God is love

[Gary Childress]

Muslims in eastern Pakistan went on a rampage Wednesday over allegations that a Christian man had desecrated the Quran, demolishing the man’s house, burning churches and damaging several other homes, police and local Christians said. There were no immediate reports of casualties.

The attacks in Jaranwala, in the district of Faisalabad in Punjab province, erupted after some Muslims living in the area claimed they had seen a local Christian, Raja Amir, and his friend tearing out pages from a Quran, throwing them on the ground and writing insulting remarks on other pages.

Police chief Rizwan Khan said this had angered the local Muslims. A mob gathered and began attacking multiple churches and several Christian homes, burning furniture and other household items. Some members of the Christian community fled their homes to escape the mob.

Police eventually intervened, firing into the air and wielding batons before dispersing the attackers with the help of Muslim clerics and elders. Authorities also said they have started launching raids in an effort to find all the perpetrators. Dozens of rioters were arrested.

Police chief Bilal Mehmood told reporters they were also looking for Amir, who went into hiding to escape the mob, and would detain him to determine whether he had desecrated the Quran.

Videos and photos posted on social media show an angry mob descending upon a church, throwing pieces of bricks and burning it. In another video, two other churches are attacked, their windows broken as attackers throw furniture out and set it on fire.

Several policemen are seen in the videos watching the situation without intervening to stop the vandalism.

In yet another video, a man is seen climbing to the roof of the church and removing the steel cross after repeatedly hitting it with a hammer as the crowd down on the road cheered him on.

Khalid Mukhtar, a local priest, said most of the Christians living in the area had fled to safer places. “Even my house was burned,” he added.

Mukhtar said there are 17 churches in Jaranwala and he believes most of them were attacked. The authorities did not immediately confirm that figure.

Khan said additional police forces were later deployed in Jaranwala and an investigation was underway. He said all involved in the attack would be prosecuted. “Our first priority was to save the lives of all of the Christians,” he said.

Later in the evening, troops started arriving in Jaranwala to help the police. Angry Muslims were urged to go back to their homes, allegedly with promises that the man who desecrated the Quran would soon be arrested.

A delegation of Muslim clerics also arrived in Jaranwala from the city of Lahore to express solidarity with the Christians.

Blasphemy accusations are common in Pakistan. Under the country’s blasphemy laws, anyone found guilty of insulting Islam or Islamic religious figures can be sentenced to death. While authorities have yet to carry out a death sentence for blasphemy, often just the accusation can cause riots and incite mobs to violence, lynching and killings.

In one of the worst attacks on Christians, a mob in 2009 burned an estimated 60 homes and killed six Christians in the district of Gojra in Punjab, after accusing them of insulting Islam.

Wednesday’s attack drew nationwide condemnation from top leaders and major political parties. Caretaker Prime Minister Anwaar-ul-Haq Kakar said he was “gutted” by the images coming out of Faisalabad.

“Stern action would be taken against those who violate law and target minorities. All law enforcement has been asked to apprehend culprits & bring them to justice,” he wrote on the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter.



A senior Christian leader, Bishop Azad Marshall, appealed for help on social media and said he was “deeply pained and distressed.”

“We cry out for justice and action from law enforcement and those who dispense justice and the safety of all citizens to intervene immediately and assure us that our lives are valuable in our own homeland that has just celebrated independence and freedom,” he posted on X.

Former Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif also condemned the rampage. “There is no place for violence in any religion.”

In the southern port city of Karachi, the capital of southern Sindh province, dozens of Christians rallied to denounce the attacks in Jaranwala.

Domestic and international human rights groups say blasphemy allegations have often been used to intimidate religious minorities in Pakistan and settle personal scores.

In December 2021, a Muslim mob descended on a sports equipment factory in Pakistan’s Sialkot district, killing a Sri Lankan man and burning his body publicly over allegations of blasphemy.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/paki ... rcna100225

People being murdered over religion is nothing surprising. Am I supposed to say that at least I don't live in Pakistan and just shut up and sit quietly?

[Immanuel Can]

One can think of cases where the emotion does not fit the situation. That's when the concept of "reasonable" comes into it.

Right. And does it make any rational sense to whine about things that were inevitable anyway, random happenstances, things that follow from mere material facts, and things that are for ever and always, and cannot be changed?

Can you complain about gravity? Will you object to entropy? Who can make sense of somebody who shouts at stars and cries at comets? These things are what they are, and they cannot be changed, so far as secularism knows. So what sense can it make of a man who is so silly as to complain about these indifferent inevitabilities...one cannot ask them to care; they're not even able to care.

If your child falls down a well and drowns, you are not sad because gravity. You are sad because you have lost your child. You are sad because of empathy for the child which has lost its life. You are sad because of the pain and suffering the child felt.

Sure. But this feeling is also inexplicable, in secular terms. For secularism would instruct you that the child's death was preset by material forces, or merely the product of random chances amid which every person lives there life. It would instruct you that there was no 'other way' things could have been than that your child would die at that point, in that way.

So why are you sad? The universe gave, and the universe takes away. There is no "loss," because nothing else could possibly have happened than what did. Why would the universe have so arranged things that you would have a "feeling of bad," if we may call it that, as a result of one kind of happening rather than another? A more useful emotion would be a kind of resigned indifference...why would you continue to suffer emotionally when the inevitable wheel of fate turned and the child disappeared? You are merely one lump of matter. The child was merely another. Both were present only by accident, and both disappear the same way. What, then, is the cause of "feelings" about it?

But do you see how unnatural and weird, and disturbingly clinical such a description is? It's nothing like what humans do. Human beings grieve as if something else had been possible (like the child remaining), and as if something else was deserved and better than what happened. Secularism might counsel us that no such desirable conditions ever exist...but we cannot bring ourselves to believe that.

We cannot shake our feeling that this situation was "wrong," was a "loss," was "out of order." And so we become sad and dismayed -- and rightly so, for this world was not meant to be a place of mere cold intevitabilities, as secular supposition would require of us, but rather of goodness, happiness and opportunity. What the world is, is not what it ought to be. And we sense that. And that is not just the root of our feelings of sadness, but also of our hope that this world will not forever remain what secularism insists we must believe it is.

[Iwannaplato]

Sure. But this feeling is also inexplicable, in secular terms. For secularism would instruct you that the child's death was preset by material forces, or merely the product of random chances amid which every person lives there life.

This is not correct. There are secular people including philosophers that believe in free will. In philosophy:
Epicurus, Lucretius, Thomas Reid, C.A. Campbell, Roderick Chisholm, John Thorp, Richard Taylor, Robert Nozick, Peter van Inwagen, Timothy O'Connor, Helen Steward, Mark Balaguer.

and then out in the world many, many more.

It would instruct you that there was no 'other way' things could have been than that your child would die at that point, in that way.

So why are you sad?

And this is ridiculous. Emotions are reactions to what happens. They would be determined just like anything else. The secular person or the Calvinist (and other religious determinists) were be compelled to have whatever emotional reactions they have, regardless of the logic thereof.

why would you continue to suffer emotionally when the inevitable wheel of fate turned and the child disappeared? You are merely one lump of matter. The child was merely another.

They might very well be sad about that. For some reason you think that people who are utterly determined should have what you consider useful emotional responses.

Even animals grieve, some to the point of lethargic depression so deep they stop eating and die. And unless you're the rare Christian who believes animals have free will, why would sadness be in their range of emotions at all or even anger for that matter. Just kill efficiently. Walk away from the dead mate or family member.

But that's a tangent.

You have this hallucination that secular is a set of specific philosophical positions. A secular person is someone who is not religious, does not adhere to religious dogma, or does not allow faith-based beliefs to dictate their life, decisions, or moral framework. They focus on naturalistic, worldly, or human-centered concerns rather than supernatural or spiritual ones. They may be atheist, agnostic, or simply non-affiliated.

Also you can be secular, non-theist and not a materialist/physicalist. here are some well known philosophers in that category.
Thomas Nagel, David Chalmers, Philip Goff, Galen Strawson, Henri Bergson, Edmund Husserl, Raymond Tallis, Donald Hoffman, Evan Thompson, Keith Frankish, Panayot Butchvarov, John Searle, Colin McGinn, E.J. Lowe, William Seager.

You position also seems to imply that Christians, say, who believe in free will and of course have free will could choose not to feel sad if their child died or upset if their wife got raped.

You keep on repeating your weird lumping in post after post even when this is pointed out to you.

[Immanuel Can]

There are secular people including philosophers that believe in free will.

Then they will have to explain on what basis they do so. It cannot be anything metaphysical, or they have departed the realm of the purely secular. So what would it be?

Emotions are reactions to what happens

Yes, but you're missing the point: why do we have emotional "reactions" to things that were inevitable? If we really believed in their inevitability, then the rational reaction is resignation, acceptance, stoicism of some kind.

This is, in fact, the very point Claudius makes to Hamlet, in that famous play, about the death of his father: "why should we take it to heart?"

The secular person or the Calvinist (and other religious determinists) were be compelled to have whatever emotional reactions they have, regardless of the logic thereof.

Calvinists, like all Determinists, are believers in a falsehood. So it's unsurprising when reality confounds their professed beliefs.

For some reason you think that people who are utterly determined should have what you consider useful emotional responses.

No, I'm asking the opposite question: why would Determinists, who profess to be totally convinced of the inevitability of things-as-they-are, get all misty over some event that happened, as if it were not inevitable?

That self-contradiction on their part requires an explanation, does it not?

You have this hallucination that secular is a set of specific philosophical positions.

No, it's a whole category of philosophical positions that all deny the existence of any metaphysics, and thus require some sort of Deterministic ontology to render them coherent.

If it accepts that there is any kind of God or gods in the universe, then the belief is not, by definition, secular. It's religious, in some form.

A secular person is someone who is not religious, does not adhere to religious dogma, or does not allow faith-based beliefs to dictate their life, decisions, or moral framework. They focus on naturalistic, worldly, or human-centered concerns rather than supernatural or spiritual ones. They may be atheist, agnostic, or simply non-affiliated.

Not "non-affiliated." That one won't work, because if they believe in ANY kind of supernatural reality, then they've departed the secular. But they could be Atheistic or agnostic.

It's interesting some of the philosophers you tried to invoke. Take Thomas Nagel, for example: before you decide he's secular, you'd better read his little book, "Mind and Cosmos." You'll realize something you don't know right now about his position.

[Iwannaplato]

Then they will have to explain on what basis they do so. It cannot be anything metaphysical, or they have departed the realm of the purely secular. So what would it be?

Go ahead and look them up. The ones I listed do not have what you are calling metaphysical explanations. Some view it as there is not constraint. They do give the basis for their positions. You're the one making universal claims for a huge complicate category.

Emotions are reactions to what happens

Yes, but you're missing the point: why do we have emotional "reactions" to things that were inevitable? If we really believed in their inevitability, then the rational reaction is resignation, acceptance, stoicism of some kind.

Emotions are not rational, they are reactions to things that happen.

This is, in fact, the very point Claudius makes to Hamlet, in that famous play, about the death of his father: "why should we take it to heart?"

You're quoting as argument or evidence a character in a play who murdered the man Hamlet is mourning. Just think about how much sense that makes as an argument or evidence. What might his motive be? Hm.

The secular person or the Calvinist (and other religious determinists) were be compelled to have whatever emotional reactions they have, regardless of the logic thereof.

Calvinists, like all Determinists, are believers in a falsehood. So it's unsurprising when reality confounds their professed beliefs.

That wasn't the point. You are asking why a determinist would have that emotions. Because, to a determinist, they must have that reaction. Some, a rare few, made differently, wouldn't have it. Everything is determined to a determinist. Not just the events, but the emotions also.

For some reason you think that people who are utterly determined should have what you consider useful emotional responses.

No, I'm asking the opposite question: why would Determinists, who profess to be totally convinced of the inevitability of things-as-they-are, get all misty over some event that happened, as if it were not inevitable?

Because they are compelled to, they can and do say. That is their mammalian reaction. Also you seem to have the strange idea that because something is inevitable one is instinctively accepting. That's really odd.

That self-contradiction on their part requires an explanation, does it not?

Nope, they could just point to mammals that grieve, get lethargic at the death of their babies or mates. I guess we are more like those animals then the ones that don't they could say.

You have this hallucination that secular is a set of specific philosophical positions.

No, it's a whole category of philosophical positions that all deny the existence of any metaphysics, and thus require some sort of Deterministic ontology to render them coherent.

But they don't have to be determinists. The word does not entail that. And physicalism is a metaphysical position as is determinism. You're making a common error that metaphysics is supernatural. Lay people use it that way, but in philosophy any position on the nature of reality falls into that category.

There's no default metaphysics position. Though certainly people who come here with religious and with non-religious metaphysical positions are also confused about this.

A secular person is someone who is not religious, does not adhere to religious dogma, or does not allow faith-based beliefs to dictate their life, decisions, or moral framework. They focus on naturalistic, worldly, or human-centered concerns rather than supernatural or spiritual ones. They may be atheist, agnostic, or simply non-affiliated.

Not "non-affiliated."

That one won't work, because if they believe in ANY kind of supernatural reality, then they've departed the secular. But they could be Atheistic or agnostic.

And those who are, for example, believers in free will but are secular do not think free will is supernatural.

It's interesting some of the philosophers you tried to invoke. Take Thomas Nagel, for example: before you decide he's secular, you'd better read his little book, "Mind and Cosmos." You'll realize something you don't know right now about his position.

I love Nagel, though I wish he was a theist. That book is utterly secular. He defines his position as non-materialist naturalism. NATURALISM. He specifically does not believe in the category supernatural.

When certain native people in Africa said that elephants communicated over long distances and some of them could hear the sound, this was dismissed by western visitors and scientists are a supernatural claims with not basis. But it wasn't supernatural it was natural which they later discovered. You can have a naturalism that includes features that some or even most scientists would think is supernatural and therefore false, while not claiming anything supernatural.

Unless you think scientists should be the ones to determine such things. Philosophers have no need to assume that scientists get to categorize things philosophically. Or do you believe elephants have supernatural powers.

You are making the assumption that determinism is the default and physicalism is the default. IOW those don't really need justification, but if you believe in free will or dualism or a different monism, then you have to demonstrate something. Which is extremely ironic given you don't hold those positions. IOW you see your own positions as needing greater explanation, more justification. You're also making scientists the experts. If one of those philosophers listed has an ontology that scientists might disagree with, then it's a supernatural ontology. LOL.

But you will never let this go. You've repeated it too many times. But you really have no idea what you are talking about. Certainly Christians and other religious people get treated this way. They get told what they believe. They get all sorts of confused categories categories aimed at them. They all get batched together. I can feel a certain sympathy given my own experiences on the receiving end of such things. So, if the goal is to annoy and go tit for tat, you can certainly go ahead and make the same kinds of category errors, conflations and non-philosophical assumptions and throw them at non-theists. Of course, that more OT, then NT.

[phyllo]

So why are you sad? The universe gave, and the universe takes away. There is no "loss," because nothing else could possibly have happened than what did. Why would the universe have so arranged things that you would have a "feeling of bad," if we may call it that, as a result of one kind of happening rather than another? A more useful emotion would be a kind of resigned indifference...why would you continue to suffer emotionally when the inevitable wheel of fate turned and the child disappeared? You are merely one lump of matter. The child was merely another. Both were present only by accident, and both disappear the same way. What, then, is the cause of "feelings" about it?

So why are theists sad?

The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.

Furthermore, why not rejoice in the suffering of the child, since it is the Lord's will that he/she suffer?

But do you see how unnatural and weird, and disturbingly clinical such a description is? It's nothing like what humans do. Human beings grieve as if something else had been possible (like the child remaining), and as if something else was deserved and better than what happened. Secularism might counsel us that no such desirable conditions ever exist...but we cannot bring ourselves to believe that.

You construct an unnatural and weird narrative about the sadness of secular people and then you call it unnatural and weird.

No kidding. Secular people don't generally think and behave that way. It's a figment of your imagination.

You're constantly inventing what you believe secular people must think and do. And then you argue that they are wrong.

[Immanuel Can]

Then they will have to explain on what basis they do so. It cannot be anything metaphysical, or they have departed the realm of the purely secular. So what would it be?

Go ahead and look them up.

In most cases, I already know their patter. But I'm not sure you do. Do you have any idea what they offer as a grounding for morality? If you did, you'd surely have used that as a response to my question, so I'm thinking you got a list off AI, but don't really know what it was all about.

Prove me wrong, I guess.

Emotions are reactions to what happens

Yes, but you're missing the point: why do we have emotional "reactions" to things that were inevitable? If we really believed in their inevitability, then the rational reaction is resignation, acceptance, stoicism of some kind.

Emotions are not rational, they are reactions to things that happen.

Well, partly.

Well-ordered emotions are proportional to some cause. A person who just has fits of emotion unrelated to reality is not a sane person, obviously. But if events are all inevitabilities, why should ANY emotion be required at all? And why would the uncaring, unemotional universe program into people the ability to have emotions about things that are supposed, by secularism, to be as inevitable and impersonal as a rock falling off a cliff?

Could it be that nobody actually does believe -- and also that nobody feels -- that events are all inevitabilities? I think so.

This is, in fact, the very point Claudius makes to Hamlet, in that famous play, about the death of his father: "why should we take it to heart?"

You're quoting as argument or evidence a character in a play who murdered the man Hamlet is mourning. Just think about how much sense that makes as an argument or evidence. What might his motive be? Hm.

That's correct, of course: but Claudius couldn't make the argument at all, unless he could invoke some rational basis for it. And his basis, if you read the text, is that these things always happen. Since they're just happenings, Claudius says, and everybody experiences them, there's no cause for so much emotion as Hamlet is exhibiting, and he should "get over it."

In other words, Claudius is making the secular argument. And if that argument rings false, what shall we say of the secular argument itself?

The secular person or the Calvinist (and other religious determinists) were be compelled to have whatever emotional reactions they have, regardless of the logic thereof.

Calvinists, like all Determinists, are believers in a falsehood. So it's unsurprising when reality confounds their professed beliefs.

That wasn't the point. You are asking why a determinist would have that emotions. Because, to a determinist, they must have that reaction. Some, a rare few, made differently, wouldn't have it. Everything is determined to a determinist. Not just the events, but the emotions also.

All you're saying is the same thing: Determinists don't live like they believe Determinism is really true. And I agree: they don't.

That self-contradiction on their part requires an explanation, does it not?

Nope, they could just point to mammals that grieve, get lethargic at the death of their babies or mates.

You're making my case stronger: if not only humans but even animals experience such things, then we have all the more need for explanation of how the indiffferent material process of the universe should ever have imposed such things on all of us.

You have this hallucination that secular is a set of specific philosophical positions.

No, it's a whole category of philosophical positions that all deny the existence of any metaphysics, and thus require some sort of Deterministic ontology to render them coherent.

But they don't have to be determinists. The word does not entail that.

The concept does. It requires a basis of some kind, in something; and that basis cannot be selected from metaphysics, or one is no longer secular.

You're making a common error that metaphysics is supernatural.

Give me an example of where it is not.

And those who are, for example, believers in free will but are secular do not think free will is supernatural.

Then they owe us some explanation of how they got "free" of the physical or natural chain of causes to which they attribute all human action. They can't say God empowered them to choose; so are they then denying the efficacy of causality itself?

It's interesting some of the philosophers you tried to invoke. Take Thomas Nagel, for example: before you decide he's secular, you'd better read his little book, "Mind and Cosmos." You'll realize something you don't know right now about his position.

I love Nagel, though I wish he was a theist. That book is utterly secular.

Not really. What you'll find is that Nagel is plagued by the metaphysical. The title itself gives it away. And while he insists he's still an Atheist, his whole hope is fixed on some non-evolutionary explanation that we do not currently have suddenly appearing to fill the serious gap he realizes exists in what he calls, "the materialist neo-darwinian conception of nature" (his words).

And not-natural means...supernatural. In other words, he's unwilling to go there, but he's dangled himself over the precipice of giving up on the conventional explanations for metaphysical properties.

You are making the assumption that determinism is the default and physicalism is the default.

No. I'm pointing out that both are rubbish, actually.

IOW those don't really need justification,

Sure they do. Otherwise, they're merely arbitrary. They then become an expression of Munchausen's Trilemma.

But you will never let this go.

Well, I don't believe your summary, and since it's never been what I've said, I've never held it, so don't have to "let it go."

But secularism can still not provide so much as one moral precept all secularists must accept. And until it does, the proof is 100% against the possibility of secular moralizing.

[Greatest I am]

Is God not the creator of both love and hate?

The Bible is clear that God creates both good and evil for his pleasure.

Are you suggesting that Satan creates evil?

Women are the root of all evil, but given the worth, quite forgivable.

Hate is quite important to us and has a place.

I use mine as often as I can, in the nicest way I can. Love hurts when it has it's hate side up. I love moral thinking a lot, and am hard on poor ideas and morals.

Yet none of you losers have anything to say about this excrement. What a surprise.

Not sure who you refer to, but I have been badmouthing the genocidal p**** forever.