rhutchin

Considering that blasphemers will be denied entry into heaven, would it not be wise to teach people not to blaspheme and thereby give them a chance to ecape hell?

The proof of God's existence is every living thing a person can observe today. Some believe in the spontaneous generation of life, but those who think about it know that there could be no life if God had not created it.

I don't advocate the execution of millions of people, based on their sexuality or what they say about the alleged God. I advocate telling people the truth. If society determines that people should not be told the truth, I will let it.

rhutchin

Yes, there is no credible evidence that the Biblical writers were not telling the truth when they claimed to be speaking for God (at least Johnny Skeptic has not presented any). Neither has he proved that he understand's the Wager. He can list alleged problems in the Bible but cannot explain why they are problems. How about explaining one error or contradiction that makes a difference in what the Bible says and forget the trivial pursuit items? You claim to be able to do so, but never seem quite up to it. You are a man of many opinions of many words.

rhutchin

The evidence for the certainty of death can be found in the myriads of graveyards and funeral homes. The evidence that no one knows what happens after a person dies lies in the myriads of books men have written. Do you need more evidence than that?

Wise people, knowing this, have only raised harmless rabbits. If a rabbit with lazer eyes still exists, he is very rare. Low risk.

Wise people still look both ways before crossing a street. Wise people go to doctors. Wise people do many things to address risk. The wisest people even consider that they will die one day and they consider that which happens after death. Only the fool says, “There is no God.”

Just because you fear to consider the evidence that exists does not make you right in believing an error, no matter how much effort you put into ignoring the evidence.

Yes. Interesting to ponder.

Johnny Skeptic

You said "there is no credible evidence that the Biblical writers WERE NOT telling the truth", but I said "there is no credible evidence that the Biblical writers WERE telling the truth." You have not produced any credible evidence that supports your arguments.

I understand the Wager much better than you do. No God can convince a man to love him based upon threats alone, and no man can convince another man to love him based upon threats alone. The main issue is character, not risk. If God told lies, you would not be able to love him, and yet you ask people to love a God who has committed many atrocities against mankind that are much worse than lying is.

I was not aware that any lies are trivial from a Christian perspective. Where did you get that information from? If a woman lies about her age, would you call that trivial? All lies are sins, right? The Bible says that God is perfect. If he is perfect, and chose to make the Bible perfect, even one error or contradtion discredits the entire Bible, and God.

Angra Mainyu

Good question.
I don’t know; I haven’t seen any such cases. Granted, I haven’t read many threads like these, either, but my experience in other forums is the same: I’ve never seen it happen.

That said, I know that some deconversions have occurred on this site. I’m not sure whether any of them happened as a result of such a long thread.

In any case, I wouldn’t expect any such change in this thread.

No, because what you’re considering is not real, but that’s not what I asked.

My question was whether they should be executed by stoning, as the Law says, or whether it would be acceptable to kill them by some other means.

Btw, and as for the wisdom of “teaching” them, do you know that the Catholic Inquisition – and some Protestant zealots as well - used similar arguments to kill heretics and witches? Do you think that that was a good idea?

I disagree. Science doesn’t require the existence of any God, but that aside, if life required a creator, it wouldn’t have to be the God of your interpretation of the Bible. One can imagine any number of non-contradictory creators. If the proof of a creator is the existence of life (which doesn’t prove any such thing, but even if), then it would be impossible to tell which creator that is – and the chances of getting it right by just picking one would be zero.

I’m confused.
You said earlier;

Could you clarify that, please?
Because the impression I get is that if a society decides not to be “ruled by God”, you’re not going to kill people illegally, but you advocate for adopting laws that would establish execution as a punishment for homosexuality and blaspheme.

If so, that would be to advocate for the execution of millions of people, based on their sexuality or what they say about the alleged God, and I’d say that it wouldn’t be too different from advocating for killing them illegally, with the exception that the latter would violate the forum rules, and the former wouldn’t.

If that’s not your position, I would ask you again:
If you could vote for or against a law that would make blasphemy and homosexual relations capital offenses, would you vote for it, or against it?
Do you advocate for laws like that?
Do you try to convince others that laws like that are a good idea?

The fact that there is no proof that they were speaking for God suffices, as the fact that there’s no evidence that I was speaking for the Goddess, suffices.
If you’re not convinced, just consider this scenario:

n people claim to speak for different and mutually exclusive Gods. What would be the odds of one of them telling the truth? With no other evidence, it can’t be greater than 1/n. But if one looks at it more closely, one realizes that one could imagine a greater number of “possible” Gods (at least,and easily, n + k, for any integer k > 0), and that a God could have decided not to manifest itself (for example).

Of course, I'm not trying to consider all possibilities, but my point is that even counting only the ones I've considered, the chances of those writers being right would appear to be zero. If one adds even more scenarios...well, you get the idea.

I do.
Death is irrefutable, but I think we do know what happens after that, since we can observe it: a person dies, and they can no longer think, move, etc. So, that's it.

If you argue otherwise, you’re implicitly or explicitly arguing that a life form exists; one very different from anything we’ve ever observed; one that has the memories of the person who died, and through which a consciousness continues, but you provide no evidence of it.

Let’s say (purely for example) I argued that, 1347432 light years from Earth, there’s a planet 13% more massive than Earth, where an advance civilization exists and there are green/black aliens about 50 centimeters tall whose average life span is 1253.72 of their years.

Would you need any further evidence that what I just claimed is wrong, other than the fact that I have no evidence of it?
Yet, a consciousness without a body is even more strange, since we’ve never observed one.

All that aside, suppose we didn’t know what happens after death, why would anyone advocate for the adherence to brutal rules and for inflicting death on millions of people, on account of something we don’t even know?

Thank you.

What evidence?
Not only is there none, but there’s counter-evidence (not that it would be necessary, as lack of evidence of the claim should suffice).

For instance, science teaches that the Flood account cannot be right, and that the Earth is thousands of millions (American billions) of years old. Is it wise to ignore science, and support a groundless claim instead?

Jon Barleycorn

But who decides who is the blasphemer? Perhaps Calvinism will be seen as blasphemy - so, you, like the rest of us, will be put to death! :angel:

JPD

Yes on the first count - death is certain. With regards to the second point the evidence I would be after would be more than "no-one knows what happens". Nothing can be convincingly argued beyond that basic point.


So you are unable to discount it then. You will have a long list of potentialities for which the only "evidence" in existence is the concept in your mind.


Yes - they are dealing with real-life risks - situations that they are doing their best to avoid because they are aware of what has happened to other people who didn't. Now, where does it say about fools and God - ah yes, the Bible. And that is a convincing argument in what way?


Fear? Not at all - what disturbs me is how so many people are so easily convinced by what they read in a book, to the extent that they use the book itself as justification for not asking it the questions that fester in the depths of their imagination, but which perversely are created by that same book. Its a form of autosuggestion.


Yes. Interesting.

rhutchin

You may believe (have faith) that it is not real, but absent proof of your position, you are simply a man of great faith.

If indeed, a person was sentenced to death following the judicial process, I am not sure that stoning would be the required response. If all we had was the OT, then yes (so in a Jewish society, stoning would be the proper course). The NT seems to take a different tack.

The inquisition was a strange situation. From what I understand, it was more about political power than religious zeal. However, just like the middle east, political entities were able to manipulate the religious people.

Science ignores what it does not know. There is some organization offering a $million to anyone who can show how life could originate. I think the research has to pass peer review and be published in Science or Nature. Science still has not discovered a mechanism that can transform the hypothetical first cell into the variety of animal life observed today.

So, it may be true that science does not require the existence of any God, but it is also true that science basically knows what it can prove in the laboratory and that limits what it knows. Hypotheses abound, however.

I made two statements.
1. I am an advocate for a society ruled by God.
2. I don't advocate the execution of millions of people, based on their sexuality or what they say about the alleged God.

Your confusion, I think, comes about because you are focused on the OT while I am coming from an OT/NT perspective.

If society does not want to be ruled by God, then that society can sanction immorality (such as homosexuality) or allow abortion or whatever. So, in the US, I am an advocate of telling people that immorality and abortion are wrong. I do not advocate killing homosexuals and abortionists. I am willing to work within the system to pass laws against abortion and immorality.

If the US decided that it wanted to be ruled by God, then I would still be an advocate of laws against abortion and immorality with a punishment system consistent with the Bible. That requires looking at both the OT and NT to determine those punishments.

A society not ruled by God can have that require the death penalty, so the issue is not whether we have the death penalty but when the death penalty would be used. If the society agreed that murder deserved the death penalty, then murderers would get the death penalty. If society agreed that sexual immorality deserved the death penalty then those who were sexually immoral would get the death penalty.

I favor laws that say that sexual immorality is wrong. I am not sure that the OT/NT perspective is to put people who engage in such things to death. If it were a Jewish society that relied only on the OT, I don’t think the death penalty could be avoided.

Fine, you hypothesize an infinite number of possibilities. So, let’s take them into the laboratory and put them to the test. Devise what ever rules you want, so long as those rules allow you to distinguish one possibility from another and see if they are realistic. I suggest that we start with the following rules--

1. Identify those religions with documentation.
2. Identify the religious documents that contain the writings of no less than X people who write consistently about the religion.
3. Identify the writers of the religious document who write about their experiences and interactions with the alleged god of the religion.
4. identify those religions that describe negative impacts.

You can suggest other ways to distinguish the various possibilities. Look at the data and separate the possibilities into categories and use some technique to determine (1) whether the writers in a category could be right, (2) whether people need to be concerned and (3) any other distinction that would allow you to evaluate the possibilities where there is no proof of the truth of any possibility. Create a decision matrix to show choices and consequences of choices. Let people make a decision.

We agree that the physical body does this.

I do argue such and I present the Bible as my evidence.

How about if you provide a document containing the accounts that several people have had with these aliens? That would be evidence of your claim. That should be the least that we might expect you to do.

I think it would depend on what evidence you had about the events that occur after death and what that evidence led you to do.

The evidence is the Bible.

Science has been known to change its mind. I think science has gotten out of the uniformitarianism rut that it was in for so long. I think it recognizes that many things observed in the world could only have been caused by catastrophic events. Who knows what science will say in the future? I bet you don't.

seebs

If it worked that way, it would. It doesn't, and in fact, it is actively opposed to wisdom.

What does Jesus teach about adultery? That to look at a woman with lust in your eyes is to have committed adultery.

External enforcement allows people to commit the actual sin while avoiding its outward expression, and in so doing, encourages them to falsely believe they are innocent, preventing them from repenting.

In short, you propose a society full of people who believe that there is a temporal punishment for certain actions, thus avoid expressing them -- and because they have such a clear and mundane reason right in front of them, they never have a chance to think about the moral reason, so they form intent time and time again, without ever expressing it... Leaving them just as condemned as they would be had they expressed it, but with the false belief that they have avoided wrongdoing.

Laws inherently apply only to expression, but God judges the heart. Forbidding expression does nothing to change the heart, and indeed, generally seems to harden it.

Johnny Skeptic

What are you babbling about? What you favor has nothing whatsoever to do with the price of tomatoes. Regarding homosexuality, there is no credible evidence that the writers were speaking for God and not for themselves. Your response to this has been Pascal's Wager, in other words, that it is not wise to take a risk that the writers might not have been talking for God, and that the Bible might contain errors and contradictions. I discussed this in my post #264, but you conveniently refused to reply to it. Thank you for your evasizeness. That is good for skepticism because the undecided crowd is surely not impressed and shouldn't stay undecided much longer, that is, assuming that anyone at this forum is ever convinced by anything that you have to say. I wish that I had kept track of all of the times that you have embarrassed yourself at the IIDB. Maybe I will eventually conduct some research and start a new thread about your many blunders. I remember some of your blunders. One was about homosexuality. You and I debated that issue at the GRD Forum. You finally gave up and basically said that more research is needed before we can make accurate conclusions, in which case, why didn't you keep your opinions to yourself pending further reseach? At that time, and at this forum a couple of months ago, you said the only evidence against homosexuality is Biblical evidence, in spite of the fact that in the older thread, almost ALL of your evidence was SECULAR evidence. At the EofG Forum, you said that a man can test God by honoring his parents and by tithing. That was an absurd thing for you to claim. I made a reply and you knew that you were beaten, so that was the end of the discussion. You also made some blunders in the recent thread that you started about God making people blind, deaf, and dumb, which is what Exodus 4:11 says. It appears that you have quickly, and conveniently, vacated your own thread lest you embarrass yourself any more than you already have. As far as I know, you gave up debating in that thread much sooner than ever before at the IIDB.