spin

You are not making sense to me.

Who?

A person born into famine has no hand in the cause. They usually die of famine before they have the opportunity to change it. Look at the people not your cardboard cut-out.


This is coming to you today from Palm Springs, California.


The individual trying to do something in Africa is pissing into the wind. I won't change the pharmaceutical companies' habits of putting profit before life, or change the governments who happily keep 3rd world countries in permanent debt, or those 3rd world countries from taking advantage of their own populations. Your local hero stuff is outdated, outmoded and irrelevant.

I'm not interested in this universe at this stage, I only know a bit about this world we live on. To start with we could do without malaria, tuberculosis, bilhazia, and other friendly bugs. Then a tiny bit of arable land for those who starve.

Why not?

How do some people over the internet glean from logical thought that someone is not calm? I wish I had that sort of crystal ball.

I would expect that you would expect. This is merely your apparent guilt projecting, right?

I didn't vote for George W. Bush.

The government, which can do something about the state of the world, doesn't seem to believe you.

This is very isolationist thought. You think that the individual can do anything for the institutional or endemic ills of this world? No, sorry. You have got the scale all wrong. The individual is as useful in all this as an ant giving leftovers to a herd of ravenous elephants.

Your response to me has been indignant, projecting, and missing the point.


spin

EthnAlln

A very good point. Gamera and others debating this issue seem to think that we are denying any human role in the misery of others. I'm sure no one is; but they are denying that any of it is beyond human ability either to cause or to fix. That's where I part company with them. A world without any gods is comprehensible in the form we see around us. A world with a loving, designing god who left a lot of useless debris careering around and crashing into inhabited places after he finished creating it, who himself decided to wipe out nearly everything he had made several times and start from near-zero again, makes no sense at all.

Actually, the debate we are having is very old. Leibniz argued, just as Gamera has, that this is the best of all possible worlds. (And most of what is in it is a necessary evil, as some cynic later added.) Leibniz was parodied as "Dr. Paingloss" in Voltaire's satire "Candide," so I really can't hope to give a better answer than that.

Although I can't know this, I have the feeling they must be uneasy about such facile optimism. They seem to be good, humane people, although I'm disappointed that Gamera suggested that you aren't doing anything to make it better, since he [??] obviously knows nothing about how much time and money you give to charity. That kind of personal attack seems very uncharitable to me.

Sheshbazzar

Telling.

EthnAlln

Certainly is. But, as Gamera says, we do have a choice as to how we spend our time. We can maybe help a few people. That's better than none. I'm far from saying that people are obligated to sacrifice all the joy in their own life in a futile attempt to help people who are probably going to be miserable anyway, but there is a middle ground between complete altruism and complete egotism.

But hey, I'm not preaching, I hope. Let everyone make up their own mind what they owe to others. I have, and I'm not saying where I drew the line.

Sheshbazzar

Effective and successful humanitarian efforts, do require vision, optimism, and dedication. and change for the better is accomplished by individuals, for individuals, one life at a time.
For the price of a cup of coffee, you, an individual, could help deliver another individual from these, but that would be just "pissing into the wind" in your ethics.
Wouldn't this make for a terrific introductory paragraph, or statement of purpose and philosophy, or as a motivational address for any humanitarian organization?

"uneasy about such facile optimism"??? is facile negativism preferable?
We choose to join ourselves to what we choose.

EthnAlln

I wholeheartedly agree. But to keep in the context of this thread, this is exactly what I would expect in a world where there was no god. If there is an omnipotent, omniscient, all-loving god, it should be possible to eliminate the misery, not merely alleviate it.


Optimism and pessimism are both futile. None of us knows the future. The uneasiness I referred to (confessing that I don't know if anyone actually feels it) was merely the uneasiness that a scientist has about his pet theory: "Is this reasoning really an adequate explanation?" In the case of Leibnizian optimism, I submit that it isn't. This is not the "best of all possible worlds," as Gamera claimed.

spin

So you can make distinctions between different levels of pissing into the wind. Some are more successful than others. Bandaids are better than dirty rags.

One life at a time is irrelevant to the topic. The people who die because they are not the one life, tell them about your one life at a time theory.

Stop drinking coffee then.

You can buy lives. Start a business.

Find a way that's not at a political level to save the African girls who are kidnapped and habitually raped by boys who have been kidnapped to fight in a war. Just for the price of a coffee.

Go ahead don't vote for George W. Bush, vote for George X. Bush instead.

Read the Songs of Innocence and Experience.

You choose to rehearse the great american sham. Heard it all before. Rugged individualism. Grass roots aid. Pissing into the wind. Sending killers off to Iraq to destroy the country for a lie. For every life that Peter and his pals save, George and his cadres kill a score. Save your coffee dollar for Peter and let George do his work.


spin

Sven

What a load of bullshit.

As soon as Christians stop to call their god (omni)benevolent, no one will complain any longer about this. *shrug*

Why?

Gamera

I think your personal attacks are off point. You seem all confused about the topic. Famine is the result of human greed not the "universe." It can be solved with policy choices. Hey, it's your capitalist system not mine. Don't blame theism for your bad policy choices.

Getting back on track, the issue of a living in world with limitations like death, disease, and gravity surely isn't addressed by your tirade against Christianity, which actually has a coherent concept of evil, while you don't.

Again, try to address this -- what's the alternative? A universe where people don't die? A universe where there are no obstacles to anything we want? Great -- you just eliminated humanity from the universe. No thanks. I rather like existing.

Gamera

Well, if God give life and a meaningful existence, and that entails suffering, then yes God is benevolent.

For your point to make any sense, you have to tell us the alternative. A world without any physical or emotional obstacles to anything we want. Sounds great, it just doens't involved being a human being. No thanks.

Try again, and tell us exactly what kind of world you think a benevolent God would create. I got to hear this.