I really have a hard time understanding how religious people cope with themselves with this kind of stuff. You seem to be perfectly ok with god, a dictator, making rules that if you don't obey, you get killed for. How is that an all loving god? Why would you agree with that, why do you think that's a good idea at all? So a guy picking up sticks should be put to death because god said you shouldn't work on the sabbath and you think thats fair because ey, god said you shouldn't? Where is your free will then? Not fucking free will if you get killed for it, is it? Plus what the fuck is that law anyways that you shouldn't work in a specific day and how fucking horrible is it, to work on a specific day that you should die for it. You think if Trump or any other president would make a law like that today, anyone would agree? Honestly you people are fucked in the head.
The reason you feel this way is because you regard this particular commandment as trivial and regard God as myth. Thus your imagination is filled with visions of inquisitions and persecuted innocents. There is no religions group I am aware of even extremist sects that advocate a death penalty for working on the sabbath. Your fear of being forced at gun point to relax one day a week seems far fetched to the point of ridiculousness. You also fail to appreciate that without God you are basically operating under nihilistic assumptions and under nihilism any system of rules a society chooses to implement and enforce is by definition arbitrary and meaningless. You can operate by might makes right, let the judges make the rules, or let a majority vote rule all are equally arbitrary and meaningless under nihilism. What is interesting about the Sabbath is the high degree of importance that is attached to it in the Bible. As other commandment like don't murder are obvious in their necessity one cannot help but wonder why the Sabbath is so critical that it is essentially elevated to near same level of importance as avoiding murder. |
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So you agree that we should be murdering anyone who works on the sabbath, right?
If your goal is to honestly analyze to then you have to consider the context. You cited (Numbers 15:32-36) where a man is put to death for working on the sabbath. From the Biblical timeline we can conclude that this man was likely among the originals who followed Moses out of Egypt. He was thus not only a direct witness to several miracles he heard the voice of God directly at Mt. Sinai. The problem was that this man was deliberately and flagrantly working in the open on the Sabbath day when God had directly manifested himself and commanded that no work be done on the Sabbath. This was a direct challenge to God's authority. Apparently, this was the first public offense against the newly revealed law of God. It was, essentially, being tested. Therefore, the severity of the punishment was to demonstrate to all of Israel the necessity of obeying the Law of God. To further add further context from a Christian tradition we have to consider the following. Matthew 12:11-12 He said to them, “Which one of you who has a sheep, if it falls into a pit on the Sabbath, will not take hold of it and lift it out? Of how much more value is a man than a sheep! So it is lawful to do good on the Sabbath.” Mark 2:27-28 And he said to them, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. So the Son of Man is lord even of the Sabbath.” Combining all of these threads what is the overall message. I think it is a warning. The simple factual based observation that if we fail to strengthen, maintain, and transmit our faith and cultural roots things will go very badly for us.. How much of our time must be dedicated to ensure we succeed in sustaining ourselves and our foundations? Perhaps one seventh especially with regards to the most difficult portion of our duties successfully passing respect for God to the next generation.. |
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I'm just saying that if that's the case then god and going to heaven or hell is unfair. No one will be tested the same way, some people die younger for example while others enjoy 40 years more of time where they might find out that god is real or not. If everything is already ''written'' then people are not evil or good, they are simply slaves of C&E and there would be no point to have a hell or a heaven. It is god who made people either evil or good.
I suppose that would depends on the nature of heaven and hell. Perhaps hell is the process whereby that which is not in alignment with Truth and reality is either rectified or broken down and destroyed. There certainly have been many examples of what we would call 'hell on earth'. These usually occur shortly before the human system that spawns the suffering collapses under its own weight. The vast majority of "unfairness" in the world is the result of human sin, vice, and malice. What little remains after accounting for sin can be usually be attributed to human ignorance and our limited understanding how the mechanics of reality actually function. Medicine for example is the organized attempt to rectify our ignorance in regards to human biology. As we eliminate our ignorance we gain the ability to remove some "unfairness". ''The grounding of reality in the divine and the acknowledgement that truth is divine sets us on a quest to seek the truth'' That seems to me like a very conflicting statement. If people did indeed acknowledge that the truth is divine, they wouldn't be looking for it, the bible says that when you get to heaven you will have all your answers, doesn't it? Also a lot of scientists and smart people weren't religious, even at the time that religion and gods were most prominent. They were searching for the truth without the need for religion or gods or acknowledgement of the ''divine''.
Seeking to understand or at least approximate and be worthy of the divine is the universal goal of the religious. The existence or lack thereof of an afterlife is tangential. A lot of scientists in history were religious and many in more recent times were not religious. However, all of these scientist religious or not operated in a culture where Truth was acknowledge to exist and to be a goal worth seeking. Remove that belief and science starts to break down and become increasingly dysfunctional. |
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07/03/2018 CoinCube  Typo on my part here. I meant 2019 not last month.  |
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Do we have free will, yes or not? You can't say we have free will only in faith to god, that makes absolutely no sense. We can't have free will if there is an entity that knows what's going to happen because how does he know? If everything is C&E as you claim, how can you say there is free will?
Interesting question. I agree that the answer depends on what you mean by free will. According to our current understanding of reality the future already exists. The concept that the future is something that has yet to happen simply an illusion. This video does a nice job of explaining why this is the case using our current understanding of Einstein's theory of relativity. The illusion of time past, present and future all exist togetherhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtjYqCi93E0Once we grasp the concept that the future already exists it becomes clear that we cannot have free will in the ultimate sense. We are are forever bound by the cascade of cause and effect. That chain already extends into the remotest future. What we have is consciousness the perfect illusion of choice our gift from God or the cosmos if you will. If I give my daughter the choice between broccoli or ice cream I know with certainty what she will choose every time. Her choice is known the future set in stone. You could perhaps argue that she has no free will in the matter but that is misleading. She has the illusion of freedom in that she is able to follow the essence of who she is and apply that to the world in this case by eating ice cream. This is the type of free will we have. Our destinies are already written but we arrive at those destinies via a testing. We are able to apply who we are to the reality of the cosmos and the result and consequence is our "choice". |
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You can go to museums and check the fossils for yourself unless you are saying all of them are fabricated.
You can't seem to get it through your head that it isn't the existence of fossils that is the point. The point is the interpretation of where they came from and why they exist. The story about the fossils is the fiction, not the fossils themselves.  We should be very careful not to overstate our understanding of reality. In the persecution of Galileo discussed upthread. The religious institutions in his time were so attached to their authority and interpretation that they lost sight of the fact that they were abandoning and suppressing truth rather then strengthening it. Similarly the scientism of today often falls in love with its own "wisdom" making bizarre and often false claims on reality. When I wandered into the flat earth thread some time ago there was a guy arguing that the earth must be flat because of his interpretation of biblical passages. The earth could indeed be flat I replied but if it was then humans and the entire universe are probably also flat. I then provided him links to holographic theory which interestingly enough cannot currently be disproven and actually could be true.
Study reveals substantial evidence of holographic universe
https://m.phys.org/news/2017-01-reveals-substantial-evidence-holographic-universe.htmlTheoretical physicists and astrophysicists, investigating irregularities in the cosmic microwave background (the 'afterglow' of the Big Bang), have found there is substantial evidence supporting a holographic explanation of the universe—in fact, as much as there is for the traditional explanation of these irregularities using the theory of cosmic inflation.
We humans have such an infantile understanding of the universe that we cannot even prove whether we are flat or not. I find that amusing. |
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I'm still waiting for you to tell me what religion has found out in the last 5000 years.
Modern science arose from a very specific value system. Without that value system it could not have developed. If that value system is abandoned it will not be sustained. Here is a short but eloquent essay on the topic from John C. Wright that I mentioned earlier. Science, Romance and the Scientific Romance of Christendom http://www.scifiwright.com/2012/04/science-romance-and-the-scientific-romance-of-christendom/
The list of inventions created in the Middle Ages would exhaust the patience of an historian. I will mention only in passing a few off the top of my head: the stirrup, the spur, the horse collar, the horse shoe, the wheelbarrow, the chimney, the paper mill, windmills, escapement and clockworks, the pointed arch, the flying buttress, the jib sail, the stern-mounted rudder, the button, the steel crossbow, the quadrant, the almanac, the hour glass, the eyeglass, oil paintings, and most important of all, the university.
While all cultures, even the most primitive have learning, and all civilizations have scholars, only the Christians ever invented the university, an self governing institution solely devoted to the investigation of the trivium and quadrivium. It is not coincidence that to this day the terms used for logical syllogisms and logical fallacies are in Latin; it is no coincidence that the scientific names for everything from beasts to chemicals is in Latin, the language of science.
One of the astonishing things I discovered after my conversion, or at least, it was an astonishment to me, was that nearly everything I knew about history was false. When England and Germany broke away politically, religiously and culturally as much as they could from the rest of the European civilization, they did their level best to rewrite and reinterpret history into a revised form that denigrated all the accomplishments of the universal and ecumenical catholic Christian Church, and offer alternate explanations or alternate origins for her accomplishments.
Under this revised history, or, to be precise, mythology, the Roman Empire fell due to the invasion of virile outer barbarians racially distinct from the Imperial civilization, and everything from free elections to chivalry toward women sprang from the barbaric rather that civilized sources.
Moreover, according to this mythology, the Middle Ages were a time of magic, when men burned witches; whereas the previous Hellenic civilization was a time of enlightened investigation of the natural world, a time of logic and philosophy.
Allow me to quote from my fellow science fiction writer and good friend Mike Flynn:
The philosophers of the “Age of Reason” called the Middle Ages the “Age of Faith,” and claimed that because “God did it!” was the answer to everything, no one searched for natural laws. Some have since imagined a “war” between science and religion, and accused the medievals of suppressing science, forbidding medical autopsies, and burning scientists. Bad times for science and reason!
Or was it? In fact, the Middle Ages were steeped in reason, logic, and natural philosophy. These subjects comprised virtually the entire curriculum of the universities. The first medical autopsies were done in medieval Europe. And no medieval philosopher was ever prosecuted for a conclusion in natural philosophy. In his twelfth-century Dragmaticon, William of Conches wrote, “[They say] ‘We do not know how this is, but we know that God can do it.’ You poor fools! God can make a cow out of a tree, but has He ever done so? Therefore show some reason why a thing is so, or cease to hold that it is so.” Not even the “Age of Reason” could have said it better.
Well, the most famous philosopher of the Hellenic culture, Socrates, was condemned to death for his investigations, while Aristotle fled into exile. The Hellenes were a people soaked in magic and mysticism, to which the clean intellectualism of Christianity was a shocking and refreshing change. Julian the Apostate, eager to reintroduce the Old Religion, in order to foretell the outcome of his war in Persia, had a slave girl disemboweled and her entrails examined by haruspices, official readers of entrails.
The reason why we think of the Greek as logical and philosophical culture is that the monks of the Dark Ages carefully preserved the ancient writings concerning grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy.
The monks did not preserve the mystery religions, the mysticism, no more than did the Romans after the conversion of the Empire preserve the barbaric customs and traditions of their pagan fathers, such as slavery, gladiatorial combat, exposing unwanted infants, the right of the father to kill disobedient sons, temple prostitution, temple sodomy prostitution, and no fault divorce.
The people the Church persecuted were not scientists. She upheld and supported the sciences—it was not the secular power, after all, that funded and founded the universities, that was all done by the Church. The people the Church persecuted were astrologers and alchemists. By clearing the strangling underbrush of magic away, the Church is the only thing that permitted science to exist at all.
The Church crushed astrology to allow astronomy to flourish. The oldest astronomical observatory still in use anywhere in the world, significantly enough, is the Vatican observatory.
...
Science arose in Christendom because it could arise nowhere else.
Allow me by way of introduction to quote again from the indispensable Mike Flynn
To summarize briefly, the Latins believed that:
The universe was rationally ordered because a single rational God had willed it into being,
This order was knowable by autonomous human reason by ‘measuring, numbering, and weighing’ (and reason could be trusted in this regard),
Matter could act directly on matter in “the common course of nature;” and because God was true to his promises, these actions were dependable and repeatable; and
The discovery of such relations was a worthwhile pursuit for adults.
They also embedded this pursuit in their culture through broad-based cultural institutions:
Creating independent, self-governing corporations in the social space between Church and State.
Accepting with enthusiasm the work of pagan philosophers and Muslim commentators and reconciling them with their religious beliefs.
Teaching logic, reason, and natural philosophy systematically across the whole of Europe in self-governing universities, in consequence of which:
Nearly every medieval theologian was first trained in natural philosophy, which created enthusiasm for rather than resistance to the study of nature.
Encouraged freedom of inquiry and a culture of “poking into things” by means of the Questions genre and the disputatio.
The reason it could arise nowhere else is that, while scientific breakthroughs are made by particular geniuses, and which refinements of technique are possible in any civilization, scientific progress itself is a orderly group effort, and must be sustained by the consensus of the general society. You cannot have a generally literate society, as Europe had in the Late Middle Ages, without a university system that enjoyed academic freedom.
Science or natural philosophy cannot be maintained by the consensus of society unless that same consensus accept the metaphysical and theological axioms on which natural science is based.
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All religion when it was conceived was meant to be peaceful and make people aware of their responsibilities towards one another. Sadly people misused it all the time for all kind of reasons, e.g. to obtain control over the population, power, greed etc. Historically speaking the clergy sadly have often condoned this, or even were active in promoting this misuse of religion. Usually religion requires it's followers to adhere to unproven dogma's, which is OK with me since belief is something that can't be proven, and if it gives you strength and guidance, by all means, follow it. What I object to is the insistance of some to convert the so called non believers, sometimes by coercion or by force. Because of this religion has often in the past stood in the way of scientific advancement, because what scientists found didn't fit the dogma. Just think of Galileo Galilei, who was threatened with a ban when he proposed the view that earth was not the centre of the universe. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gal... Yep, that's us humans for you. We lie, we cheat, we oppress, we seek power over others. Point to any human institution be it economic, scientific, or religious and you simply need to scratch the surface to expose the corruption we introduce. Religious institutions are in no way immune. They are composed of flawed individuals too. In the Catholic church during the middle ages the corruption got to the point where it was selling permission to sin in the form of indulgences. The corruption was so severe that believers in the church could no longer overlook the hypocrisy and broke away in open rebellion thus the Protestant Reformation. Galileo certainly was treated very poorly by the Catholic church but he was no saint himself. He refused to marry the mother of his three children making them illegitimate which was a big deal back then. Despite being a wealthy and powerful man, acknowledging illegitimate daughters would have presumably been embarrassing and inconvenient for him. It would also have probably been costly and difficult to find them good husbands. So instead he opted to sent them away at the tender ages of thirteen and twelve respectively to live in a covenant for the rest of their lives. A very harsh fate for a 12 year old when it is imposed not voluntarily chosen. Galileo was human too a good scientist but very human.
Religion discovered truth and science
"Even we knowers of today, we godless anti-metaphysicians, still take our fire, too, from the flame lit by the thousand-year-old faith, the Christian faith which was also Plato's faith, that God is truth; that truth is divine". ~ Friedrich Nietzsche
''Religion discovered truth and science '' Did it really, did god specifically told people in the bible about the scientific method? Yes it did or at least that is my belief. The grounding of reality in the divine and the acknowledgement that truth is divine sets us on a quest to seek the truth. Science is nothing more then a formalized and systemic attempt to seek truth. Its prerequisite is the belief and certainty that there is a truth worth seeking. Friedrich Nietzsche one of the most devastating critics of institutional Christianity that every lived felt this way, as does Jordan Peterson today. Somewhere upthread I posted an eloquent argument by John C. Wright where he makes this case as well. I find the arguments these thinkers put forward persuasive but you will have to make up your own mind. |
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So what are the discoveries? What has religion found out in the last 5000 years?
Religion discovered truth and science " Even we knowers of today, we godless anti-metaphysicians, still take our fire, too, from the flame lit by the thousand-year-old faith, the Christian faith which was also Plato's faith, that God is truth; that truth is divine". ~ Friedrich Nietzsche |
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very quick short list for a small "game list" or how i have to call it..... only when breaking 12288 dollar price..... almost same rules as the list before just a winning date AND .15 BTC for correct date only accounts with minimum 5 Merit and 20 activity (last time to many new pop't up  ) LIST CLOSES tuesday 12 CET allways CET time no execptions just for quick enjoyment normal tommorrow i look @the dates.... firts one posted has the choosen date , some one with the same date have too take another one so look out a bit.... DATES sended in PERSONAL MESSAGE will NOT count let us break back 5-digits March 7th, 2018 |
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Here is a question for you to ponder:
In a world shaped and and ultimately defined at all levels by consciousness when does a Truth that cannot now or ever be falsified become your reality?
''Had you been given that direct proof it would have been at the cost of your freedom to choose and define who you are.'' Absolutely wrong, that's like saying if someone gives me direct proof that the earth is round he is taking my freedom away to choose between a flat earth or a round earth. Also many religious people claim that god himself appeared to them so, wouldn't that take their freedom away by your logic? I'm not sure I understand your last question, english is not my first language (it's my third and I'm still learning) and philosophical talk is hard for me to understand. At the end of the day I can make all sorts of claims that cannot be falsified, right now at least. Like there is life outside our galaxy. I personally think that there is no point in believing any of the claims, specially big ones if they can't be falsified or proven for that matter. The question of life outside our solar system is a trivial one. Finding the answer is simply a matter of overcoming a technical challenge. If nothing else physically inspecting all the stars in our own galaxy either directly or more realistically via proxy would go a long way towards answering the question. Other galaxies would be more difficult but still the problem remains a solvable technical challenge. The fact that the solution is currently beyond us simply highlights our primitiveness. For the ancient Romans launching an object into orbit would have been similarly overwhelming. Two thousand years of later and the problem becomes very manageable. Now we have eccentric billionaires launching their cars into space as advertising gimmicks. Proof does take away our freedom to choose. There is obvious and direct proof that the earth is round and the existence of this proof takes away our freedom to believe otherwise. The only way to believe that the earth is flat is to descend into incoherence and self deception. There is a long thread here at Bitcointalk by a flat earth advocate where such incoherence is on clear display. Freedom is not the only factor when determining good. For example, there are times when it is necessary to deny freedom to preserve life and the potential for later freedom. My infant daughter likes to crawl around everywhere exploring every nook and cranny. Whenever someone opens the front door she makes a beeline for it hoping to get outside. She gets angry and starts crying when you close the door blocking her way out. She does not understand that there is a busy road outside our house and that crawling on it could be fatal. It is a freedom she cannot handle. I tend to view divine revelation in the same way. The fact that it can be necessary is more likely a sign of human infancy and failure rather then triumph. Its an indication that we simply lack the wisdom to discover God on our own. Perhaps it is the divine equivalent of closing the front door in front of a humanity crawling towards the busy road. The rise of Christianity immediately before Israel turned inward and destroyed itself in a futile confrontation with a Roman empire at its peak can be viewed through a similar lens. Matthew 21:33-40 is interesting to read with this in mind. You take the position that there is no point in believing any of the big claims if they cannot be falsified. This is not a fully coherent position. The very act of living life requires us to act out worldviews. At the foundation of these worldviews is one of two things 1) A coherent apriori Truth that cannot be falsified or 2) An incoherent mismatch of poorly thought out, possibly false, possibly self contradictory concepts. Taking the position that you are not going to make a decision on any of the big apriori claims without evidence places you in category #2 by default as you have no choice but to live your life on a day to day basis and that requires making decisions which at their foundation trace back to those same undefined, and perhaps incoherent concepts. Nihilism is coherent or at least beyond my ability to falsify. That is why it is so prevalent so dangerous and the logical result of rejecting the infinite. I am of the opinion that nihilism leads to cessation and death but I cannot prove it only highlight the multiple hints that this is the case as I have done in this thread. |
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Even if we are able to choose what to believe, how can you know if it's the right thing then? ''Our current situation allows us to freely choose God or reject God.'' Our current situation allows us to freely choose between a few hundred Gods, pick one and reject all the others, again I don't see how can I know which one is real.
I was a strong believer when I was younger and certainly even when a lot of evidence was presented against my belief, I still wanted to believe in God, who wouldnt? Eventually I just couldn't believe anymore because of how much evidence I kept finding and how the bible made less and less sense to me, I prayed to god many many times to give me a clue, some proof of his existence, guess what, nothing happened...
Had you been given that direct proof it would have been at the cost of your freedom to choose and define who you are. You would no longer be a free and autonomous agent but a passive one your beliefs compelled your will largely suppressed by something greater then yourself. The situation is more subtle then simply picking one religion and rejecting the rest as false. Accepting for a moment the reality of the infinite it follows logically that all human conceptions of God and consequentially all religions must be "wrong" in that they are at best distorted reflections of underlying Truth. At most they are akin to an explanation of quantum mechanics given to 4 year old and even this example understates the vast chasm between reality and our understanding. The choice then is not choosing which religion is right but choosing which religion represents the least distorted simplification. The purpose of the Bible as I understand it is to be a functional and transformative document. It must "work" for both illiterate tribal societies who lived in conditions we cannot imagine, for modern educated man, and for a future humanity vastly more sophisticated then we are. The broad range of conditions sharply reduces the way knowledge can be conceptualized in the book. There are many aspect of the Bible that appear designed to be easily grasped by a simplistic and primitive man. These can be less persuasive to modern sensibilities. However, there is also a massive depth to both the concept of God and to the Bible itself. Its like a fractal and the deeper the examination the more one realizes how subtle and complex the overall structure is. The Bible series by Jordan Peterson does a nice job of highlighting this complexity. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-wWBGo6a2wHere is a question for you to ponder: In a world shaped and and ultimately defined at all levels by consciousness when does a Truth that cannot now or ever be falsified become your reality? |
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Then I would argue that the act of believing in something is not something I can choose to do. For instance I can't force myself to believe in ghosts and the more videos of ghosts I try to watch the less I believe in them because I see how ridiculous it is. Faith is not a good pathway to the truth, all the other religious people claim to have faith in their own gods and yet they would still get punished if it turns out that the real god is the one described in the bible, what did they do wrong?
Ultimately we all choose what we believe. If you drill down to our core fundamental beliefs you will find a host of "truths" some incoherent some sound. Not everyone is capable of doing this and fewer still actually choose to do it. Ultimately, however, at the foundation of our beliefs is a set of metaphysical Truths. For the simplest among us this truth may be as basic and as incomplete as what gives me pleasure is good and and what causes me pain is bad. For others the situation is more complex. If we ground ourselves in an incoherent or incomplete "truth" the idea when expounded upon is self refuting. Maintaining such a falsehood requires that we ourselves become incoherent and fractured either by avoiding deep thought or lying to ourselves. The simpleton in the example above would have great difficulties with the concept that excessive pleasure can be bad and that suffering for a purpose can have great meaning. Grounding ourselves in Truth that can never be falsified, that is something else entirely. This kind of truth is a foundation. It is something we can build upon. God cannot be falsified but his existence is not something that you will be able to prove or disprove to your satisfaction it is an apriori Truth. What I find so elegant about this ambiguity is that it is a basic necessity to maintain freedom. Without such an ambiguity we would not have true choice when it comes to our beliefs. Our situation would be akin to that of complex robots follow our creators explicit instructions and fulfill our purpose or acknowledge we are defective and rebel against the obvious purpose of our creation. Our current situation allows us to freely choose God or reject God. This is far superior as it ultimately leads to a people who have willingly and freely chosen God. It leads to a people who contemplate God not because God demanded it, but because we have freely chosen it. If you have not had a chance to read it I recommend this essay by Charlton as he articulates these issues with more eloquence then I. See: Metaphysical Attitudes. |
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''I agree that rules should follow logic. However, just because we cannot always follow the logic does not mean that the logic is not there. '' It also doesn't mean that there is, why take it for granted? Even if God is real, why follow him if his rules aren't good? If a true benevolent god exists then you wouldn't need to believe in him in order to be saved, in fact atheists that are good people should be valued more than religious people that are good because religious people are good because they know they will go to heaven and they fear hell, however atheists that are good, are good because they want to.
I question the idea that there are any "good people". We grade ourselves on a curve, but the existence of others who are worse then us does not make us good. If we honestly compare ourselves to a true and perfect good each and every one of us would fall horribly short in comparison. The belief in God gives us an ideal to strive towards. With God at least we can define good and from that definition comes a reason to improve ourselves and a goal to strive towards. It gives us an ideal that can never be achieved only approximated. Humans clearly do not deserve an afterlife of any kind. We have not earned one, nor are we in any way fit to inhabit one in our current state. If an afterlife is on offer it could only be through an act of extreme generosity the ultimate charity case. There are certainly atheist's who behave well by relative human standards and there certainly are religious fanatics and hypocrites who behave very badly. Take away the curve and apply an objective standard of good and evil and I am not at all confident where humanity falls on the scale. You argue "If a true benevolent God exists then you wouldn't need to believe in him in order to be saved" This line of thought fails to consider the possibility that the very act of believing in God is transformative. It is possible that it is the act of belief that allows one to be saved not so much via external intervention but from the changes in our essence our souls if you will that become possible once we define our first principles and ground our existence in them. |
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'Losing My Religion' - Where Young Europeans Aren't Prayinghttps://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-04-02/losing-my-religion-where-young-europeans-arent-praying Since the Czech Republic tops the list I am reminded of this earlier post from Okurkabinladin. If I recall correctly he mentioned in one of this posts that he grew up there. I am that I am. I chose. My return to God from nihilistic positions, that engulfed the West like a cancer took several years... And it has to some degree purely rational basis. I witnessed time and time again "scientists", who tried to understand desert by counting every single stone in it. It was not problem of the methodology, but of their choices, of their resignation on any non-materialistic argument. Without faith in what you do, all your work loses purpose besides feeding you. Degrading you in process from human being created in His image to something more akin to beast with large cranial capacity. Faith forms culture, culture forms civilization. Civilization gives a Man purpose. When the faith dies, so does the culture and when culture is replaced civilization ends. Then men start to die. - Patrick Buchanan Even atheist or rather agnostic greatly benefits from moral compass of religion and faith, as it provides for social stability, hope and drive. Giving entire culture what could be described as "soul". Marxists like Fromm and Freud understood this, as did scientists like Darwin and Newton. I come from the most agnostic, godless place on planet... And I have witnessed how the place, without faith that formed its culture for the past millenia, slowly turned to Animals farm. Youngest being the hardest hit. Every generation in western Europe is now by full third (!) smaller than the previous one despite peace and welfare and health care. As I saw with my compatriots at foreign owned factories, women sell themselves to highest bidder, while men spend all their income on gambling and paying back high interest loans. Sounds almost like Bitcointalk, right? They dont do it for any purpose, but to feed themselves. From industrial heart of Europe, into place full of aging, fearful corporate slaves, that wait for highest bidder. Fukuyama was indeed right, his "Last men" cannot be fought on battlefield by "barbarians". However, these "Last men" that I turned my back to also fail to do most most basic of things, that Darwin demands of victors in evolutionary race. Offspring. Because they have only interests, not beliefs. As did Greco-Romans before their demise. Thats one of the points, why I personally chose to become "born again". I have grown up among secular liberals, saw their fashionable cults masquerading pointless materialism. And saw it for what it is. Nails to the coffin of our culture. I would hate the sight of my children as the "Last men". If secular liberalism has any future, than why its adherents arent even able to replenish their own numbers? I already mentioned, that sir Darwin was anglican, yes? Well, atheists love to turn to him as a reference aswell. Will you? For a materialistic proof, friend.  Stats, you can look at the following as a list of developed, secular countries. Or as a graveyeard of their respective cultures and tribes. It is your choice. Guess, where is my homeland on the list? The very existence of these facts disprove that you can build anything that survives you on reason alone. It is against human nature. And therefore "science" aswell. 
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' No it's more like you threw the man into the water and then you offer him a hand, since god created and put us here first. The arbitrary rules are still arbitrary throughout the whole bible like, ''do not work on the sabbath'' or ''your slave can be free after 7 years'' Why 7 years? Why can't I work on the sabbath? Rules should follow logic, otherwise they are meaningless.
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If the bible was truly inspired by god and god wanted me to believe in him, I wouldn't have these questions, everything would be explained there but it isn't. Why should I get punished for using my intelligence that he gave me?
I agree that rules should follow logic. However, just because we cannot always follow the logic does not mean that the logic is not there. Take the Sabbath for example. Honoring the Sabbath could be necessary to sustain and propagate religious belief from generation to generation. If a solid ideological/religious substructure necessary to sustain society then the sabbath or a Sabbath equivalent could simply not be optional if one wishes to maintain rather then consume ones society. Fail to honor the Sabbath and the young start to forget and reject their religious foundation. Abandon the religious foundation and the entire society starts to destabilize. Is this happening in the west right now? Time will tell. You may be correct when you say we are punished for our intelligence. According to Genesis our remotest ancestors exercised their freedom and made a "choice". They obtained/ate/developed sufficient intelligence to have knowledge of good and evil. With this intelligence humans gained the ability to choose evil voluntarily. Every human inherited this "gift" from them. The "punishment" is the inevitable and logical consequence of the evil humans now freely choose and actively introduce into the world. Why does God allow us to make evil choices? Perhaps he wants us to be free. Freedom necessitates the ability to make choices for better or for worse. |
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The "arbitrary rules" are freely chosen or rejected'' Not freely, you go to hell to get tortured forever if you reject them, that's not freedom. If I point a gun at you and tell you to give me your wallet or I shoot you, sure you have 2 options but you wouldn't consider that freedom, would you?
The possibility of an afterlife is a binary. There either is one or there is not. Let's proceed from the possibility that a heavenly afterlife exists along the general lines outlined in the Bible. What might its characteristics be? 1) It would probably be perfect from a human perspective. 2) It would allow for meaningful action and creativity. If it did not then it would be less a paradise and more a gilded playpen or cage. 3) Due to #1 and #2 above there is not a single human being worthy of or capable of proper existence in such an afterlife. Even the best of us are far from perfect. We are all full of varying amounts of falsehood, incoherence, and evil which if allowed expression via freedom of action would disrupt a perfect heaven. 4) Therefore before any human being could be allowed freedom of action in a perfect afterlife our deficiencies (falsehood, incoherence, and evil) would first need to be expunged. Yet these deficiencies are an intrinsic part of who we are. 5) Rectifying (burning away) of large portions of ourselves even if they are false, incoherent, and evil would likely be a very painful process. It would probably not be an exaggeration to describe such a process as the burning of the spirit in eternal hellfire. 6) Putting one through a torturous process of this sort could be the greatest act of mercy possible because the alternative would be oblivion and cessation. Purification though painful would potentially allow that what could be saved to be saved. There is a strong minority view in Christianity that feels that the suffering of a soul in hell is not eternal. The Seventh-day Adventist believe this. See: Annihilationism
Even the Pope if recent news articles are to be believed is a advocate of Annihilationism though to my knowledge this is a minority view in the Catholic tradition. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/mar/30/vatican-scrambles-to-clarify-popes-denial-that-hell-existsFinally the Jews also believe something like Annihilationism with their views on purgatory. https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/1594422/jewish/Do-Jews-Believe-in-Hell.htmSo yes the "arbitrary rules" are freely chosen or rejected. No one is pointing a gun at us. If anything the situation is probably more akin to a drowning man being offered a helping hand. It is up to us to grasp it or push it away. |
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1. Ehm didn't god already kill everyone with the flood? Not to mention all the plagues and other methods he used to kill people. How come that was totally ok but when it comes to stopping slavery it isn't?
2. Doesn't god remove your freedom when he makes arbitrary rules? ''Do not work on the sabbath'' Isn't that taking my freedom away?
3. Teaching people to beat their slaves with no punishment isn't exactly teaching people to behave better.
Deep topics here Astargath and I may not be the best one to address them. I will share some very general thoughts, however, in the hopes that they will be useful. 1) God and the flood. Let's operate for a moment from the premise that the destruction outlined in the bible is true either in a literal or a metaphorical sense. What could justify causing such suffering? One possibility is that such things are necessary to maintain freedom via preventing or delaying the emergence of successful totalitarianism. Bruce Charlton discussed this in one of his recent blog posts. Successful totalitarianism would be the end of the world - literallyhttp://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/I have previously described the currently well-advanced totalitarian/ transhumanist agenda - in particular that it has a spiritual goal: the goal that as many people as possible will choose self-damnation because they will have come to embrace an inversion of values (the reversal of virtue and sin, beauty and ugliness, truth and lies etc).
If this is ever achieved - if The System gets to a point where it can engineer damnation by rendering free agency ineffectual: then that will be the end of the world.
I mean, that would be a point at which God would bring to an end the 'experiment' of human life on earth. That is what our loving Heavenly Father would surely do - because to have his children born into the certainty of damnation would be an evil that could be avoided by ending the world.
I don't know whether it is, in fact, possible to engineer damnation - perhaps it is not. Perhaps it is just a foolish dream of the forces of evil, and they are wasting their time in trying to achieve it. (I incline to this interpretation myself.)
But if it is possible, then it will not be allowed.
Which implies that at present, since the world continues, it is not possible to engineer damnation - and that we are wholly responsible for our choices.
And that, as a society, we have firmly and decisively chosen evil over Good: specifically, have chosen to assume the incoherent nihilism of materialism over the reality of the divine.
2) The "arbitrary rules" are freely chosen or rejected. Accepting the rules may appear to limit personal freedom but I would challenge this view and push you to look deeply into how you are defining freedom. If you are talking about overall freedom for everybody then a strong argument can be made that the "arbitrary rules" actually maximize freedom and rejecting them makes everyone less free. I made that argument in the linked post below. See: Freedom and God3) Regarding slavery I shared my thoughts immediately up thread. I believe the arguments were sound and do not have much more to add. To understand the relationship of religion and slavery I recommend not focusing on individual sentences of a religious text possibly taken out of context but instead look at the broader picture and attempt to answer the following in a non superficial and honest manner. In a world where slavery was a perfectly acceptable practice for all of human history what was the fundamental agent of change that allowed us to largely abolish it? |
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One way to invest in copper is to put a copper roof on your home. It lasts forever and is functional.
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Where to even start... First of all, are you saying god cannot do something? Are you implying that god himself cannot stop slavery? If he can, why not just do it? Why leave arbitrary rules for slaves?
Second. Slavery is almost gone, in Spain, where I live, we have no slaves so it is definitely not even close to impossible to get rid of slavery and considering we are talking about a god, it seems a very easy task to solve.
Third ''telling those people to treat their slaves right'' Being able to beat your slaves almost to the death with no punishment isn't really teaching people to treat their slaves right, is it?
You are extremely deluded, ugh... You religious nutjobs would go to any extent to defend your bible... Even defending slavery, disgusting human being.
You are virtue signaling here Astargath. BadDecker in no way defended slavery. He simply pointed out the reality of human evil. Slavery is an evil we inflict on ourselves. How do you eliminate an evil that is voluntarily and freely chosen. There are only three ways. 1) You exterminatiate the evil which in this case would involve extermination of the human species. 2) You remove the freedom of the evil parties essentially making them slaves to your will which is morally problematic when the goal is to eliminate slavery. 3) You teach people to behave better. If the students are especially slow the process of change may take a very long time. On Slaveryhttps://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/305549/jewish/Torah-Slavery-and-the-Jews.htmLet's start simple:
Take an agrarian society surrounded by hostile nations. Go in there and forcefully abolish slavery. The result? War, bloodshed, hatred, prejudice, poverty and eventually, a return to slavery until the underlying conditions change. Which is pretty much what happened in the American South when the semi-industrialized North imposed their laws upon the agrarian South. And in Texas when Mexico attempted to abolish slavery among the Anglophones there.
Not a good idea. Better idea: Place humane restrictions upon the institution of indentured servitude. Yes, it's still ugly, but in the meantime, you'll teach people compassion and kindness. Educate. Make workshops. Go white-water rafting together. (Hey, why didn't Abe Lincoln think of white-water rafting?) Eventually, things change and slavery becomes an anachronism for such a society.
Which is pretty much what happened to Jewish society. Note this: At a time when Romans had literally thousands of slaves per citizen, even the wealthiest Jews held very modest numbers of servants. And those servants, the Talmud tells us, were treated better by their masters than foreign kings would treat their own subjects.
Torah teaches us how to run a libertarian society--through education and participation. Elsewhere in the world, emperors and aristocracy knew only how to govern a mass of people through oppression. Look what happened to Rome.
Getting Real Change
So you can see where I'm getting to with the slavery thing. If G d would simply and explicitly declare all the rules, precisely as He wants His world to look and what we need to do about it, the Torah would never become real to us. No matter how much we would do and how good we would be, we would remain aliens to the process.
So, too, with slavery (and there are many other examples): In the beginning, the world starts off as a place where oppressing others is a no-qualms, perfectly acceptable practice. It's not just the practice Torah needs to deal with, it's the attitude. So Torah involves us in arriving at that attitude. To the point that we will say, "Even though the Torah lets us, we don't do things that way."
Which means that we've really learnt something. And now, we can teach it to others. Because those things you're just told, those you cannot teach. You can only teach that which you have discovered on your own.
History bears this out.
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