putting religion in it's proper place

[Greatest I am]

...they all really have no sensible answer for why evil exists at all.

But it doesn't.

Do you mean to say that nothing merits the adjective "evil"? So paedophelia isn't evil. Genocide isn't evil. Racism isn't evil. Rape isn't evil. Happy with that conclusion?

I have no problem of evil, be it from nature or god, but people do not like elegant solutions that do not argue with either nature or god.

It is al about evolution and our seeking the fittest.

Regards
DL

[Greatest I am]

As an adjective I have no issue,

Then evil exists.

"Red" exists, but is an adjective not a noun. "Taller" is a real distinction, but is not a noun. "Ancient" is an adjective, but is not limited to one subject. Just so, "evil" is an adjective that aptly and objectively applies to some things. You can't fault it for not being a noun, because lots of real things aren't nouns.

"red" is an adjective AND a noun.

An adjective is simply a word that describes things. Evil does not exist as a noun, an ACTUAL thing - therefore it does not exist, beyond being a WORD.

What is your definition of EVIL as a noun?

Since evil is a subjective judgement, it has to be defined as anything I do not like.

Some posit that there are some objective moral tenets that always apply but I one know of a couple that might be objective.

Regards
DL

[Greatest I am]

"red" is an adjective AND a noun.

So?

If "evIl" turns out to be a noun too, how does that help your case?

What is your definition of EVIL as a noun?

From Oxford:

noun
noun: evil
profound immorality and wickedness, especially when regarded as a supernatural force.

Here's a sentence with "evil" as a noun: "Try as they might, the few remaining good Democrats could not get the profound evil out of their party."

Just wanted to point out that immorality and wickedness are subjective calls, thus evil is subjective and it is whatever is causing the judgement that is evil.

Regards
DL

[Greatest I am]

"red" is an adjective AND a noun.

So?

If "evIl" turns out to be a noun too, how does that help your case?

What is your definition of EVIL as a noun?

From Oxford:

noun
noun: evil
profound immorality and wickedness, especially when regarded as a supernatural force.

Here's a sentence with "evil" as a noun: "Try as they might, the few remaining good Democrats could not get the profound evil out of their party."

Just wanted to point out that immorality and wickedness are subjective calls, thus evil is subjective and it is whatever is causing the judgement that is evil.

Regards
DL

[Greatest I am]

I C

"Anyone can explain why 'evil' exists in the context of wo\men doing evil things."

What is your theory?

Regards
DL

[Immanuel Can]

I C

"Anyone can explain why 'evil' exists in the context of wo\men doing evil things."

What is your theory?

My theory? I'll tell you right after somebody gives me the Atheist theory of that.

[Greatest I am]

I C

"Anyone can explain why 'evil' exists in the context of wo\men doing evil things."

What is your theory?

My theory? I'll tell you right after somebody gives me the Atheist theory of that.

Deal, even though I am not an atheist.

Eve was correct in eating of the tree of knowledge and rejecting God.

It was God's plan from the beginning to have Adam and Eve eat the forbidden fruit. This can be demonstrated by the fact that the bible says that Jesus "was crucified from the foundations of the Earth," that is to say, God planned to crucify Jesus as atonement for sin before he even created human beings or God damned sin.

1Peter 1:20 0 He was chosen before the creation of the world, but was revealed in these last times for your sake.

This indicates that Jesus had no choice.

If God had not intended humans to sin from the beginning, why did he build into the Creation this "solution" for sin? Why create a solution for a problem you do not anticipate?

God knew that the moment he said "don't eat from that tree," the die was cast. The eating was inevitable. Eve was merely following the plan.

This then begs the question.

What kind of God would plan and execute the murder of his own son when there was absolutely no need to?

Only an insane and immoral God. That’s who.

The cornerstone of Christianity is human sacrifice, thus showing it‘s immorality.

One of Christianity's highest form of immorality is what they have done to women. They have denied them equality and subjugated them to men.

------------------------

Christians are always trying to absolve God of moral culpability in the fall by whipping out their favorite "free will!", or “ it’s all man’s fault”.

That is "God gave us free will and it was our free willed choices that caused our fall. Hence God is not blameworthy."

But this simply avoids God's culpability as the author of Human Nature. Free will is only the ability to choose. It is not an explanation why anyone would want to choose "A" or "B" (bad or good action). An explanation for why Eve would even have the nature of "being vulnerable to being easily swayed by a serpent" and "desiring to eat a forbidden fruit" must lie in the nature God gave Eve in the first place. Hence God is culpable for deliberately making humans with a nature-inclined-to-fall, and "free will" means nothing as a response to this problem.

If all sin by nature, then the sin nature is dominant. If not, we would have at least some who would not sin. That being the case, for God to punish us for following the instincts and natures he put in us would be quite wrong.


Psalm 51:5 "Surely I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me."


Having said the above for the God that I do not believe in, I am a Gnostic Christian naturalist, let me tell you that evil is all human generated. Evil is our responsibility.

Much has been written to explain what I see as a natural part of evolution.

Consider.
First, let us eliminate what some see as evil. Natural disasters. These are unthinking occurrences and are neither good nor evil. There is no intent to do evil even as victims are created.

Evil then is only human to human.
As evolving creatures, all we ever do, and ever can do, is compete or cooperate.
Cooperation we would see as good as there are no victims created. Competition would be seen as evil as it creates a victim. We all are either cooperating, doing good, or competing, doing evil at all times.

Without us doing some of both, we would likely go extinct.

This, to me, explains why there is evil in the world quite well.

Be you a believer in nature, evolution or God, we should all see that what Christians see as something to blame, evil, we should see that what we have, competition, deserves a huge thanks for being available to us.

There is no conflict between nature and God on this issue. This is how things are and should be. We all must do what some will think is evil as we compete and create losers to this competition.

Regards
DL

-----------------------
Evolutionary theology.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXOvYn1O ... _A&index=9

[Immanuel Can]

I C

"Anyone can explain why 'evil' exists in the context of wo\men doing evil things."

What is your theory?

My theory? I'll tell you right after somebody gives me the Atheist theory of that.

Deal, even though I am not an atheist.

Eve was...

Wow. You didn't even get it right for one word. That's pretty remarkably off-point.

Do I even need to point out to you that Atheists don't believe in "Eve"? So "Eve" cannot form any part of their explanation of Evil.

[Advocate]

[quote="Immanuel Can" post_id=481275 time=1606149096 user_id=9431]
[quote="Greatest I am" post_id=481273 time=1606148579 user_id=4303]
[quote="Immanuel Can" post_id=481272 time=1606148138 user_id=9431]

My theory? I'll tell you right after somebody gives me the Atheist theory of that.
[/quote]

Deal, even though I am not an atheist.

Eve was...
[/quote]
Wow. You didn't even get it right for one word. :shock: That's pretty remarkably off-point.

Do I even need to point out to you that Atheists don't believe in "Eve"? So "Eve" cannot form any part of their explanation of Evil.
[/quote]

Bad is unwanted effects. Evil is intentional unwanted effects.

[Immanuel Can]

Bad is unwanted effects. Evil is intentional unwanted effects.

No, that can't be right.

There are many effects which are "unwanted" but not evil. And there are many evil effects that are "wanted"; in fact, who would do evil at all, except for the perception that one is going to get some "effect" one desires?

It's not clear from your definition who is doing the "wanting" either. Is it the perp, or the victims? And the perp is likely to "want" the thing the victims find "unwanted."

We might also wonder what feature of "wanting" something or finding it "unwanted" would justify calling it "good" or "evil." Much of life, both good and bad, comes to us unexpectedly. And we "want" different things at different times...

That just looks very uninformative, at the moment. Want to improve that definition?

[Belinda]

e
'Evil' is a word that is variously used according to the social and inter-subjective context in which it is used.

In the context of this discussion 'Putting religion in its proper place' there is actually a theological Problem of Evil. If you do not know what that is you should inform yourself about the nature of it.

[Scott Mayers]

In the cases of gratuitous mystics like yourself, perhaps.

In comparison to other cases, no, you don't offer anything. In fact, I've seen zero evidence from you so far, despite two requests.

A "Gnostic" by Gnostic is not arguing as a 'mystic' but by the means that the original gnostics meant: THAT what scriptures and other religious records HIDE regarding mysterious entities has a SECULAR interpretation when properly addressed.

Actually, Scott, I'm certain I have better information about the history and literature of the Gnostics than most people are likely to have. In fact, if you wish to debate their ancient writings, I have many of them on hand.

They were not secular. That's a very recent innovation, and one, I think, unlikely to stick. They are a religious sect that actually predates even Christianity, historically. That's why Paul was keen to refute them, using their own language, in Colossians and elsewhere.

One doesn't debate or refute a sect that doesn't exist yet. So we know for certain they predate Paul. There was no church when Gnosticism first appeared, and no "Gnostic Christians" until much later, although that word remains an oxymoron, since, as you see from earlier messages, the Gnostics hate the God of the Bible anyway. Their religosity takes a skeptical form in regard to that, on the one hand, even while they feverishly embrace the most bizarre speculative mysticisms about hierarchies of heavenly realms with the other hand.

Secularism and Gnosticism have only really got hooked up in the last fifty years or so, and increasingly with the new Techngonsticism sponsored by things like information technologies. Prior to that, they were thoroughly religious for thousands of years, and in a tacit sense, still remain very much so, although they've relocated their religious enthusiasm and hopes to things like modern technology.

First off, the meaning of a "gnostic" is descriptive, not specific to any particular religion. Secondly, the formalizing of the Catholic church when setting up their 'official canon' did not approve of sources that permitted free thought. The ideal of officiating 'Christianity' to replace the Empire still wanted people to recognize authority of the new Emperor via the newly titled, "Pope".

The Gnostics were any class of people who believed that knowledge is HIDDEN in the context of written sources that evolved into religions. Note that the source 'Gnostic Christian' sources were removed from acceptable canonical works permitted because they tended to reveal their 'secular' roots and that they themselves evolved from many different past peoples.

Gnosicism was not just Christianity. Those OF the very places talked about in Biblical sources likely had MORE evidence than exists now of the roots of the Judaeo-Christians as evolving from a vast source of different groups of people who met up in the 'metropolitan' atmosphere of the Middle East, being the main trading centers for the then known world.

Regardless, the "mysticism" derived AS from those like the Gnostics were due to the nature of their means of communicating in the style the Greeks made popular of the philosophical movements. The 'socratic' style was relatively effective because it attempted to rely on the listener's starting point while the gnostic would ask the questions hoping to permit one to figure out the truth by careful SELF-analysis. It differed from the rising tactics of the authoritarians who merely DEMANDED people believe using threats should they NOT follow.

You are wrong about their existence as post-Paulian Christianity. The evolving transfer of original Christianity to become authoritarian-led was threatened by the 'freethinking' activity of those demonstrating different sources that made people doubt the authorities power on the 'Church' as it became politicized. At Paul's time too, many were threated by the logic movements through the Greek philosophers works that permitted the average Joe to think and doubt authority. People feared the intellectuals more and more and by the formalizing of the Christianity as a UNITED whole (ie, "catholic"), those sources, like the 'gnostics', were deemed enemies of the Church and the propaganda campaign to make them out to be merely 'mystics' (as though they were carnival tricksters) was manifested by the Church.

By the time of the vote of the authoritarians creating the Catholic Church as the new Empire, was a clever con itself considering it was a prior people's movement (communist-like) and belonged mostly to the non-authoritatian masses before this period. Then a PURGING of documents occurred, including the sacking of intellectual 'universities' and libraries that were independent of the Catholic imperialists. That was most prominent destruction was that of the Alexandrian library, as a perfect example. Note WHERE the Gnostics were dominant: Egypt.

I pointed out many coincidences before about the links of Judaism to the prior Egyptians. The original 'promised land', was Egypt, for instance. Who better then those living IN Egypt at the time could have CLEAR evidence around them of the real sources of religion? And this is why the Gnostics were intentionally targetted. YOU get your own biased information AFTER the purging and after the development of Christianity as a religion. The 'winners' define the history. Why do you not notice how purging of sources itself suffices to raise skepticism? Why was a councel set up to DEFINE which sources SHALL be accepted versus those they purged if not for political reasons of control?

[Scott Mayers]

...

This is the response to your post of the above link regarding "replicability".

I'm not sure what you are not accepting of this idea. It IS a major property of the 'scientific methodology' because it rules out assuming things from mere authority. The idea for science is to accurately explain what they did in experiments with the expectation that future people try it out for themselves. The necessity of 'replication' means that we cannot simply trust what is 'written' in history about events that are not evident to where anyone is in time and space.

The example with respect to a religious interpretation of a story to be literal, such as that Jesus walked on water or that he magically turned one loaf of bread into many, lack replication. This helps demarcate such interpretations as non-science (and so "non-sense"). But even within science today, many may trust the results that lead to supports of some theory based upon experiments asserted. That we CAN use the informative description of how these people did their experiment enables us to retest this to prove to ourselves if this is true OR be able to discover what errors may have been made in the proposed experiments. If replication was trivial, the institute of science would become a 'church' given we would be required to TRUST the authorities as though they were priests. This still occurs due to the politics of institutes as science has grown so big. We rely on some ability to retest what was done so we can CONFIRM or DENY the assumed conclusions drawn from such experiments.

How do you not recognize this logically?

You were also wrong about disincluding "inductive inferences" in logic. I thought I gave good examples of the meaning of science and logic as cooperative PROCESSES of reasoning. The fact that induction is not always able to draw absolute conclusions is already understood by most (though even many I know with education in science have also treated Induction as 'superior' when coupled with a disrespect of formal deductive logic.)

I personally separate 'science' from 'logic' now because I've given up trying to argue with the majority who think that philosophy and science or distinct. So to permit those who continue to lack the difference in processes, I treat 'science' as the 'logic or rational processes of observation' where the term "science" is etymologically associated with the same roots as "sense". Then the field of "theoretical science" to me is the philosophical part that combines formal logic with observation. Most of science is as much political for it being an institute based on democratic ideals. Since truth does not rely on polls to assure, scientific 'support' remains political. I actually propose that religion is a devolution of a prior non-religious set of factors that had intellectual origins such as science.

[Scott Mayers]

Being non-religious, I know that if I was the one left out and all others simply hated me AND I had the 'selfish' nature properly in check, I might appropriately choose to save myself at the expense of all the rest. That is more 'natural' when considering self interest alone.

That's very frank. Thank you, Scott. I might well say the same of myself. If I were secular person, and if I felt it would be to my advantage to be only selectively moral, or perhaps downright immoral on occasion, I would see no logical reason why my "self-interest" would not prevail, and should not prevail.

Now, I might be too chicken to do the thing I was thinking of, or fear the social consequences and not act; but I'd feel no better for that: for "brave men die but once, but cowards die a thousand times," as the old saying goes. I would feel myself a coward for NOT being willing to take the initiative to seize what I wanted, and for being held back by scruples and fears I felt we're not objectively necessary.

This is where I disagree with other atheists who still want to find some justifying 'morality' in nature. To me, morality is just a political expediant we require for practical reasons. They would share with you the belief in something fixed about what is 'good' versus 'bad'. I differ in that I say that there are too many competing issues that prevent ALL people from agreeing. Altruism is often sought by atheists who still believe in universal morals but is in error if it cannot be DEDUCTIVELY proven and requires to be consistent for ALL situations equally. The dilemmas that exist suggest to me that the religious persons like yourself who question this about athiests are valid concerns to me.

This doesn't mean that we cannot give up on trying to seek for optimal laws through the political process as I have been expressing to you as the place where we create moral rules. But I disagree with fellow 'liberals' who think that government should speak on morals that are not limited to secular ideals. That is, I disagree with laws that demand authoritarian control on things that are about one's personal freedoms of expression. Government should not define specific culture laws, for instance. I favor the traditional "liberalism": to be free to behave as one wants so long as they do not infringe on the rights of others to do the same. Todays liberal movement consists of even athiests who favor cultural law making, something that to me is 'religious' in nature.

[Immanuel Can]

First off, the meaning of a "gnostic" is descriptive, not specific to any particular religion.

You are both right and wrong about that, Scott. "Gnostic" can be an adjective, it's true. As such, it can get attached to different ideologies.

But it was also a set of distinct religious orientations that predate even Christianity in age. We have evidence for that, not the least of which is the Bible itself. But there are also pre-Christian Gnostic texts.

Secondly, the formalizing of the Catholic church when setting up their 'official canon' did not approve of sources that permitted free thought.

It was actually the establishment of the Catholics as the official "church" by Constantine that created that. Do you know that history? I do.

The Gnostics were any class of people who believed that knowledge is HIDDEN in the context of written sources that evolved into religions.

Well, no. The Gnostics were their own thing, really. They didn't "evolve" into other religions. However, they did sometimes corrupt other religions, and syncretize with some religions. One could, in fact, argue that the whole Eastern orientation to religion is deeply "gnostic," so long as one keeps that small "g."

Note that the source 'Gnostic Christian' sources were removed from acceptable canonical works permitted because they tended to reveal their 'secular' roots and that they themselves evolved from many different past peoples.

No, no...that's a sort of "Dan Brown" historiography. It's fiction, not truth.

You can tell when you run into those kinds of stories about Gnosticism because they're so neat, so tidy, so one-thing...which has been totally unlike the real history of Gnosticism. It's history is extremely messy and complex, because of the many ways its been involved in other things.

The 'socratic' style...

...was definitely not gnostic. Gnostic teachers do not "give away" their secrets, and they certainly don't draw them out of their students. They hold their gnosis to be a kind of elite "illumination" that is only suitable for the "Englightened ones," to whom you must turn if you want to have any idea about "the Truth," as the Gnostics hold it to be.

You are wrong about their existence as post-Paulian Christianity.

Eh? I said neither of those things. In fact, I pointed out that they are definitely pre-Pauline, and definitely non-Christian. We know that for sure.

The evolving transfer of original Christianity to become authoritarian-led was threatened by the 'freethinking' activity of those demonstrating different sources that made people doubt the authorities power on the 'Church' as it became politicized.

Dan Brown history: not how it happened at all.

To be fair, let me suggest you don't go to pro-Catholic sources, nor to the pro-Gnostic scribblings of Dan Brown or the other fictionalizers. Let me suggest a look at the (secular) historical sources for the movement. You'll find it's very diverse. For example, the Manichees or the Techgnostics have not believed what the Cathars are alleged to have believed, and none of them believed all the same things the pre-Pauline Gnostics seem to have believed. They have quite different mythical cosmologies, ethics, alleged histories, and so on.

There's actually a lot to know there -- but anytime you hear somebody say something like "at one time, all Gnostics believed X," you can be pretty much guaranteed you're dealing with fiction, not history there.

As for the Dan Brown stuff...it's just nonsense. Sorry. There are whole volumes debunking that.