Christianity

[Iwannaplato]

So, how did you come to believe in God?

Do you think those videos should turn people into believers? Or must they be open/interested?

Why won't some people be convinced by the videos? Does this mean they are damned?

[Immanuel Can]

It's been months since you linked those videos to me. I didn't exactly bookmark them.

Lame excuse. Go back to my earlier message to Gary, and the website's there. Or don't. Whatever you want to do.

[iambiguous]

Okay, above, IC recommended to Gary Childress that he "try the video on meaning"

That's this one: https://youtu.be/NKGnXgH_CzE

Go ahead, watch it. I did.

Basically, what is being argued here is that, as the Christian woman says, in the absence of God, all things are permitted. That as philosophers like Camus noted, No God and human existence is essentially meaningless and absurd.

In other words [and I agree with this] if there is no God than there is no basis for objective morality. It is all merely the result of the evolution of life on Earth and "human conventions".

So, the atheist suggests that "human flourishing" ought to be the criteria. And the Christian woman then points out [rightly in my view] that if there is no God than who is to say what flourishing means? She points out how Hitler thought that his Nazi policies were what would accomplish this. And, she notes, certain philosophers have argued that using the tools of philosophy will not lead us to objective morality. And I agree with this in turn.

Then she gets to the bottom line for most Christians: "What happens after you die"?

No God, no afterlife.

She sums it all up: "If Christianity is true then each one of us is here for a reason. And life does not end at the grave. And God is the absolute standard of goodness. He knows you. He loves you. He intentionally created you. So, your life ultimately does have meaning and value and purpose."

But then the Atheist makes the point, "Well, that doesn't prove that Christianity is true".

And she agrees. She merely points out again how comforted and consoled you can be if you do believe in Christianity.


Edit:

How does this video demonstrate to us that the Christian God resides in Heaven? Would not many folks here...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_r ... traditions

...make the same claims about their own God?

[Immanuel Can]

So, how did you come to believe in God?

Reading the "great" Atheists and agnostics at uni, actually. They were such dusty fellows, with such a complete absence of plausible answers to serious human problems that it was inevitable I'd have to seek answers elsewhere. I wasn't enthused about turning to the Bible at first, actually...and to tell the truth, not at all convinced I was going to find anything. But I did.

I think that's one reason I like the videos. In addition to covering some basic strategies for thinking rationally about God, they point out some of the gaping holes in Atheism. And if a person realizes how seriously flawed that worldview is, it at least sets them up to look for better answers. That's a good thing.

Do you think those videos should turn people into believers?

As I was saying to Gary, that's not precisely their purpose. What they do is show that there is a strong, non-religious case for the existence of God, as taken from several angles. What's nice about the videos is they're short, entertaining and concise. They're a great introduction to the various questions about the reasons for the existence of God. But they're only a "gateway" thing: they don't answer every question possible -- just some of the biggest and most common first-step questions.

Sure, the makers are Christians. But the purpose is more general arguments for God, not specific theology.

Or must they be open/interested?

If a person isn't open or interested, there's nothing they learn about anything...and that's true of all subject areas, right?

Why won't some people be convinced by the videos?

Maybe some won't be interested. Maybe they aren't engaged with the questions the videos address. Maybe they don't want to think about it. There are lots of reasons why a person would choose not to be convinced. Not all are rational, of course.

Does this mean they are damned?

Damned for not watching a 7 minute video? No, of course not. But the stakes of actual disbelief in God are much more significant, of course; and if any of the videos that speak about that help somebody sort their thinking out, one way or the other, then that's a service, I would say.

[Dubious]

Dubious believes no other explanations are needed for any phenomena of a revelatory sort) but the idea of a transcendental divinity is -- here his assertion is similar to Iambiguous's -- an idea that has been rendered impossible at an a priori level.

Can you explain how an idea which exists only as speculation without the slightest evidence or logic can even exist at an a priori level?

The former cosmological model was a Story, and the *reality* is different as we all now know. But the content of the Story is still as much there as it ever was -- if indeed it ever was.

True, but stories invariably get upgraded and the old ones get archived unless they're fictional to start off with which doesn't mean they aren't interesting in our effort to understand.

The belief factor is ALL there ever was to compress the unprovable into a fact.

True enough, and the performance of such an act of concretizing belief is just as evident in the hermeneutic deployment with which you are engaged with a notable zeal.

One needs the right tool for the domain under consideration. The kind you expound indeed requires hermeneutics whereas mine exists mostly in the realm of probability. These types of conflation and discordancy of method results in the kinds of error you keep repeating.

Nothing more sustainable than belief was ever available to reify god beyond what is subsumed mentally whether simply imagined or as a psychic necessity.

To me at least I find this too reductive and, as per usual, you simply reify the set of assumptions that you operate under.

Pray! In what conceivable way is this an "assumption"? How is the urge to reify god into palpability not based on belief since the probability for such an entity, historically and scientifically is near zero...an obstacle that only belief can override.

In a sense, religion has even less use for god than an atheist as it transmutes a myth into an authoritarian scholastic entity supervised by its own hierarchy in which god, in some form, becomes an icon of established power; nothing more and nothing beyond.

While I am familiar with the logic of the argument, and have also seen things in terms of 'power-structures', this final analysis is insufficient in my view.

History refutes your view!

[Harbal]

A leap of faith could mean something like: although I have no evidence and feel nothing, experience nothing special in prayer, feel nothing numinous when I read the Bible, never feel the presence of grace of Jesus, I simply decide to have faith in God.

I think this must have happened to me at some point in my life, except I made a leap of indifference, and decided not to bother with God. I must have been very young, because I don't remember it happening. I sometimes wonder if it could have gone the other way, and whether it was good fortune, or common sense, that saved me.

[Dubious]

If only the potential horrors of life were a "myth". ¯\_(*_*)_/¯

Life is a play written by a farce master who knows how to blend all the elements of existence into a meaningless, delirious, incoherent story. The only thing which makes sense, it doesn't last forever.

[Alexis Jacobi]

IAM quotes AJ:

"And then I like voyaging by intellectual skyhooks from one upper region to another."

It seems that I must clarify what seemed obvious to me. OK, here it goes:

It was an ironic statement.

irony
/ˈʌɪrəni/
noun
the expression of one's meaning by using language that normally signifies the opposite, typically for humorous or emphatic effect.

It could be that your world just shattered into bits (fragments). If so I am sorry and it wasn’t intentional.

[Alexis Jacobi]

A quote from Acts that caught my eye: “These who have turned the world upside down have come here too."

She sums it all up: "If Christianity is true then each one of us is here for a reason. And life does not end at the grave. And God is the absolute standard of goodness. He knows you. He loves you. He intentionally created you. So, your life ultimately does have meaning and value and purpose."

The appeal will always have a great deal of attraction and power. It becomes apparent when one reverses the assertions:

You exist but there is no purpose to your existence.

Though you sense that your being is eternal it is not. Eventually you will be subsumed into meaningless nothingness.

There is no "good" in this manifest universe and no 'absolute good' that can be associated with the manifest cosmos.

There is no divine intelligence that is aware of you. You are an irrelevant particle. You have no connection with something greater.

Our own *love* is not connected to larger, cosmic processes or realities. If you imagine a creator who has ultimate concern for you, you are hallucinating it. Your belief that you are connected, through love, to divine being is a sickness. Do away with it and become well.

Since you simply *happened to occur*, and since you actually realize that you face a wall of sheer meaninglessness, all sense of purpose and of design is also hallucinatory. If you believe life has 'purpose', no, it does not. Better to stifle or even to strangle that false sense.

Since I cannot present myself and don't present myself as a Christian apologist attempting to convert anyone, I find it more interesting, more fruitful, to examine the implications of the ideas we have. Obviously, we have all been confronted with a powerful idea-set that affirms in reverse each of the positive assertions made by the Christian woman (and naturally by both Judaism and Christianity).

That belief, that interpretation, is made to appear *absolute* is it not? It is a sort of final and irreducible declaration about the way things really are. And yet when it is examined it is rendered thoroughly false! Allow me to explain. I might say, and in fact I do say, that the sense of purpose, value, continuity, relevance, meaning and indeed all the rest that I might name, most surely do exist and are as real as anything else. They exist and are part of the structure of things. They exist *metaphysically* of course. But does that mean falsely or, as I understand many to mean, as a neurotic hallucination?

Also in Acts, as most everyone is aware, when Paul made his appeal in Athens:

For in him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain also of your own poets have said, For we are also his offspring.

Christians make the problematic claim that the God defined by Judaism and Judaic monotheism is also the God that created all things. Let's be honest: that is a hard assertion to make. I think I can with fairness reduce both Iambiguous's and Gary's *core problem* to the fact that neither of them can reconcile The World with this proposed World Creator, there is simply far too much dissonance in the assertion. Indeed the assertion is made to seem childish.

So even if we could arrive, or have arrived, at the (necessary) assertion that the The World and the manifest cosmos could not have come about except through an immense act of manifest design, we are not able to understand what *God* is through examination of that world. All there are really are endless questions. The more that our seeing penetrates the depth (of the Universe) (for example through the new telescope which seems to be upending physics) the more are specific interpretations overturned. We then seem to be confronted with the understanding, which is more than mere sense, that our interpretations are not very solid.

I guess I am alone in this but these paragraphs, in my mind, point out the situation in which we find ourselves:

To give a 'philosophical' account of matters which had formerly been explained 'unscientifically', 'popularly', or 'figuratively' -- this, it would probably be agreed, has been the main intellectual concern of the last three hundred years. In a sense, no doubt, the separation of the 'true' from the 'false', the 'real' from the 'illusory', has been the task of thought at all times. But this winnowing process seems to have been carried on much more actively and consciously at certain times than at others. For us in the West two such periods are of especial importance, the period of Greek philosophy and the centuries following the Renaissance. It was in the seventeenth century that modern European thought seems first to have assumed, once more, that its appointed task was La Recherche de la Vérité, the discovery and declaration, according to its lights, of the True Nature of Things. It is in that century that we meet once again the exhilaration which inspired Lucretius in his address to Epicurus the sense of emancipation from inadequate notions, of new contact with reality. It was then, too, that the concepts of 'truth ', 'reality', 'explanation ' and the rest were being formed, which have moulded all subsequent thinking. There is some reason, then, for supposing that it may be worth while to watch these concepts in process of formation.

First it may be well to enquire, not with Pilate -- 'What is Truth?' -- but what was felt to be 'truth' and 'explanation' under seventeenth century conditions. As T. E. Hulme and others have pointed out, it is almost insuperably difficult to become critically conscious of one's own habitual assumptions; 'doctrines felt as facts' can only be seen to be doctrines, and not facts, after great efforts of thought, and usually only with the aid of a first-rate metaphysician. It is, however, less difficult to detect the assumptions of an age distant from our own, especially when these have been subject to criticism. At this distance of time it should be possible, I think, to state fairly accurately what the seventeenth century felt as 'true', and what satisfied it as 'explanation'. In reading seventeenth century writers one feels that it was as 'explanation' that they chiefly valued the 'new philosophy', and it is for this reason that I wish first to enquire, briefly, what is 'explanation'?

Dictionary definitions will not help us much here. 'To explain', we learn, means to 'make clear', to 'render intelligible'. But wherein consists the clarity, the intelligibility? The clarity of an explanation seems to depend upon the degree of satisfaction that it affords. An explanation 'explains' best when it meets some need of our nature, some deep-seated demand for assurance. 'Explanation' may perhaps be roughly defined as a re-statement of something -- event, theory, doctrine, etc. -- in terms of the current interests and assumptions.

As T. E. Hulme and others have pointed out, it is almost insuperably difficult to become critically conscious of one's own habitual assumptions; 'doctrines felt as facts' can only be seen to be doctrines, and not facts, after great efforts of thought, and usually only with the aid of a first-rate metaphysician.

My view is that both Iambiguous and Gary are 'stuck' within this problem. I recognize, naturally, my own relationship with the issue, and yet I am aware of the various ways that I have attempted to surmount it and also to some degree succeeded. But it is a question of degrees since I believe we are all subsumed, more or less, in this existential and metaphysical problem.

My own view runs like this: If one tries to bend the Bible Tales, which are pictures that are in so many ways incommensurate with our perceived experience, to be for one an Absolute Picture of reality, one will be disappointed. The picture, qua picture, simply cannot quite function. And trying to make it function leads to difficulties and disfunction.

So then one must deliberately stand back from *it* (the total picture offered as an invitation to step into it) and attempt to avail oneself of that master metaphysician to whom we do not have recourse, who is not present for us, and yet try to see and if you will extract the kernel of meaning which shines though -- and I say *beyond any shadow of a doubt*.

But with that statement made, I would argue for a recognition of value as evidenced by the quality of the World that had been created, based on belief in what I refer to as The Picture; and it is there where we have to focus to give validity to what I say is "metaphysical content".

[Harry Baird]

Harry wrote...

"Sure, some humans might be demoniacal too - the sort of humans to whom we refer as "psychopathic"."

The psycho-/socio-path I see as a damaged creature, his conscience, his moral compass, crippled or absent. He may be a true nihilist (a rabid dog), a horrorshow, a monster, but that sets him outside of what I consider evil.

Evil -- true, real, evil -- is a choice. And choice, in the moral sense, is sumthin' the psycho-/socio-path appears to be incapable of. He's a pitiable thing (best considered when he's buried six feet down), but not evil.

A few questions in response - feel free to take them either as rhetorical or genuinely inquisitive, as you choose:

1. Could it be meaningful to define two types (maybe even origins) of evil: "evil by choice" and "evil by nature"?
2. If so, is it possible to be both: that, bit by bit, free decision by free decision, a free being chooses to become evil by nature?
3. Do you agree that evidence shows that psychopaths understand what's right and wrong perfectly well; it's just that they choose to use that understanding not to constrain their behaviour and choices but rather to manipulate others?
4. On a dualist understanding (mine), in which consciousness survives biological death, is it in any case possible that psychopaths are - per question two above - "evil by choice" as well as "evil by nature": that, over (potentially aeons of) time, those souls which incarnate as psychopaths have, bit by bit, free decision by free decision, chosen to become evil by nature?

Moving on:

I'm glad you liked my essay. We seem to agree pretty wholeheartedly.

There's perhaps one slightly nuanced difference in our perspectives that's worth raising, but maybe, again, I'll just be using a different framing to get at the same thing. It's my own riffing off that to which I've added emphasis in this:

As I've said across multiple threads (including this one, as I recall), man, any man, every man, any where or when, has an intuitive understanding that his life, liberty, and property are his and his alone. In a world overflowing with differing cultures and conflicts, differing environments and adaptive tricks for surviving them, this simple intuitive understanding stands coherently when all mores and laws rise and fall away. If this intuitive understanding were simply a kind of survival trait then one would expect, over the long haul, it would have been bred out of at least some populations. It never has been. Even in societies founded on deference to authority, men still take offense at being used as property. The consistency of this intuitive understanding, even as attempts are made to squelch it, to mebbe breed it out of mankind, has a lot to do with my being a deist.

I didn't, as one dumb sob, asserts over and over, 'take a leap of faith'. I deduced from available fact.

But, as I've told the dumb sob over and over, I might be wrong. This sense of self-possession, this ownness, this intuitive understanding a man has that his life, liberty, and property are his and no other's may be 'brute fact'. There may be nuthin' (or no one) behind it. If so, if natural rights is simply a kind of deep-seated survival trait, does this negate the universal repugnance we have for murder, rape, slavery, and theft? No, it doesn't. Even an evil man, one who murders, rapes, slaves, or steals, and sez God is a fairy tale, will not consent to being murdered, raped, slaved, or robbed.

Hopefully this is not too much of a tangent, but: given that (as I understand it) moral behaviour is (roughly speaking) that which conduces to avoiding negative experiences - of harm and suffering - in others, to some extent, moral behaviour depends on what does cause negative experiences in others. Thus, if a person by nature happened to desire being enslaved, raped, robbed, and even murdered, and to find those things literally pleasurable and even satisfying, then, although we very probably would consider that person to be perversely constituted, and would probably likewise consider to be perversely constituted anybody who indulged him/her in his/her desire to be enslaved, raped, robbed, and murdered, it arguably wouldn't be morally wrong in those circumstances for the (otherwise) enslaver, rapist, robber, and murderer to commit those acts upon that person given the otherwise-victim's nature which desired and found pleasure and satisfaction in them.

I'm framing it in that way to make it clear that even if people were to exist with such perverse constitutions, it wouldn't change my belief in the existence of objective moral truths - at worst it would just change what they are in relation to those sort of people.

I also think that here is where God really could come into the picture: not to change what's (arguably) objectively moral with respect to those people, but to provide a standard from which such people really could be seen to have been perverted - and not so as to condemn them, but so as to provide a (somewhat) less arbitrary reason against any attempt to biologically engineer more people like them than "the thought of it makes me queasy".

"a Story does not determine moral truth"

It can, however, convey it. And it must be conveyed. The intuitive understanding a man has of his natural, inalienable right to his life, liberty, and property, it doesn't intuitively extend to his fellows. He must be taught his fellows each have the same claim to themselves as he has to himself. Unfortunately, far too often, those trusted to transmit this are mercenary types who distort the teaching.

Fair.

"Although there are a variety of ways of phrasing, framing, and justifying morality, they all get at and amount to essentially the same thing."

Yes, exactly. There's piece in the new issue of PN that addresses this. Later I'll cut & paste it here, in this thread (and at least one other).

I read it. It's excellent, and I endorse it too.

The distinction it makes between primary and secondary values is another way of expressing...

"But that's so vague, and you (Harry), hq, JC, utilitarians, virtue ethicists, and others are bound to disagree on many specific moral truths, so, no genuinely objective moral truth exists beyond your abstraction."

No, we would not. Our disagreements would lie in application only, not on the principles.

...this, and, as you point out, of expressing an idea I'd expressed:

As you say (with slight editing on my part) "it is reasonable to expect some uncertainty and ambiguity, in which genuine disagreements can occur. That doesn't refute the objective existence of moral reality any more than the fact that the blurriness of the boundary between a human being and the world beyond that human being refutes the objective existence of human beings".

Finally:

Another example of disagreement over application and agreement on principle is "whether or not abortion is immoral depends in part on the empirical truth of exactly when a foetus becomes conscious or when its soul enters its body - a truth that is currently unknown or at least plausibly disputed". I've said the same elsewhere: the conflict is not over the permissibility of killing kids, but instead on the point during pregnancy a human meat lump segues into a baby (a person).

Yep, and I deliberately chose that example because you'd made that point (which I already agreed with) in the other thread with iambiguous.

Thanks for your thoughts.

[Harry Baird]

Sir, you excelled yourself in that last post. Bravo.

[Harry Baird]

Just 'cos:

Gen Z gym bros resurrecting Christianity as religion makes godlike gains on social media

It all started at high school in Alice Springs, when a few mates started sharing bodybuilding memes they found on social media.

The niche memes would show famous bodybuilders with quotes from the Bible, gradually exposing Mr Byrnes and his friends to Catholic teachings.

"You start paying more attention to it because it's funny, it's cool pictures," he said.

The Catholic imagery proved to be the divine inspiration for his boutique clothing brand, which promotes "gains" with slogans like, "On the seventh day he lifted" and "The Last Supplement".

Not everyone is a fan of Bible puns.

"A couple of people on TikTok have said, 'This is blasphemous, you're going to hell'," he said.

But Mr Byrnes said it was all done in the spirit of sincere faith.

"I'm not doing it to be blasphemous, it's in good taste," he said..

"I'm showing Jesus's strength and whatnot through muscles."

More at the link.

[Flannel Jesus]

Just 'cos:

Gen Z gym bros resurrecting Christianity as religion makes godlike gains on social media

I can see why people think it's blasphemous. If I saw those shirts I wouldn't assumed they were designed by a Christian.

[promethean75]

and how do u get from the kalam argument and the fine tuning argument to a Christian conclusion (the one Aquinas came to)? nothing so far suggests there must be not only an intelligent creative source but one that is human like in its intelligence - u infer this from the idea that man is like a less perfect example or model of what god is. so, if we have a moral conscience, so must god. if we are intelligent planners and creators, so must god be, etc.

what brings the kalam and the intelligent design aka fine tuning arguments together are the sketchy arguments from morality. like here your homeboy Aquinas goes:

"... Aquinas there begins with the claim that among beings who possess such qualities as “good, true, and noble” there are gradations. Presumably he means that some things that are good are better than other good things; perhaps some noble people are nobler than others who are noble. In effect Aquinas is claiming that when we “grade” things in this way we are, at least implicitly, comparing them to some absolute standard. Aquinas believes this standard cannot be merely “ideal” or “hypothetical,” and thus this gradation is only possible if there is some being which has this quality to a “maximum” extent: “so that there is something which is truest, something best, something noblest and, consequently, something which is uttermost being; for those things that are greatest in truth are greatest in being, as it is written in Metaph. Ii.” Aquinas goes on to affirm that this being which provides the standard is also the cause or explanation of the existence of these qualities, and such a cause must be God."

like the other scholastics he's already suffering from a fever that is fundamentally feuerbachean. damn try to say that three times fast.

man can't help but project his own highest sense of what is virtuous and noble and great about himself onto a logically necessary even greater type above man... but with the same facilities of reason. a Freudian George Micheal father figure of sorts.

now listen u can get away with linking the argument from morality to a general teleological argument from fine tuning, but it's still lacking in anything Christian, or 'monotheistic' in the anthropomorphic sense of god. All we have so far is a moral intuition that is teleoogically developed in a designed universe.

nothing logical gotten from the kalam argument and the intelligent design argument necessarily leads to Christian doctrine. that's a giant inference made by philosophers who never chilled on Freud's couch becuz if they did they'd be like 'yo that is some perverse shit i never really thought about it.'

and this is being generous. really no Christian apologist has ever convinced me that pardoning the outrageous nature and claims made in the bible should be done  becuz 'god chose to reveal himself here and in this way for reasons we can't know', and accept it without further question.

my old argument goes that it would be contradictive of god to chose to reveal himself via the means of written religious text from four thousand years ago when in contemporary society today there are any number of equally magnificent, thorough and persuasive religious texts available that would have to be wrong.

god wouldn't do it like that. he wouldn't base the gravitas of his being on evidence that is so trifling, ambiguous and historically absurd. when u get to heaven he won't be like 'bro i gave u the evidence in the bible' becuz you'd be like 'really dude? guys with flaming swords protecting trees, immaculate conceptions and resurrections, dudes parting seas with the wave of their hand, talking snakes, miracle healers fixing cripples with cataracts just by touchin the blokes, voices from the sky giving instructions to your homeboys Moses and Abraham, bushes spontaneously combusting (that does happen in southern California tho), etc.

then god would have to be like 'yeah bro i wuz just bullshitting' and play off the embarrassment as smoothly as he could.

[Immanuel Can]

A few questions in response - feel free to take them either as rhetorical or genuinely inquisitive, as you choose:

1. Could it be meaningful to define two types (maybe even origins) of evil: "evil by choice" and "evil by nature"?
2. If so, is it possible to be both: that, bit by bit, free decision by free decision, a free being chooses to become evil by nature?
3. Do you agree that evidence shows that psychopaths understand what's right and wrong perfectly well; it's just that they choose to use that understanding not to constrain their behaviour and choices but rather to manipulate others?
4. On a dualist understanding (mine), in which consciousness survives biological death, is it in any case possible that psychopaths are - per question two above - "evil by choice" as well as "evil by nature": that, over (potentially aeons of) time, those souls which incarnate as psychopaths have, bit by bit, free decision by free decision, chosen to become evil by nature?

Harry:

Alright if I offer a thought?

I wonder, if we say that people are "evil by choice," but not "evil by nature," how do we explain that people ever make the choice to be evil? Having no nature conducive to it, should they not find evil, if not instinctively repugnant, at least unappealing to anything in their nature, unechoed by anything they actually want?

From where, then, comes any inclination to choose evil, if not from some harkening in the nature of the chooser?