99Percent

Albert Cipriani: Tho I'm a bit dyslectic, I'm not this time.

I was never under the impression you were dyslectic. In fact, aren't you major in English?

Imagine engaging in the Zen-like meditative exercise of archery. This is a objectively good (builds strength) and subjectively good (builds patience) and wholesome pastime. Now let's say a child ran in front of your bulls-eye just as you released.

Interesting analogy. Except the kid you contemplate is not really external, its your own life.

The dead kid would render your objectively and subjectively good action into an objectively bad action for which you were objectively, but not subjectively, responsible.

True. But the kid, like your own life, cannot pass objective judgement anymore, because he is dead.

Conversely, a pagan bowing down to a false god is objectively and exteriorly no different that a Catholic bowing down before the Real Presence,

But how can you objectively see what is the "Real Presence"? Because the bible, a book full of contradictions and nonsense, says so?

but subjectively the Catholic's bow reaches the target.

And objectively too, it killed the archer, because you and I can objectively see literally billions of worshippers wasting their time, and therefore their own life.

Albert Cipriani

My My Mr. 99Percent,
Aren't we being Koy-like tonight, which is to say not-coy. Such antagonism! Me thinks thou doth protest too much.

I'm reminded of a most excellent British film, "The End of the Affair," I highly recommend based on the novel by that heretical liberal priest Gram Green(?). Anyway, the closing scene has the atheist typing his memoirs, the last sentence of which is "God, leave me alone" and after a pregnant pause "forever."

The last word is just too strident. It reveals that the atheist is trying too hard, is overcompensating against grace of faith that has already taken hold.

Let's see. You present so much rotten fruit to smash. I hardly no where to begin.



Being sinful by nature is Original Sin, not mortal or moral sin. We're not responsible for our sinful nature and no one goes to hell for it, contrary to what most Protestant sects say. We are rewarded or punished only for that which we are culpable.



It's much more serious than that. All self-esteem is illusionary. I not only feel worthless, but am worthless. Indeed, as the book of Ecclesiastics states, "Vanity, vanity, all is vanity." It is my favorite Old Testament book. Totally existential and totally accurate and totally me.



What isn't a waste of time? All we have is time to waste. That is what a human life consists of. The difference between you and I is that I choose to waste a goodly amount of it on God and you are hogging all your wastage on yourself.

Yeah, I was an English major at Santa Barbara University. I went there because Jim Morrison went there and you could see all the stars at night over the ocean and it had a lagoon around which mud hens would waddle every morning.

This was fun. Hang loose. Your Worthless Friend, Albert

HelenM

Albert Cipriani

Dear Helen,
You'd make a hell of a Fundamentalist, what with your going back to word origins and allowing the present-day meaning of a single word translated from dead languages written thousands of years ago in a culture whose literary conventions are opaque to us today to trump common sense. What a firebrand you are!

Literalism is simply unworkable. But more than that, it's stupid. It is born out of a mistrust of reason, a sense of being inadequate to the task of knowing what God wanted us to know. It develops, as if on steroids, a muscle-bound caricature of faith to overcompensate for its scrawny intellect. So in spite of being internally inconsistent, the fundamentalist can at any given point in time for any given occasion produce a single biblical verse that supports virtually anything.

It's staccato thinking. The fundamentalist always hits the right note... so long as it's not sustained long enough to become discordant with other biblical passages or common sense.

Yet I kind of admire the noble savagery of Fundamentalism, its intensity of conviction and single-minded one-dimensional fervor that it necessarily generates to compensate for its intellectual vacuity. But it's wasted on you as an atheist. Get ye to a Church of Christ or Southern Baptists congregation. Your propensities are being wasted among the infidels.

You ask:


Those who don't share my beliefs are normal. They are going to have a normal life, which will lead them to a normal afterlife insofar as normal is defined by the bell-shaped curve. They are on the broad path. I am on the narrow path. Jesus said it's better to be on the narrow path.

As to who goes to hell or heaven, people on both paths go to hell and to heaven. One has a better chance of not crashing and burning if one drives on the left side of the road in England and drives on the right side in America. I drive accordingly. The ultimate traffic cop, Jesus, said to take the narrow path, and that I'm doing. Nothing more can be said.

But of course, that won't stop me. I'll say this: it's a sin of presumption to know, as virtually every practicing Protestant knows and all apostate Catholics know, that you are going to heaven. In this matter, one can only take refuge under the theological virtue of hope. I, for one, hope and pray that everyone (even Hitler) (maybe even you! ) goes to heaven. – Cheers, Albert the Traditional Catholic

HelenM

Automaton

Hey Albert! I'm still waiting for a response!

As for Technos' comment:
The first law of thermodynamics is a statistical law. Quantum fluctuations do indeed create energy, but this is so small that overall it has no net effect.

Albert Cipriani

Dear Helen,
With "fear and trembling (Philippians 2:12)" that the powers that be will banish this to the religious forum, I'll hazard some short answers.



It's impossible to universally know what anything means. Our own US constitution is up for grabs and its only 200 years old and written in our native tongue. But one does not give up the better for the perfect. So just because solo scriptura is an imperfect guide is no reason it can’t be used to better our understanding.



Yes. His mantra "faith alone" illustrates the utter ludicrousness of the Protestant intellectual tradition. The gift of Faith IS a work in that it must be accepted. Accepting God's grace requires our free will. The exercise of our free will, by definition, is a work. That 500 years of factionalism could arise from Luther's inability to appreciate this metaphysical truism illustrates just how blind mankind is.

From what I've read, you tend to pick around the edges of arguments, never come out whole hog pro or con. That made me think you were probably agnostic. But, hey, on this board everyone is guilty of atheism until proven innocent. Cheers, Albert the Traditional Catholic

Albert Cipriani

Dear Automaton,
You ask:


Who knows. My argument does not stand on those terms. It's enough to know that time is the subset of eternity. You can call them dimensions or I may call them platforms, the semantics are not important.

Do you remember your Euclidean geometry, where a point is the representation of the first dimension, and an infinitely long series of points connected one to another forming a line represented the second dimension? Well then, as an analogy to the terminology you object to, one could say that the non-point platform (first dimension) of the linear second dimension still involves points. Ugly and awkward. I'd rather not defend such terms.

You say:


A dot on a page solely exists in the first dimension from its perspective. From our perspective it exists in our three dimensional world. Likewise, if there is a fifth eternal dimension, we exist in that one too, tho like the dot on the page, are not aware of it.



Yahweh God is all that exists and therefore it is not proper to speak of Him existing IN anything. Rather, He forms the matrix of being (and dimensions) whereby all that exists, exists in Him.



Change does not require time when the subject matter is creation ex nihilo. For creation out of nothing is not strictly speaking a change. From our hopelessly non-intelligent metaphoric perspective, creation seems to be a change only because we imagine absolute nothing (which is a logical error for it cannot be imagined) out of which we imagine the Big Bang exploding. This seems like a sequence of events that constitutes a change and would have required time. But that is not so.

Absolute nothing (unlike Absolute Vodka) is bereft of even the potentiality of something. So nothing did not first exist only to THEN have the Big Bang come into existence. There was no sequence of events here, only the one event of creation. Thus, time was not required.

Ergo, "ex nihilo," the official term used in the Catholic de fide dogma is an unfortunate choice of words to the degree that it implies that the "nothing" had "something" to do with creation. A more accurate phrase might be that God created the universe not out of nothing but from Himself; so long as we understand that "from Himself" does not mean "of Himself." That is, so long as we don't conceive of the universe as being of the substance of God, we will be preserved from pantheism.



This is an argumentum ad ignorantiam. You're like someone bullying Edison with a challenge to prove that a light bulb is possible before Edison invented the light bulb. Simply because I am ignorant of the causes behind some effects does not mean that some effects have no cause. This is elementary. And like an elementary school yard bully, you should be ashamed of yourself for pushing me around like this... I'm gonna snitch to the teacher on you!

The belief in cause and effect is about as axiomatic as the law of non-contradiction and ranks right up there among the notions that save us all from the solipsism of being a brain in a jar. Yet you have the audacity to say I have "no excuse" for this "baseless assertion." Breathtaking!



Being related is the existential state of being whereby there exists the quality of intrinsic goodness. This quality of goodness can be quantitatively magnified. Ergo, the greatest good is the greatest number of relationships possible.

For example, compared to a corpse, there's an order of magnitude in the number of relationships expressed in a living body. Ergo, a living body is better than a corpse.

In the moral sphere, actions that relate us to more things are good, and actions that rupture those relationships are bad. The more we are related to the world around us, the more reality and we are an integrated whole and the more complex and God-like we become. Conversely, every immoral act we commit, disorders that matrix of interrelationships, reduces the number of our relationships and simplifies us ultimately to that of a corpse. -- Sincerely, Albert the Traditional Catholic

[ February 27, 2002: Message edited by: Albert Cipriani ]

[ February 27, 2002: Message edited by: Albert Cipriani ]</p>

HelenM

Technos

I've always found the evidence for this unconvincing personally, but it's not an idea I ever openly debate because the assertion that energy can not be created nor destroyed is a negative statement, and as Atheist we all know how hard it can be to prove a negative.