Albert Cipriani

Dear John,
I’m more of a Kafka man. Catch 22’s are too tame for me.

But your point is well-taken. Reality is like that, paradoxical. Such that one man’s meat is another man’s poison, which nicely fits my conception of heaven and hell being one reality invoking two wildly different responses from its denizens.

We are all cockroaches, but theists are cultivating a taste for the light, while you atheists have merely equipped yourselves with shades. When the time comes that ends all time, we theists will bask in The Light that will fry you guys. – Cheers, Albert the Traditional Catholic

AmericanHeretic

I hope this does not distract from the direction in this thread, but I am compelled to respond to this.

Are you saying you will enjoy the eternal burning torture of atheists....for our opinion? That's sadism, the enjoyment of other's pain.

If one is moral and goes to Heaven, how can one really be moral after all if they bask in the joys of the torture of others? Seems to me that any moral person who made it to Heaven should be compelled to overthrow the beast in charge of that carnage.

That's one mean mother of a god you got there....

Albert Cipriani

Ah Lighten Up American,
Couldn't you tell from all my smilies that I was ribbing John?

Fact is, if you want to be serious about this subject, morality has nothing to do with "feeling someone else's pain," to quote Clinton. Morality has everything to do with acting to alleviate someone else's pain. But in eternity, action is impossible. Ergo, so is morality.

So in every sense of the word, it makes no sense for you to think of the saints in heaven being morally outraged or immorally sadistic in refference to the damned. Sincerely, Albert the Traditional Catholic

Dianna

Albert Cipriani: So either stop claiming that Christians claim God leaves empirical evidence, or lower your standards (as I have) of what constitutes empirical evidence to include subjective phenomena.

Do you mean "subjective phenomena that support my preferred belief"? Do you embrace Islam, Buddhism, Wicca, etc. as well as Catholicism? Or do you mean, "subjective phenomena that I have experienced personally" in which case everybody
else's religion is still also right...right?

Dianna.

John Page

We are in eternity yet for some reason a am compelled to actiion responding to your post. Is this immoral, or merely timely?

How about "In eternity, god is unnecessary"?

Thomas Metcalf

Originally posted by Albert Cipriani :

I'm not so sure that's the extent of it. God created the universe, so if the universe failed to exist, we would be able to falsify God. Sure, there are plenty of observations that seem to provide some confirming weight toward God's existence, but there's a huge number of observations that the God hypothesis predicts, and may or may not be confirmed.

There's all this room for falsification. Suppose God's existence as an omnipotent, omniscient, morally perfect being predicted there would be 10% less evil than there is now. If that were true, then we'd be able to have some evidence against God's existence. So it still looks as if empirical evidence can come into play, and some fairly objectively available empirical evidence at that.

Albert Cipriani

Dear Dianna,
You ask, Of course. Beliefs, by definition, cannot be known. That’s why we call them beliefs instead of facts. Beliefs may be relatively objective, but they are ends that cannot be reached through purely objective means. Ergo, our beliefs are ultimately determined by our subjectivity. That’s why there’s so damn many of them. We’re all so different and so are they.

If by “preferred belief,” tho, you mean pre-conceived bias, then no. Then one is simply using their subjective phenomena to confirm, not discover, their prejudices.

How you get from the fact that our beliefs are necessarily decided by our subjective phenomena to here is beyond me: According to the first law of logical opposition, the law of contradiction, either religion or no religion is right. Since all religions are contrary to all other religions, they can’t all be true but they could all be false (second law of logical opposition). So the most logically untenable position possible is the one you propose, that all religions could in some way be right. It’s actually a heresy known as indifferentism and is held today by almost all Christians and Catholics. – Sincerely, Albert the Traditional Catholic

John Page

C'mon Al - All religions are considered true by their adherents, subjectively, which is Di's point (I think).

hinduwoman

If this god does not show up on our perceptory organs, then how can it be relevant to our lives?
Besides are we not told constantly that god is this, God has done that, God has ordered that --- all of which are based on the premise of an entity that impacts physically on our world?

hinduwoman

albert, if God and supernatural is everything you describe, then no meaningful debate about whether it exists or not is not possible.
Are these views shared by the Catholic Church?