Buffman

Ku Bop (Welcome Neighbor)

Is it believable to claim that morality and ethics arose from an impersonal, material world?

Of course it is! What you are inferring is that it was an immoral and unethical world before Christianity made an appearance. That is a ludicrous inference/belief. What you are further implying is that no other group, whether religious or not, arising since the beginnings of Christianity has been able to establish a viable set of ethical and moral values. That is also ludicrous...as well as arrogant in the extreme.

You use a very presumptive adjective in your premise..."impersonal." Survival is a "very" personal desire. Ethics and morality are merely an outgrowth of social interaction. Haven't you heard the expression "Cooperate to Graduate?" Well, back at the dawn of homo sapiens , it was "Cooperate to keep from dying alone." Were the ethics of the caveman identical to those of today's cosmopolitan and educated city-dweller? Where life or death of the individual is involved, I suspect that they would be very similar. Morality is the new boy on the street. Moral values developed after societies were formed in order for that society, vice the individual, to survive. Why? Well because the survival of the individual became inextricable from the survival of the society. (Group/Tribe/Clan/Country/Nation/Government)

How can you descern between what can be understood by the human mind and what is the product of human thought. You are, in reality, demanding that God communicate something incommunicable. It is to His credit that he revealed himself to us via human media, in an understandable manner. He is a personal God, both transcendent and immanent.

I am sure that that is a very comforting superstition for you to believe, but as far as it having any basis in reality, I can find none. I suspect that you are not accurately aware of what we currently know about the brain-mind interface in our quest for more knowledge about, and understanding of, the natural world...and thus ourselves. Therefore it is far easier for you to attribute what you don't know or understand to the supernatural world...especially if you have fears centered in the natural world.---Do you have a problem discerning between what hurts or doesn't hurt you? Is what hurts you bad? Evil? Unethical? Immoral? Aren't we simply dealing with questions of semantics/semiotics? I certainly don't need any supernatural God to tell me what can/does hurt me. Maybe you do. A child has to be told not to put a bare hand on a hot stove...the first time. If he/she doesn't listen, he/she will get burned/hurt. That is pain. Bad! If no one tells the child not to do this, they will learn very quickly not to do it again. They might even write about it so others can be prevented the same pain. Of course those others must be able to read and understand the words.

(This all goes back to presuppositions.) The Scriptures are clear that Satan and his demons are real, and that they are deceivers. They have the power to manipulate men and the elements in order to cause miracles and religious experiences for people of other faiths, all for the purpose of taking glory away from the Lord God.

If you wish to believe a book filled with the campfire tales of a bunch of ancient, nomadic, uneducated, goat herders, that someone elected to write down hundreds of years later, that is certainly your choice. However, until you have accurately researched the derivation of those "scriptures" and how certain ones were selected to be included in the book that you worship, I can only smile at the level of your naievete. Just try asking yourself why, and by whom, certain ancient writings were declared divinely inspired? PLease note:

"Catholic and Protestant Bibles both include 27 books in the New Testament. Protestant Bibles have only 39 books in the Old Testament, however, while Catholic Bibles have 46. The seven additional books included in Catholic Bibles are Tobit, Judith, 1 and 2 Maccabees, Wisdom, Sirach, and Baruch. Catholic Bibles also include additions to the Books of Esther and Daniel which are not found in Protestant Bibles. These books are called the deuterocanonical books. The Catholic Church considers these books to be inspired by the Holy Spirit."

<a href="http://www.innvista.com/scriptures/pseudep/default.htm" target="_blank">http://www.innvista.com/scriptures/pseudep/default.htm</a>

The various practitioners of the Christian faith can't even agree on which scriptures are/are not sacred and divinely inspired. However, I suspect that you know which ones are. If you think that you do, then you are falling into the trap of religious dogma and mind conditioning that is part and parcel of all religious faith beliefs. Now add the rituals and operating paraphernalia and you have one of the modern day religious advertising companies attempting to recruit more non-critically thinking adherents/dutiful serfs.

God is the God of secondary causes. It isn't suprising that many miracles can be explained via natural causes. These events are often called freak happenings for a reason. The reason being that they are abnormal, exceptional. God is Lord of the heavens, earth, and sea. He can do what He wishes with them.

Miracles? For many people, anything that does not appear to have an immediate natural explanation is a miracle. The miracle of Birth? The miracle of an earthquake! Volcanic eruption! Tornado! Nuclear explosion! How about the miracle of a heart transplant? Any biological transplant? The only miracle is that adult humans still believe in the supernatural.

[ December 01, 2002: Message edited by: Buffman ]</p>

Bible Humper

Hello, Ku Bop, I thought that you had abandoned us, so wasn't paying attention to this thread. I'll keep an eye on it from now on.

Also, I would add the hardening of Pharaoh's heart to scriptural evidence that the free will defense is incompatible with Christianity. This is a clear case of the deity changing someone's mind.

You are right to reject the free will defense, it is very flawed. It is used by mainstream Christians as an apologetic bolt-hole where they can try to hide from questions of the deity's non-behavior.

Basically, they offer a "solution" similar to the old problem "Can God create a rock so heavy even he can't lift it?", they claim that God has created creatures so unpredictable that even he can't predict them!

Your rejection of this idea, however, leaves you exposed to the many reasons they adopted this defense in the first place!

If I hook up a bomb to a remote control car, and detonate it in the midst of a crowd, can I blame the remote control car for the deed? Why or why not?

I see that these scriptural definitions cause problems later on. The words "holy", "righteous", "loving", and "just" either have the same meaning whether Yahweh is described as conforming to them or not, or they are merely titles that apply to Yahweh no matter what sort of (non)behavior he indulges in.

You follow the latter course in the rest of your reply, but the only one of these words with which it is acceptable to do so is "holy". The other words lose all meaning if you use them this way, I could call Yahweh a "ninja", and by insisting that his attributes constitute ninjitsu by definition, no matter what those attributes are, I haven't made a case that the deity is indeed what we would commonly think of as a ninja, I've just decided that this word has excellent connotations which I want to attach to my conception of the deity, and so declare the word "ninja" to describe the deity by definition.

The justification you use later in your post, that the deity has as much right to do with us as he pleases as we do with a lump of clay, divorces these three concepts as they are commonly used from the deity's relationship towards us. If willing me not to believe, and then punishing me later, is an amoral act rather than an immoral act, then love, righteousness, and justice still have no place in this discussion.


Let me get this straight, God wills some of us to commit sin, we can't resist him so we do, but God isn't responsible for sin? Sorry, even tweaking the definition of sin doesn't help you here unless it changes in mid-sentence.

There are extremely important theological reasons why most sects of Christianity have adopted the free will defense, and we are seeing one of those reasons here. Much worse than the problems with how you define his behavior is the fact of the existence of the universe itself, this deity has no reason to create a world where he already knows everything that is going to happen anyway. It is an entirely pointless exercise. This is why your Christian cousins invented the free will idea in desperation, they realised that they needed to explain this somehow.

Your concept of God is of a puppet master who makes his own puppets do things that piss him off, and then kicks them for it after they do it.

The "great difference" is completely irrelevant if God is just. Justice does not depend on how powerful the individuals involved are. Unless you make the definition of the word "just" change to whatever it needs to become in order to describe Yahweh.

My "right to question" is inherent if God is righteous. Blind obedience is amoral, a machine that saves lives is not moral. Unless you make the definition of the word "righteous" change to whatever it needs to become in order to describe Yahweh.

Anyway, if you want to deflect criticism by asserting that we are not qualified to make conclusions about an alleged creator deity based on the creation, then your own assertions of a "loving, just, and righteous" deity ring very hollow indeed.

Every dictator has a horde of sycophants who loudly proclaim that everything the dictator does is "loving, just, and righteous". Do we have any right to question the application of these terms to the dictator?


Nope, omnimax attributes are entirely within our capacity to conceptualise, specifically because they are without limits. Thus, we can discuss the implications of omniscience and omnipotence, without being omniscient ourselves, because the concept of "without limits" is well within our abilities to comprehend.


I don't know enough physics at the moment to accurately describe the workings of a star, beyond the basics, so if I was called upon to invent laws of physics that would allow stars to exist, I couldn't do so.

If I am then allowed to try again, but with the tool of omnipotence, it is a simple task! I could make them balls of shining grape jelly if I wanted to, there are no limits to what I could do.

So too with the problem of evil, it is easy to conceive of universes without any woe whatsoever. The only excuse ever offered for why Yahweh has to make the universe appear to be completely naturalistic, and thus indifferent, is that he wants us to have free will, though there are still tons of naturalistic scenarios that remove at least some of the unnecessary evil of the world.

How do you answer the problem of evil? "Don't question the deity" is not going to cut the mustard in these forums!

In fact, this answer is only necessary if the problem of evil reveals that a deity who is both benevolent and omnipotent doesn't exist, an appeal to fear that is intended to scare you into seeing the Emperor's New Clothes after all.

By what criterion did you judge the deity to be "just", "righteous", and "loving"?

Once you reveal the criterion, we have the Bible on hand which is supposed to contain an accurate portrayal of the One True Deity and his works.

We can entertain the solipsistic possiblility that reason, and/or the stimuli towards which we apply our reason, are not what we thought them to be.

How do you choose one flavour of solipsism over another?

Here is what I said about it before:

In other words, he is saying that a universe where his deity exists is indistinguishable in EVERY WAY from one where he does not!

If solipsism is nonetheless enough for them, perhaps the christians should think about the possiblility that we are all brains in a laboratory, being fed stimuli by a sophisticated computer in a perfect simulation of reality.

In actual fact, this "brain in a laboratory" scenario trumps christianity immediately by virtue of the fact that we can see how it could be done, in principle, when technology is able to reverse engineer the brain, feed stimuli directly instead of through sense organs, etc.

Contrast this with any and all supernatural solipsistic scenarios which suffer from the embarrassing fact that supernaturalism has yet to be discovered despite the fact that there have been trillions of claims by billions of believer which all turned out to be naturalistic after all when the mysteries of the phenomenon in question were at last unraveled.

Supernature has no sound argument. Much less a theistic variant of it. Much less the specific christian version of the theistic variant of it! MUCH LESS the particular flavour of any sect of the specific Christian version of the theistic variant of it!

Every solipsistic doubt thrust upon the empirical multiplies exponentially towards theism, which is an attempt to "intuitively" discern a reality above and beyond our own from within.

So if you are going to admonish us for not considering the possibility that our reasons, or the stimuli fed to our reasons, are unreliable, then you're going to have to explain what tools you used to conclude that the Bible is true!

Well, this "reasoning" is known as a logical fallacy for good reason.

If I wrote you a letter telling you to send me all of your valuables, and wrote in the same letter that this is a good deal for you, I somehow doubt that you would consider that convincing.

You have tacitly admitted that your belief is irrational. Your childhood indoctrination has resulted in an emotional investment towards your religion, whenever the tools you use to discern truth in your day to day life result in an unfavourable conclusion regarding your religion, and your religion only, you make a special exception.

If I sent you a booklet describing a pyramid scheme I wanted you to join into, you would reject all claims within that same booklet promising easy money to be questionable at best. You know about pyramid schemes already, specifically that they invariably result in the majority of the participants losing money at the end.

On the other hand is the bible describing a religion you are wanted to join into, and in opposite fashion you wave away all criticism of the supernatural claims which you would find questionable at best in any other book. This despite the fact you know about the myriad religions of the world already, specifically that they invariably result in the vast majority, if not the totality, of participants wasting their time on superstitious fantasy at the end.

Let us not forget that yours is not the only holy book in the world! The very existence of billions of believers who used this exact same illogic to decide that their religion was the One True Faith(tm), and the sad fact that they can't all be right even if one of them is, is a conclusive indictment of this justification for your beliefs. It is as easy to have faith in something without evidence that isn't true, as it is to have faith in something without evidence that is true.

You have bet the farm on a method of discerning the truthfulness of religious belief which you know has failed the vast majority, if not the totality, of mankind throughout history!



I already know that it would be impossible for me to tell the difference between a universe I perceive through my five senses plus reason, and a perfect virtual reality simulation where I am being fed the electrical impulses, that I assume to be my sense organ's reaction to stimuli, directly to my brain.

Like I said before, though, every solipsistic doubt you cast upon the empirical multiplies exponentially against the intuitive. Not only are you using the same tools that I use, in any case, you are trying to apply them to an invisible, intangible supernature! On top of this, you reject the possibility that you are wrong with the same poor logic used by the followers of all the rest of the religions which you know are all false!

The only way you can say that your religious beliefs are beyond your own fallible reason or perceptions is if you admit that the question was answered for you during your youth, and you were "programmed" to be a Christian via indoctrination. This just defers the problem, though, because you still need to justify the conclusion reached by those who made the decision on your behalf.

Otherwise, you had to use your own perceptions and reason in some way and at some point in order to come to a conclusion regarding the truthfulness of Christianity.

LOL, the questioner here asked the question that goes right to the heart of why it is nonsense, but the narrator tells him to "shut up, don't ask that question".

I have yet to see that argumentative "tactic" used by someone who was actually right, it only seems to be used by people who can't answer a critical question.

What were you saying about the deity being "just"? "Loving"? "Righteous"?

Is this Christian flavoured nihilism I'm hearing here? Why indeed should the deity view us as anything more than material? Do we worry about being fair to clay?

So conscious beings have no intrinsic worth, their value is measured by the deity the way we might measure the worth of a clay jug?

This is an interesting interpretation indeed!

Well, you've already denied the free will of mankind, so this is like me gathering a bunch of toy soldiers on my living room table, deciding that the ones I put on the left side of the table shall burn, and letting the ones on the right side see it so that they realise how nice I am not to burn them too, but expect to not be carted off to the funny farm for it.

There are good reasons indeed for mainstream Christianity to adopt the free will defense. Good reasons indeed.

Then the deity has no excuse for designing the universe to appear naturalistic. He especially has no excuses for evil!

In fact, since he already decided who would be saved, and who would be damned, there is no reason for this universe at all. He could have created all the hellbound aready there, and all the heavenbound already by his side.

There is no reason for him to play a game of chess against himself, with conscious beings as his pieces!

If the solipsistic possiblity of an invisible, intangible Yahweh, who runs the universe in a way that insures that his existence is impossible to discern empirically, is supposed to be enough to make submission to Christianity reasonable, I might as well just pick a deity with less troublesome taboos. Like Dionysus!

Or make up my own!

The worship of a deity I invent myself has just as much going for it as the worship of Yahweh does!.

In any case, you have already claimed that my belief is dependant wholly on the deity. Most Christians try to use the free will idea to make sense of why their religion has to be preached like any other, but according to your version there is no reason for us to not all be born with knee already bent if that's what the deity wanted anyway.

So why don't I believe?

EDIT I wanted to add a question I forgot to ask. If my belief, or lack of belief, is wholly dependant on the will of the deity, is your challenge above, and indeed your entire apologetic effort, merely a material expression of the deity trying to make a decision in his own mind regarding whether I should believe in him or not?

I'm not aware of any "nontheist's problem of evil", the existence of evil is completely consistent with an indifferent, naturalistic universe.

Thank you very much for these responses, I'll get to your second post later on tonight if I can. If I don't, I'll get to it tomorrow. Take care!

[ December 01, 2002: Message edited by: Bible Humper ]

[ December 01, 2002: Message edited by: Bible Humper ]

[ December 02, 2002: Message edited by: Bible Humper ]</p>

atheist_in_foxhole

You actually believe that shit? Get thee to an insane asylum.

Bible Humper

Yes. I'm not an Objectivist.

Well, our capacity to understand is greater than our our capacity to imagine! If the human mind is capable of imagining something, it goes without saying that that same mind can understand it.

I can understand the imagery of great painters, though I could never have produced their work myself.

I wasn't asking for something so complex that only an omniscient mind could grasp it.

There are tons of examples of philosophies, that we all admit came from the mind of man, that put the laughably primitive concepts found in the bible to shame. Read Kant, Nietzsche, or whoever you like of the great philosophers. They have all come up with ideas so profound that if you went from their works to bible in all earnestness, reasoning that since they have come up with ideas this incredible, that an omniscient deity must have left us a philosophy of unique unearthly profundity, you would piss yourself laughing when you saw "Thou shalt not steal."

"Thou shalt not steal" elevates the act of theft to the level of taboo. It makes no allowances for the situation of the thief, stealing is disobedience towards the deity. Period. In a hypothetical situation where there was a decision to be made between feeding your starving children through theft, or letting them starve to death, only one course of action stays consistent with the commands of the deity....

Yes, I know that a "True Christian" would steal food in this situation, and that the deity would be well pleased with him for it. This is just a case of the Christian projecting his own modern ideals onto his deity, all the "deity" said about it is "thou shalt not steal". Period.

What alternatives are there? How about guidelines that scale with the situation?

The Golden Rule fits the bill, "do unto others what you would have done unto you" would have allowed the thief in the example above to steal the food, and know that it was the right thing to do in that situation, while still making greedy theft wrong.

This is the only idea that is in any way advanced in the bible. Unfortunately for the bible's fans, it was invented in Asia centuries before Jesus hit the scene. Even if you want to deny that the Middle East would certainly have come into contact with this pearl of wisdom by this time via the Silk Road, the best you can do is claim that your deity reinvented something that a man had already thought of elsewhere. You also have to somehow explain why the deity didn't reveal this, and much greater ideas besides, to Moses when he made an actual personal appearance to him, but wasted the unique opportunity of his visit to instead gave him the kind of concepts that the other local tribes of barbarians were thinking up on their own anyways.

So the best we get from the avatar is a mere nugget that is demonstrably well within the power of man to think of himself. This is still head and shoulders above the "deity" himself, though, who meets with Moses to impart his "unimaginably profound morality" which consists of taboos like "thou shalt not steal".

The mainstream Christians can scurry into their free will bolt-hole in response to this criticism, claiming that the deity couldn't make it too profound, because then it would obviously not have come from the minds of these barbaric desert nomads, and it would challenge our ability to not believe. Oh the humanity!

I'm not sure what you can offer, though, according to your theology there is no good reason why the deity would have to make his philosophy primitive enough that it appeared to be the crude moralising of dark age illiterates.

I take it that "understandable" is a euphemism for "simplistic"?

Well, if I was to become a believer I would have to take your word for it that this being is transcendant, since there is no evidence of it elsewhere.

Well, I've already mentioned why your circular argument, using the bible's own promise that it is true as the totality of your justification for believing it, renders your religious beliefs completely without a foundation to rest upon.

Since you have already thrown doubt upon the reliability of reason and perception in our exchange, you admit that you have no method of discerning if your book is the word of the One True Deity and the rest are deceptions perpetrated by devils, or if the bible itself is one of the demonic works. This is, of course, why the solipsistic admonishments of theists towards atheists that we "put total faith in our perceptions and reason" rings so hollow.

Look how easy it would be for a demon to fool you, all it has to write in the bible is that the bible is true, and you'll take it's word for it! It could continue from here and have you do some pretty wild things, like ritual cannibalism and vampirism! Ooops....

Err... like <a href="http://iidb.org/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=45&t=001456&p=" target="_blank">animal sacrifices, something well known to be associated with black magic.</a>

D'oh!...hehe...errrm, well you get the idea, the demon could have you worshipping an entity who is into some very dark stuff, and you wouldn't dare to question it.


Well, if you truly believe that demons and sorcerers are this active in the world, there isn't much that I can say that is going to convince you that I'm not a sorcerer myself. My only request is that you look into these things yourself, don't take someone else's word for it, make an effort to learn about the other cultures and religions of the world, and I think that you will change your mind about them trafficking with demons.

Once again, this is an issue that the mainstream Christians dodge by hiding behind the free will defense. According to your theology, though, there is no reason for the deity to disguise his manifestations as natural occurances.

A second point. Tell me, please, at what point in a miraculous event does the deity intervene?

Freak happenings are invariably explained to be manifestations of supernature by religious folks. The question, then, is did the deity tweak the natural world to not have freak happenings that weren't part of his plan? One in a million odds come up....err, about one time in a million. So the deity would have had to have canceled the incidents when a "natural" one in a million would have occured on it's own, and replaced it with his own event.

When someone wins the lottery, they invariably thank their deity for the blessing, but what would have happened if the deity did nothing at all? If the deity had no interest in who won the lottery, someone still had to have the winning ticket, so how can you be so sure that the deity had a hand in it in the first place? Would you admit that the deity is falsely given credit for random chance?

I guess that your theology's answer might be that everything at all times is under direct control of the deity, but I'll have to wait and see what you say about the reason for the deity creating the universe is before responding.

Oh, and I forgot to mention in the first response....

Ditto. I understand that it must be difficult for you to discuss an issue that you believe to be responsible for damning me to eternal hellfire in a way that doesn't seem hostile!

[ December 02, 2002: Message edited by: Bible Humper ]</p>

doc58

Ku Bop,
I enjoyed reading your essay. Sounds like you are a good calvinist. I know your calvinistic theology says I can't exist but I used to be a 5 pt. calvinist. I could have written what you wrote. For me, the first pillar that fell was the inerrancy of scripture. Then I began to understand something shocking. And that is:

Calvinism(or whatever you want to call it) is the belief that God, before He created anything, looked ahead at all the people who would ever exist, decided what % (apparently very low) of them would go to heaven and what %(apparently very high) he would torture forever, and then drew straws(since it is all grace and no merit) to decide who would be in what category.
Salvation by grace means grace of a purely random nature. As you say, if there is an omnimax God, He has the prerogative and ability to do just that but it is inconceivable to also call that same God all-loving or all-good.

I now find it hard to imagine that I ever fervently believed and confidently taught the inerrancy of scripture, sovereignty of God, goodness of God, holiness of God, predestination, etc. It embarrases me now.

Wyz_sub10

I think Ku Bop's gone away, never to respond to my post.

Oh well. Maybe some other time, when you're up to it.

diana

I'm in a bit of a rush, so I didn't take the time to slog through all the posts, but my favorite response to any god comment/claim is simply, "Why do you believe in God?"

...to which the number two reply is, "Just look around you!"

...to which my reply is something along the lines of, "Trees, rocks, dirt, water....Yes? How do you make a leap from all this to something that is logically impossible that you can't see and have no direct experience of? Again...why do you believe in God?"

The number one reply, in case you're wondering, is silence.

d

Bumble Bee Tuna

The simplest argument is the best.

"You believe in the Judeo-Christian God? Where's the evidence to support that claim?"

After which the best anyone can ever do is a supposed proof of Deism...and never a proof of Christianity.

You really don't need any other justification. Though my favorites when I do decide to engage are biblical atrocities and contradictions.

-B

Shadownought

Whoa, whoa, hold on there.

You are saying the following:
1) If God made us so that we would all worship him and then go to heaven, he is not loving.
2) If God lets us choose whether to worship him or not, but throws us in eternal searing agony forever if we do not, then he IS loving.

Explain this, please!

diana

Fallacy of the excluded middle.

You assume there is no third option (at least), which IMO a loving God would provide: if you don't believe, you're neither rewarded nor punished.

The heaven/hell position of Xnty coupled with its claim of an all-loving god is one of its most ridiculous doctrines. Thank you for elaborating on that so eloquently.

d