ligesh

What about God? If they really believe in God, hell and heaven, shouldn't it deter them from committing heinous crimes? Religion is the moral police, and theoretically we would expect a believer to fear the wrath of God and act morally, just to appease him.

This is just meaningless statements. "Appearance?" God can't be fooled.


Threat of punishment is exactly what Religion offers. Have you now completely lost track of the fundamental religious percept? It is based on punishing of sin, and rewarding virtue. Good lord.

I am asking for a THEORETICAL reason why a believer shouldn't be perfectly moral. Yes it contradicts with reality, but Why? In fact, my explanation of solipsist mind is the THEORETICAL explanation for why theists aren't moral than atheists.

See? We had reality::::: Theists aren't more moral than atheist.

Now we have the reason:::::: Solipsist mind.

So simple. You couldn't provide a theoretical explanation, which is exactly what *I* I have proposed.

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:: Ligesh :: http://ligesh.com

ligesh

Jihadi is fictional? What are you talking about?


Circumstantial evidence is how we start a theory. I have proposed 4 empirically falsifiable claims that can be verified in the laboratory, and that can actually determine if I am absolutely right. But as I said, I have a preponderance of circumstantial evidence on my side, and yet not a single contradiction. I am currently discussing this with people at scientific mailing list, and trying to come up with simple experiments that can properly demonstrate the validity of my theory.




Yes! It can be extrapolated to criminals who identify themselves as believers.

The whole point is that 99.8% of the criminals are believers. So there must be something to it. Without this statistic, I cannot and wouldn't extrapolate it. But with the statistics it seems trivial to extend the attitude of soldiers who go into the war to criminals too. Both are believers, and I would even say that the crimes committed by criminals pale when compared to the atrocities perpetrated by soldiers.





I envy your clairvoyance, which I guess comes from witchcraft. But unless you explain the process behind your prediction, I will just consign your statement into the same heap as voodoo or shamanism.


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:: Ligesh :: http://ligesh.com

newtype_alpha

Wrong. The various motivations of the crusades include quite a number of self-serving papal objectives, not in the least of which was ending fuedal rivalry between various Lords and bringing thme under the authority of the Pope. Besides that, there's the little matter that many of the crusades involved armies of Christians fighting other armies of Christians (and the 4th crusade sacked Constantinople) and also the fact that the Muslims had already conquered Palestine more than a century before the Crusades even took place (the Europeans had a bone to pick with the Seljuk Turks, and much of the reaction against them was on account of rumors spread by the Pope himself).

Regardless of why the Cruaders THOUGHT they were fighting, their actions speak for themselves: in the capture of Jerusalem in 1099, the city's entire population--some forty thousand people--were massacred.

You can NOW. This has not always been the case.

And he can also point to the Old Testament where God helped the Hebrews chase the Canaanites and Perezites et al out of the land and slaughtered them wherever they found them. There has been no shortage of Christian thinkers who justified the displacement of American Indian tribes on those same biblical grounds: God's choosen people should inherit the promised land and chase out the Pagans.

ligesh

So? It came AFTER the conquest by the Ottomons. That's called a reaction. Isn't it? I mean, whatever be the actual way in which the events happened, it was fundamentally CONCEIVED an act of defense. Rumors spread by the pope... That means he couldn't even simply command people to go to war, but had to spread rumors about the enemy. So what does that prove?

So who cares. People have been mistreating each other even before they were humans. I said that in the 'nudity thread'. People are cruel, bestial and bloodthirsty. That's how we evolved, because our species spent quite a lot of our evolution engaged in bloody battles with each other.

Islam institutionalized this vulgar instinct, and then gave explicit theological backing to it.


Yes! So why can't we criticize Islam NOW? Even in countries that aren't majority Muslim.



I have said this long back. Bible is fucking heap of garbage. But that's a positive thing as well as negative. You can use it to prove anything. Unlike Islam which is consistent in its bloodthirstiness. Abu hassan was directly talking from the Koran, no muslim can really contradict him. But a moderate pastor can at least win an argument against a bloodthirsty one. Whether he will convince him is a totally different matter.

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:: Ligesh :: http://ligesh.com

newtype_alpha

No, we're talking about crime/immorality. Crime is not synonymous with "risky behavior," since the risk to a shoplifter with great confidence in his abilities is signifigantly less than the risk to a fire fighter who isn't doing anything illegal. So if your premise is correct, then God is that which makes risky behavior possible, and is therefore responsible for all benevolent risky actions as well. This, also, does not appear to be the case, and would be far more difficult to examine.

So we limit the discussion to criminal/immoral behavior. Harming others is immoral, and also criminal... do you dispute this? FYI, the test subjects in the Milgram Experiment were not given any religious reasons to "torment" the learners. Sufficient motivation was provided in the form of a guy with a clipboard. This proves that God is NOT neccesary for criminal behavior. And like it or not, most criminal behaviors involve activities that are harmful to others at a minimal risk to the criminal himself

Statistics are not what we lack. EVIDENCE is what we lack. What is required here is a proper study on religious conviction and how it factors into criminal activity itself. Without such a study, no hypothesis can be substantiated.

I have explained it. The statistics are NOT in your favor. They are vague enough to support literally any premise one cares to draw from them, equally, without supporting any one of them stronger than any other.

I haven't attempted to refute the statistics (in fact, in this case we are talking about only a SINGLE statistic: religious conviction among prison populations). I have refuted the notion of your interpretation following logically FROM that statistic. It doesn't follow; you reached that conclusion entirely on your own and found a statistic that was vague enough to maybe support you.

Which is a hypothesis in its own right which needs to be examined before you move on to any inference from this. As I've already shown you, not all criminals DO pray before they commit an immoral act, nor do all of them pray in thanks after comitting the act.

I don't have to prove a negative. You made the assertion; you can either support it or you can't. So far, all you have given me is a concept in your imagination without any basis in fact.

Strawman fallacy. I never said they don't pray. I said they DON'T PRAY FOR HELP IN COMITTING CRIMES. It's not difficult to understand.

Something along the lines of "Dear God, please help me to become the very best criminal I can be and rob more old ladies than any other thug on South Street. Amen." I really don't think so.

You have provided me no statistics that would suggest criminals pray for God to help them commit crimes. I, on the other hand, have shown you that--at least in an experimental setupp--most people do NOT pray for God to help them commit crimes.

newtype_alpha

Theoretically, yes. But it doesn't. So theory does not stand up to reality and is, therefore, a myth.

Milgram's experiment may shed some light on this as well: the test subjects objected to the experiment far more consistently when the authority figure was not present in the room (calling by telephone or intercom). The immediacy of an authority figure has a signifigant effect on the power of that authority. Since God is invisible, indetectable, and never speaks any louder than the "still small voice" in the back of a believer's head, his authority is extremely easy to ignore. The same cannot be said for human authorities.

He certainly can, IF he exists as a mental construct in the mind of a believer and little else. If a believer can fool himself, he can also fool God, because God cannot help but be what the believer wants him to be. So if the believer doesn't want God to judge him as an immoral person, God won't. It isn't entirely a conscious thought process.

If I had, I wouldn't have mentioned it, now would I?

And neither the punishment nor the rewards have any immediacy in the believers' mind, so they--too--can be dismissed moment by moment as subject for "another time, another place." For the same reason a person to ignore threats of punishment in hellfire or rewards in heaven, he will also buy things he can't afford, forget to pay bills, buy a candybar or a pack of batteries with a five-finger-discount, etc. The sword of damocles isn't much of a threat unless it's hanging over your head.

I have already given you a theoretical reason why, and I have explained why the myth of "theism = morality" contradicts reality. Theism is a BELIEF that can be intellectually assented to, but the sad fact of the matter is human behavior is not ruled by intellect. What you know (or believe) is often of little consequence to what you end up doing. The simplest example of this is the Milgram experiment, where the test subjects ended up taking actions that they unanimously agreed were morally wrong; but if they believed the action was wrong, why did they do it in the first place? Same concept exists in phobias. A person with a terrible fear of heights will still be afraid of heights if you put him in a situation where he is in a high place with no possibility of falling. He knows that he cannot fall, but that doesn't stop him from being afraid, and it is the fear--and not his knowledge--that drives his actions.

The simple fact of the matter is, most Christians aren't really afraid of God, and neither for that matter are most criminals. Threats of hellfire or promises of punishment are ineffective without the strength of presence behind them.

One possible reason, but it ignores far too many factors and seems to make an observation that isn't warranted by what little evidence you DO accept. A better reason would be that human beings are primarily creatures of habit, not intellect, and therefore belief cannot regulate morality. Beliefs can be modified or changed--especially by the dishonest--to be compatible with certain habits, but it is far more difficult to change a habit to suit a certain belief.

newtype_alpha

The Godfather wasn't about Jihad, now was it?

No, it's how YOU start a theory. Do not presume to speak for anyone but yourself on that issue.

We have presented dozens of contradictions to you so far. What you mean is you have not yet ACCEPTED the existence of contradictions.

And you've been told already the simplest way to demonstrate the validity of this hypothesis: go out and ASK THE CRIMINALS if they prayed to God for help in committing their crimes. Best make it an anonymous survey so there's no misunderstanding that they might be able to talk their way in front of a parole board.

Yet soldiers do not pray to God for help in comitting war crimes, Ligesh. Actually, often enough, they don't really even pray during combat since at that time they are far too preocupied with--you know--combat. The only anecdotal context in which a soldier might pray in the middle of a battlefield would be that of a soldier fleeing an ambush, running for his life, chanting a memorized prayer over and over again to keep from thinking about what's going on around him; in that case, the soldier would probably get the same results from singing the lyrics to Rappers Delight.

The process is simple: I know a number of criminals on a person basis. None of them pray for help in comitting crimes, but all of them pray (only after getting caught by someone) for God to forgive them. Furthermore, I have been in many situations and seen others in similar situations of either extreme risk or extreme stress, and the things people do to "psyche up" for activities like this. Between several of these contexts--Marine Bootcamp, unreasonably dangerous skateboard stunts, and a state-championship wrestling tournament--I have only see two cases where a the person involved took the time to pray first before beginning. I recal that it was the first time he ever took that measure, and I also recal in one of those cases (a wrestler in a championship match) it didn't help him all that much since in the end he still lost his nerve and ended up getting his ass kicked by his opponent, who did not bother praying before the match.

IOW, "theism = morality" is a myth, because it is not consistent with reality. "theism = courage" is equally false, because it is also not consistent with reality.

newtype_alpha

Wrong again. The Ottomans didn't control that region until about the thirteenth century. The Seljuks drove out the relatively benign Abassids that had controlled the region before then, and since the Europeans considered the Seljuks to be barbarians, spreading rumors about Seljuk attrocities was extremely easy.

It proves that it wasn't a defensive war, since the Crusaders themselves were not "defending" anything that was actually in their posession. It would be a little like saying the United States "defended" Iraq by invading it and ousting Saddam Hussein.

You CAN criticize Islam in countries that aren't majority Muslim (you've proven this fact with your own actions) and nobody's going to kill you for it. You can insult Christianity AND Islam without getting death threats; this has not always been the case for Christianity, and in some places is not the case for Islam.

I can name three off the top of my head who can and do contradict him.

ligesh

Oh Please. I will just say this again. God doens't make a person evil. It just gives him courage to do risky activities.


Yes. 99.8% of the criminals are believers. That should actually constitute EVIDENCE, but I did not even say that. I just said statistics seem to be in my favor. And also that, there are a lot of circumstantial evidences too, like the warring factions believing that God was on their side, even though they weren't actually invovled in spreading God's word.


99.8% of criminals are believers.... You have consistently failed to give any reason for this.

That's great right. I have a hypothesis I came up on totally different method. And lo!! the first statistic that come along seems to perfectly match what it predicted.

God. Your statement would be enough to conclude that my hypothesis has been empirically verified. But even then I don't claim that. All I say is the statistics, and circumstantial evidences seems to be supporting me.


That is an inference from the FACT that they consider themselves to be believers. So it is YOUR duty to prove that they don't, and your statement is actually a no-true-scotsman fallacy. Oh how we are running around in circles.


That's your lack of comprehension. As I pointed earlier, people really do not consider that they are perpetrating crimes.


This is exactly what fraudsters do. They cheat the elderly and donate some part of their money to the Church. This is what the Jihadis did throughout history. They rape/plunder innocents and donate generously to their Mosques. So why not the criminals too.

Hello: There was no RISK involved in the experiment. Please stop using that stupid 40 year old experiment anyway. Much more recent experiments have shown far more horrible traits in human beings. Humans will actually hurt others even WITHOUT authority, but will create ad-hoc rationalizations for their actions. You should read Pinker and Dawkins.

People have been raping and pillaging even before they were human beings. In fact, raiding party formation is something that is found in Chimpanzees, who will scout their neighboring territories, and if a lone female is found, she will raped, and if she is carrying a child, that child will be killed.

So your experiment proves nothing. I am talking about God helping people to overcome their fears about all the contingencies involved.

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:: Ligesh :: http://ligesh.com

ligesh

--------- Dictionary.com
1. Often Crusade. Any of the military expeditions undertaken by European Christians in the 11th, 12th, and 13th centuries to recover the Holy Land from the Muslims.
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You are again raising trivial historical nuances as something that contradicts the whole premise. Crusades are not a perpetual war against the infidel, like in Koran. It was a very specific incident in history, and it was meant to recover the holy land.


Nope. There you are wide off the mark. Dutch film maker Theo Van Gogh was killed by a muslim fanatic in Holland.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/3974179.stm


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:: Ligesh :: http://ligesh.com