Rhea

One more comment on the claim - ridiculous to me - that Jesus suffered "the greatest kinds of suffering".

I would just like to say one little bitty thing more.

That is factually, demonstrably, overwhelmingly impossible.

And here's why. Jesus was never a parent. And this train of thought has two prongs. Both are, in my experience, overwhemlingly accepted as true to the point of being nearly unanimous. If ANYONE disagrees, I would be interested in hearing it. H'okay.


THING 1:
Childbirth is painful. If childbirth lasts 3 hours, it's considered pretty good. For some it lasts all day. For some several days. But. And here's the strength of the argument. Every mother will tell you it was worth it to bring forth their _one_ child into the world. AND. Almost every mother will tell you she would do it again despite the suffering. You claim that Jesus KNEW of an even greater reward than a single child of his own. Supposedly, he was doing this for the greatest reward ever - the salvation of all of mankind. And he didn't have the certainty of a first-time mother?

THING 2:
Just about any parent on the planet will confirm to you that the death of a child is the worst suffering they have ever known. Jesus never lost a child. Now, you may claim, "he lost so many children who didn't accept him," but I'm saying _IF_ your claim is that he had to die on the cross to "know what humanity was like" then how can you trivialize the worst suffering known to humans by saying he didn't have to do _that_ one?

THING 3: Which brings me to the unsolicited thing 3. If God wanted to "experience humanity" so that he could "understand us better" then how could he have possibly left out parenthood? Is that not a major part of the human experience? With all due respect to those who choose to remain childless, whom I admire greatly for their decision despite the pressures of society, can anybody really claim to have experienced ALL that humanity has to offer without experiencing parenthood? Parenthood brings tremendous joy to most parents, but also has the potential to bring great trauma and suffering.


So lets look at another example of "the greatest kinds of suffering" and see if Jesus actually had a hard time of it or was really just a scared, soft, shadow of a martyr.

Lets look at Bana. I just made the name up, bear with me. Bana is a slave in the American past. Bana was ripped from the arms of her parents at 10. She was shipped across the ocean in a hold lying on her back for three months (not three hours, not a whole day, but 3 months), chained, lying in excrement and vomit. Fed just enough to keep her alive. She is sold on the block on her arrival. Raped by her owner. Forced to work hard labor. Whipped, hit, cut, beaten, raped some more and kept at hard labor. Finally she finds love in a fellow slave. They have children. She continues to work back=breaking work - even days after giving birth (no resting in a manger for this mom). She continues to be whipped at the whim of her master. Her husband tries to escape to forge for them and their children a better life. He is captured. She and her children are forced to watch him hanged to death. Then, as punishment, her children are taken, screaming and crying from her arms and sold. She never sees them again. In her misery, she is disobedient. Finally, she is whipped again so badly that she can no longer walk. She dies, weeks later from the infection.

This is fiction, but it was repeated time and time and time again in history. I am _sure_ someone can say, "yes, that is the story of my great-grandmother". It's a real human "experience".


Now tell me. How can any person say that _Jesus_ had it bad? How can you say that and still look at yourself? If your god sought to "experience the worst man had to offer", then he chose a pathetic vessel. He should have chosen Bana.

beth

You just hit the nail on the head! That was something! I am going to use that argument with my husband. You never cease to amaze me.
:notworthy :notworthy :notworthy :notworthy :notworthy :notworthy

Rhea

Why thank you!

This argument makes me quite passionate, as you can tell. It just evokes near rage in me that people can call one consenting, purposeful, knowledgeable person who suffers for one day anything even close to "the worst of suffering".

The cruel and heartless trivialization of the REAL suffering of unconsenting, unpurposeful and unknowledgable individuals including CHILDREN just makes me rage at the kind of heartlessness and lack of compassion that they are proclaiming. Not just telling us about, but celebrating their heartlessness and trying to convince me to trivialize it too. It is that kind of "compassion" that makes Pascal's Wager into a genuine argument.

What have I got to lose? My humanity. My compassion. My very soul lost to the glorification of cowardice.

GunnerJ

Well, I think that would vary on the naturalist. I don't think that there's anything in naturalism that specifies whether naturalists must believe in any "ultimate truths." As for myself, I think that quite a few things are absolutely true, but I don't think that we know many of these things, and if we do, we may not even know we know that they're absolutely true! Basically, the best we can do is approximate. Much of science is based on finding a good reletive degree of certainty in the absence of any absolute certainty.

First off, "My name is bob" is a positive claim and is therefore NOT held to be accurate until evidence to the contrary is presented. Second off, anyone claiming to be named Bob probably has, at the very least, a driver's licence, a birth certificate, and a lifetime of experice being called Bob to attest to their name.

But, to answer your deeper question, it depends on which naturalist you're talking to. If we're talking about scientific naturalism, then no statement of fact is held to be absolutely true. Facts are assumptions that have, if you'll pardon my French, a metric buttload of evidence supporting them. But scientists don't deal in absolute truths, and many naturalists, taking a scientific viewpoint, don't either.

mike_decock

I got that info from Why I Don't Buy the Resurrection Story .

-Mike...

mike_decock

Sure, unprovable assertions but I believe that they are based on safe assumptions. It's not a bias I consciously "chose", it's a bias I have. Many factors in my life have led me to conclude it. Here's one example:

I'm a wannabe audiophile and have read lots of audiophile magazines and go drool over the gear at shops. I was always told, and always believed, that speaker cables made a big difference. Audiophiles will spend thousands of dollars to get the best sounding cables. When I upgraded my cables, I heard a big improvement: deeper bass, sweeter highs.

When discussing cables on some audiophile forums, some folks dared to claim that cables make NO audible difference. I knew from my electronics education that this should be technically true, but my experience and the experience of thousands of audiophiles showed otherwise. I thought there must be something they were missing. Some kind of measurement that had yet to be invented. Maybe not something supernatural, per se, but something beyond our comprehension of the natural world.

Then they started talking about double-blind tests (DBT). Different cables would be compared and neither the tester nor the listener would know which cable was which and the listener was to judge which cable sounded better.

To date, I have yet to hear of anyone being able to tell the difference between two cables in a DBT. I even participated in a few informal ones myself to be sure I didn't have some "special" ability.

Now that my expectations of hearing a difference are gone, I no longer hear a difference when swapping out cables.

That's just one of the experiences that taught me two very important lessons:

1) Your senses are unreliable because your perception is heavily influenced by your expectations.

2) Anecdotal evidence is worthless in determining the truth.

Can you refresh me on that example?

-Mike...

Christian

Rimstalker,

Earlier: And I replied: And you replied: I think I’ve found the problem. When I gave my definition (an actual exception to a natural law) I used the word natural. It had not occurred to me at that time that someone might define “natural” as “everything that exists.” Accepting such a definition renders my definition as basically “an exception to the way that everything in existence works.”

My problem would not be defining all unknown things as supernatural it would be defining none of them so. Operating within your definitions I don’t think I would ever call anything “supernatural.” God and miracles and angels would fall within the realm of “nature.” In fact arguing for the existence of “xyz” would be by definition a claim that “xyz” is not supernatural.

I had no idea how fundamentally different our definitional frameworks would be!

Let me try to define my terms better. How about this:

Nature / Natural: That which exists physically.
Supernature / Supernatural: That which exists but which is not physical, and is not merely conceptual.

This would seem to fit with Mike’s definition: “Anything we perceive with our senses is a natural event.”

Is there an equivalent term within your world view for what I am describing here as “supernatural?”

Respectfully,

Christian

Christian

Demigawd,

Whether you believe it is up to you. I'm merely pointing out that it is actually true.

Respectfully,

Christian

Christian

Chris,

I'm not sure that the scientific method can provide such a determination. Events which cannot be reproduced on demand (and much of the supernatural is like this from our current perspective) cannot be tested experimentally.

For example, look at history. History is not a science because we cannot reproduce all the relevant factors and go though the events that led to the current war in Iraq, for example, over and over again until we are satisfied we have the correct explanation. This doesn't mean that historical events are not real, it just means that the scientific method cannot be applied to history.

Studying events that cannot be reproduced on demand is more like history than like science.

The scientist, speaking purely from the perspective of science, probably will have to simply admit that they don't know.

Respectfully,

Christian

Christian

Jamie,

OK. But once they have developed a naturalist conclusion, it sometimes becomes a deeply held conviction that colors how they process any information. I see sufficient evidence on II that this does happen. At that point, the naturalist would be very much at risk of ignoring any evidence that does not fit with their core unprovable assumptions.

That's not being objective.

Respectfully,

Christian