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What do you think God was up to during the billions of years Dinosaurs and other weird creatures roamed the planet?promethean75 wrote: ↑Tue Jan 03, 2023 12:43 pm Christianity hasn't been around for so long for nuthin, man. it's a mastermind system of thought will all kinds of fail-safes.
I've heard that Christianity originated as the religion of slaves and the down troden. People without hope in their earthly existence, but found it in the promise of Heaven. Tailor made for those whose life sucks.promethean75 wrote: ↑Tue Jan 03, 2023 12:43 pm
not saying Christianity is true; very, very most likely it isn't. alls I'm sayin is all the sufferin' is eventually rendered moot by eternal life in heaven, etc., so u can't be like 'hey my life sucks so fuck god'. Life is supposed to suck... it's a condition, a built in feature, of Christianity.
Gary, I get it...not first hand, of course, but because I have lived close to somebody who suffered in exactly that sort of way. She was hugely bipolar, and on all kinds of meds, and was the victim of a sexual abuser in her childhood...and also one of the kindest, best people I ever knew. But she suffered. And I'm not going to tell you that it's just a matter of "changing your perspective," or anything pat and silly like that.Gary Childress wrote: ↑Tue Jan 03, 2023 9:37 am I'm sorry, IC but after what I've been through with mental illness, sleep apnea, childhood emotional trauma, and other maladies, I don't feel particularly thankful. I don't feel like those challenges have done me any good. Maybe you need to find someone who hasn't suffered as much in life so that you can sit around with them and think happy thoughts about God together. I'm angry and I'm bitter. I feel like I got ripped off compared to many of my peers around me. I'm sorry to be a downer for you. I just wish for relief. Maybe if relief comes I'll be able to agree with you.
"It's a flesh wound." Yes, that's a choice bit.Harbal wrote: ↑Tue Jan 03, 2023 12:20 pmThis reminds me of the Black Knight,..Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Mon Jan 02, 2023 4:36 pm
Put this way, you can see that Evolutionism is not a scientific certainty at all, even though many people would like us to think it was (a remarkable fact, in itself). It is, instead, a protected, pet ideology, which skeptics are taking on for reasons that it is supportive of other ideological positions they wish to take. There are surreptitious motives involved...people want to believe Evolutionism BECAUSE it rationalizes things like Atheism, Progressivism, Marxism, and Egoism, among others, not because the theory itself is some sort of scientific certainty. Like Papist authority, Evolutionism must not be questioned because a network of other beliefs require it to be true, not because its authority is anywere near being beyond legitimate question or scientific necessity.
But since you know that Evolutionism still has "unanswered questions," you can see that phenomenon for yourself. And you rightly say that science is "driven forward" by the raising of skeptical questions and the seeking out of additional evidence. One would have to think, therefore, that the proponents of Evolutionism either a) do not know what you know, that there are holes to be filled still, or b) are keen to gloss over the holes in order to preserve the theory, even if that means that Evolutionary biology will be inhibited from being "driven forward" thereby. But why are they so?
Not at all. Certainly, such a mind is wise to see that there is metaphorical and allegorical material in the Bible...parables, for example. One is wise also to see that there is metaphorical significance in events therein presented as real...the Red Sea crossing, the Crucifixion or the trials of the early Church, for example. But one would be silly not to make meaningful distinctions between, say, that which is presented as poetry (Song of Songs) and that which is presented as historical narrative, or to pretend that there is simply NO historical data to verify, say, the existence of the travels of Paul or Christ as an actual person. So we cannot say that the Bible is ALL allegorical or ALL literal: we have to say something much more intelligent -- that it is both literal and allegorical.If God, the creator, does exist, then, in the light of modern science, any rational mind that is unable to break its emotional attachment to the Bible is forced to conclude that it is an allegorical version of events.
That's Deism. It "wins" small, but "loses" big. What it would mean is that God is no longer interested in us, has no present plans nor future intentions for us, and really has left us orphans in a mechanistic universe that has no ultimate purpose. That's a creed one can adopt, but it has not been a popular one since the 18th Century, perhaps, because of its many and obvious shortcomings. It's not really a "win" for anybody.God put in place all the conditions and laws of physics necessary for the existence of the Universe, and then let it run. That seems like a win, win situation to me. You can keep God without having to resort to sophistry to defend your position.
Well, let me see if I can deliver myself, even a little, of that charge....the necessary dishonestly of your arguments does take the shine of one's admiration.
No doubt.I can't predict what your response to this will be, except to say that it is bound to be unbearably frustrating.
I'm amazed that the Devil hasn't tried to head hunt you, IC.
It seems his ranks are already swollen. But since headhunting is his preoccupation, I'm not at all immune. However, I'm not speaking for him.Again, back to how each of us reacts to this. To what extent do we have the education and the actual on-the-job training as an astrophysicist [among others in the scientific community] to respond to that in a truly sophisticated manner? And then the gap still between what the scientific community thinks it knows about these things and all that there is still to be learned. What does "randomly falling into place" mean given the staggering gaps here? Are the odds really "infinitesimally" small?So could this fine-tuning be due to chance? The problem with this explanation is that the odds of all the constants and quantities’ randomly falling into the incomprehensibly narrow life-permitting range are just so infinitesimal that they cannot be reasonably accepted.
Right. That and only that among the atheists is postulated. The irony here being that just as he needs to imagine the most "out there" set of circumstances to explain the Goldilocks effect, the faithful need to imagine that only their own God set it all into motion. And that one way or another theodicy also fits into it all Divinely.Therefore the proponents of the chance explanation have been forced to postulate the existence of a ‘World Ensemble’ of other universes, preferably infinite in number and randomly ordered, so that life-permitting universes like ours would appear by chance somewhere in the Ensemble.
Look, once we go this far out onto the metaphysical limb, sure, we are allowed to imagine all kinds of fantastic explanations for the existence of existence itself. God and No God. But to suggest that the "insuperable objection" is more applicable to the atheists than the theists?Not only is this hypothesis, to borrow Richard Dawkins’ phrase, “an unparsimonious extravagance,” it faces an insuperable objection. By far, the most probable observable universes in a World Ensemble would be worlds in which a single brain fluctuated into existence out of the vacuum and observed its otherwise empty world. So, if our world were just a random member of the World Ensemble, by all probability we ought to be having observations like that. Since we don’t, that strongly disconfirms the World Ensemble hypothesis. So chance is also not a good explanation.
Admittedly, more power to those here who are actually able to convince themselves that this set of assumptions is all but...axiomatic?Thus...
1. The fine-tuning of the universe is due to either physical necessity, chance, or design.
2. The fine-tuning of the universe is not due to physical necessity or chance.
3. Therefore, the fine-tuning of the universe is due to design.
Thus, the fine-tuning of the universe constitutes evidence for a cosmic Designer.
Prom's not actually dead wrong here. Marx complained loud and long about the same feature of Christianity: that it proposes a consolation in the afterlife for suffering here, on earth. Marx thought that it counselled quietism, passivity and capitulation to oppression, which is why he declared the critique of religion "the first critique" that had to be done. (He meant Christianity especially, of course.)Harbal wrote: ↑Tue Jan 03, 2023 1:00 pmI've heard that Christianity originated as the religion of slaves and the down troden. People without hope in their earthly existence, but found it in the promise of Heaven. Tailor made for those whose life sucks.promethean75 wrote: ↑Tue Jan 03, 2023 12:43 pm
not saying Christianity is true; very, very most likely it isn't. alls I'm sayin is all the sufferin' is eventually rendered moot by eternal life in heaven, etc., so u can't be like 'hey my life sucks so fuck god'. Life is supposed to suck... it's a condition, a built in feature, of Christianity.
There's no need to buy Xianity an entire package.No individual survives death there is no so-called 'life after death'. We can keep the good bits but not the supernatural bits. God is a human concept and we ought not to accept other men's diktat. It's our duty to truth, goodness, and beauty to make our best efforts to find and incarnate those virtues.Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Tue Jan 03, 2023 5:11 pmProm's not actually dead wrong here. Marx complained loud and long about the same feature of Christianity: that it proposes a consolation in the afterlife for suffering here, on earth. Marx thought that it counselled quietism, passivity and capitulation to oppression, which is why he declared the critique of religion "the first critique" that had to be done. (He meant Christianity especially, of course.)Harbal wrote: ↑Tue Jan 03, 2023 1:00 pmI've heard that Christianity originated as the religion of slaves and the down troden. People without hope in their earthly existence, but found it in the promise of Heaven. Tailor made for those whose life sucks.promethean75 wrote: ↑Tue Jan 03, 2023 12:43 pm
not saying Christianity is true; very, very most likely it isn't. alls I'm sayin is all the sufferin' is eventually rendered moot by eternal life in heaven, etc., so u can't be like 'hey my life sucks so fuck god'. Life is supposed to suck... it's a condition, a built in feature, of Christianity.
Nietzsche hated it for a somewhat different reason, which Prom also touches: namely, that he thought it "feminized" what he regarded as "masculine" and "heroic" virtues, such as aggression, violence, selfishness, and so on, which he identified with the "life force," and "the will to power." But he saw the same issue: if heaven is the future, it relativizes life on earth, reconstitutes our view of what oppression, suffering and pain indicate, and change the whole way we are prepared to address the world.
Ironically, it is Jesus Christ Himself who said exactly the same. Think of the Beatitudes from the famous Sermon on the Mount. There, He shows how that believing in the Kingdom of God is bound to tranform one's values, perceptions and actions. Nothing on earth will seem the same, once heaven is taken into account, He says. But unlike Marx and Nietzsche, He did not see this as issuing in any kind of quietism, femininity and weakness, but rather in lofty moral courage and fortitude, and in the endurance of things the ordinary man simply shies away from, for the sake of higher principles than mere mortals can properly grasp.
Who was telling the truth: Marx, Nietzsche, or Jesus Christ? I invite you to judge them on this basis: in the last hundred years or so, since Marx and Nietzsche first wrote, what fruit has fallen from each of the trees they planted?
The case makes itself.
Belinda wrote: ↑Tue Jan 03, 2023 5:26 pmThere's no need to buy Xianity an entire package.No individual survives death there is no so-called 'life after death'. We can keep the good bits but not the supernatural bits. God is a human concept and we ought not to accept other men's diktat. It's our duty to truth, goodness, and beauty to make our best efforts to find and incarnate those virtues.Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Tue Jan 03, 2023 5:11 pmProm's not actually dead wrong here. Marx complained loud and long about the same feature of Christianity: that it proposes a consolation in the afterlife for suffering here, on earth. Marx thought that it counselled quietism, passivity and capitulation to oppression, which is why he declared the critique of religion "the first critique" that had to be done. (He meant Christianity especially, of course.)
Nietzsche hated it for a somewhat different reason, which Prom also touches: namely, that he thought it "feminized" what he regarded as "masculine" and "heroic" virtues, such as aggression, violence, selfishness, and so on, which he identified with the "life force," and "the will to power." But he saw the same issue: if heaven is the future, it relativizes life on earth, reconstitutes our view of what oppression, suffering and pain indicate, and change the whole way we are prepared to address the world.
Ironically, it is Jesus Christ Himself who said exactly the same. Think of the Beatitudes from the famous Sermon on the Mount. There, He shows how that believing in the Kingdom of God is bound to tranform one's values, perceptions and actions. Nothing on earth will seem the same, once heaven is taken into account, He says. But unlike Marx and Nietzsche, He did not see this as issuing in any kind of quietism, femininity and weakness, but rather in lofty moral courage and fortitude, and in the endurance of things the ordinary man simply shies away from, for the sake of higher principles than mere mortals can properly grasp.
Who was telling the truth: Marx, Nietzsche, or Jesus Christ? I invite you to judge them on this basis: in the last hundred years or so, since Marx and Nietzsche first wrote, what fruit has fallen from each of the trees they planted?
The case makes itself.
It's true that it is a tradition of feminine gender stereotyping that acceptance of what she is told to do, say, think, and believe is proper to a woman. Fortunately we can now see that gender stereotyping is a means of social control: the male sex is as free as the female sex, and the female sex is as free as the male sex. During and leading up to 2022-3 Nietzsche has been vindicated and endorsed
That "sounds good," but only until one thinks about it.
Then He would be nothing. No power is rightly given to an entity merely fabricated in the minds of men. Neitzsche would be with you on that.God is a human concept
Au contraire, says Nietzsche: can you not see we have no such "duties"? "Duty" is another of those craven concepts produced by the frail, feminized world of Christian morality. Bah! The Ubermenschen have no such illusions! Take your paltry "duty" and begone!It's our duty to truth, goodness, and beauty to make out best effort to find those virtues.
What a sweet land you live in! Goodness, truth and love are always rewarded...
Exactly!Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Tue Jan 03, 2023 5:37 pmThat "sounds good," but only until one thinks about it.
When one does, one realizes that if there's nothing after life, then there's absolutely no reason at all to deny oneself anything one might be inclined to do or have.