Gamera

I don't think you could. I don't think you could design a world were you and I exist as free agents without the possibility that we'll do bad things. Comes with freedom. So I suspect your "Better" wrold would involved being a robot without moral freedom and hence without a life worth living.

Gamera

Well, I'm glad you resolved that problem.

Now back to the issue, assuming there is a God as depicted in the bible, is he "cruel" for giving us free will and making us moral being. And so I get back to me question: what's the alternative. Your alternative appears to be a world where humans don't exists. No thanks.

spin

So you'd consider nations with more responsible education systems and social relations full of robots, because they have much lower crime rates, much better social protection than the moral decay you apparently live in.

Are you not simply projecting your ugly environment onto your religious beliefs?? Are you not merely equating licence granted by the worst aspects of rampant unchecked captalism with free will? Would you educate your children so that they were likely to commit crimes against society? Would you put guns in their hands because they have the free will to know how to use them intelligently? Would you teach them to screw their neighbours economically because they can gain from doing so? If the answers to these questions are no, then I believe according to your strange notions you are robbing your children of free will and making them robots.

You are stuck with the creaky notion of free will, something you are socially conditioned to think of is a given notion, though I've seen no serious effort on your part to produce anything other than a naive explanation for, the lack of which makes one a robot. Teaching a child to speak is robbing it of free will because you are modifying the way that child approaches the world before it had the chance to choose to have such an ability. Toilet training is robbing the child of free will. I think you need to cough up a serious analysis of this term you have been bandying about with gay abandon, in order to show that you have some credibility in the line of thought you are presenting. As is, you seem to be purveying meaninglessness.


spin

EthnAlln

At this point, I think I understand Gamera's position. It is essentially the position of Leibniz, that this is the best of all possible worlds, that no world better than this can exist, and we just have to live with all its inconveniences. It's an extremely strong assumption, one without a scintilla of empirical evidence to suggest it, but de assumptionibus non disputandum est. It's logically and empirically irrefutable. It of course abolishes the possibility of miracles, since if God can intervene in this world to help people without destroying the world, then that is proof that a better world could have existed if God had so chosen. But there again, one can quibble one's way into a maelstrom, depending on whether God's intervention was a necessary part of the world or not. I find nothing to recommend the doctrine. It adds nothing to my understanding of the world and provides no positive evidence of any kind for any god. It merely says the world is what it is.

Gamera

[QUOTE=spin]Wow is this the best nonsequitur plus misrepresentation of the board or what?

Focus, focus.

So education equals lack of free will in your worldview. Odd.

I think you're stuck attacking strawmen.

Getting back on topic, free will at the very least involves the choice to make moral choices, and hence to make immoral choices. That has nothing to do with education. A lot of very educated people are very very bad.

So try again: what is the alternative to a world where people have the ability to make bad moral choices. Focus, focus.

Toto

Mod request:

Could we please focus on Biblical Criticism or History in this forum? If you would like to suggest a split, I will separate out the posts that belong in Morals or any other forum.

spin

Naaa, it's about time you did a little focusing. Bald pleas for non sequiturs are as convincing as Bundy saying it was all good clean fun.


Evasion is not a reasonable response. You seem to be purveying a notion of free will that you will have to unveil. Does education take away people's free will or does it not? Do you have the free will to choose how you are educated as an adolescent or are you robbed of that free will?

How would we know, when you don't explain your idiosyncratic use of terminology?

More apparent naivity this time regarding education, which I use as a cultural term which includes upbringing. Had you been born in Nazi Germany, would you have been taught to dob in people who didn't conform to what was deemed to be the norm? and would you probably not have done the dobbing?

You focus. Your feint doesn't work. Are more people proportionally killed by gunshot wounds in the US than in any other major "western" country? Is there proportionally more homelessness in the US than in any of the other top economic western country? Why do you think? Do they have more free will to be homeless? Oh, I see, that's not a moral decision, is it? The people in the society though are making a moral decision to leave these people out in the cold. They are doing as they are trained. People usually do as they are educated to do. That's why American soldiers mostly go into foreign countries and kill without asking questions.

So cough up a meaningful approach to your notion of free will. Is it sufficient to talk about the ability to make moral choices, when we see that people are educated differently and make different moral choices because of it? Do those making generally more limited ranges of moral choices due to their educations more robotic in your books?


spin

TomboyMom

No, he's cruel because he orders his followers to stab little babies to death. The alternatives including not believing that a God would do such a thing, not being willing to worship a being who would do such a thing--how would you tell him from Satan?--and generally existing but not murdering babies.

Which I find a very odd form of loving your enemies.
Any evidence yet that the NT was written before the Tao Te Ching?

TomboyMom

Regarding Gemara's assertion that the purpose of Yahweh's order to commit genocide was to separate the Jews from the barbarians so he could teach them to love their enemies, a previously unheard of advance in world religions, unique to Christianity:

An earlier poster in this thread raised the counter-example of the Jains, a religion of which I know little. A few minutes on Google taught me that they are one of the world's oldest, most non-violent and tolerant religions. One of their basic principles is Ahimsa, which means non-violence toward all creatures. Not just your neighbors, or even your enemies, but all creatures. Jains are so non-violent that the most devout will not eat root vegetables, because to do so destroys the entire plant. I am not aware of any war fought by the Jains, and certainly not on behalf of their religion. In the 6th century, B.C.E., Lord Mahavira preached that Lord Mahavira, 24th Tirthankara
What I get from that is that we should love all creatures as well as we love ourselves, including neighbors, friends, enemies, and non-humans as well. This philosophy pre-dates Christianity; indeed, it is contemporaneous with the formation of Judaism, since Lord Mahavira compiled and expanded on an existing tradition. It is also more compassionate and less violent than Christianity, in both teaching and history. btw the Jains do not worship any deity, rather strive to achieve wisdom and understand the nature of existence itself. I don't believe there is any record of any Jain religious text commanding genocide; I would think that would be the worst heresy to a Jain. Insofar as Christianity is less violent than Judaism, it seems to me much more likely to have been influenced by Jainism, directly or indirectly, than vice versa. In short, Gemara's argument seems to be based on inaccurate understanding of the history of religion.

striderlives

No no no! It has to specifically say 'Love your Enemies!', or Gamera gets to reject it......