No Children!http://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/- Emmanuel Macron, the newly elected French President, has no children.
- German Chancellor Angela Merkel has no children.
- Austria’s Chancellor Sebastian Kurz has no children.
- British Prime Minister Theresa May has no children.
- Italian Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni has no children.
- Holland’s Mark Rutte - no children
- Sweden’s Stefan Löfven - no children
- Luxembourg’s Xavier Bettel - no children
- Scotland’s Nicola Sturgeon - no children
- Jean-Claude Juncker, President of the European Commission - no children.
What to make of this pattern? It is significant, for sure - not a coincidence. ... And this is just the tip of an iceberg of chosen sub-fertility - implicitly willed extinction - which affects almost the entirety of Western populations (apart from a few traditionally religious subgroups). It is also just the tip of an iceberg of anti-real-marriage, anti-family, anti-biology - pro-extra-marital promiscuity, pro-sexual revolution, pro-hedonism... It is decadence, it is nihilism, it is despair. It is positive, deliberate, strategic evil. We knew all this already - and we know the cause; but demographics provides the most objective data that illustrates it.
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Vatican Cardinal Says the West Is ‘Committing Suicide’ by Forgetting Its Christian Rootshttp://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2018/03/02/vatican-cardinal-says-the-west-is-committing-suicide-by-forgetting-its-christian-roots/ The prominent African Cardinal Robert Sarah said in a recent address in Belgium that by forgetting its Christian roots the West is committing suicide, “because a tree without roots is condemned to death.”
In his meeting in Brussels in early February, the outspoken prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Sacraments had strong words both for the leaders of European nations and for certain cardinals and bishops who distort the Catholic faith.
“Not only is the West losing its soul, but it is committing suicide, because a tree without roots is condemned to death,” Sarah said. “I think the West cannot renounce its roots, which have created its culture, its values.”
The signs of this suicide are everywhere, the Guinean cardinal declared, and all boil down to a loss of the sense of the dignity of the person as well as a loss of respect for God and his laws.
“There are chilling things happening in the West,” he said. “I think that a parliament that authorizes the death of an innocent, defenseless child commits a serious act of violence against the human person.”
“When abortion is imposed, especially in developing countries, saying that if they do not accept it, they will receive any more aid, it is violence,” he continued.
This is all to be expected, he said, since the West has also lost its sense of the divine.
“When one has abandoned God, one abandons man, one no longer has a clear vision of man,” he said. “There is a great anthropological crisis in the West today. And this leads to treating people as objects.”
The cardinal said that some Church leaders are also at fault in this suicide of the West, accusing certain high-ranking prelates from “opulent nations” of perverting Christian doctrine regarding life and marriage.
“High-ranking prelates, especially from opulent nations, are working to bring about changes in Christian morality concerning absolute respect for life from conception to natural death, the problem of the divorced and civilly remarried, and other problematic situations,” he said.
“The great drift became evident when some prelates or Catholic intellectuals began to give ‘a green light for abortion’ or ‘a green light for euthanasia’ I their speeches and writings. Now, from the moment that Catholics abandon the teaching of Jesus and the Magisterium of the Church, they contribute to the destruction of the natural institution of marriage as well as the family and it is now the entire human family that finds itself fractured by this new betrayal on the part of priests,” he said.
Cardinal Sarah has been called the “standard bearer for Catholic orthodoxy” and was the world’s youngest bishop in 1979, when Pope John Paul II summoned him for episcopal ordination at only 34 years of age.
He is now one of the most important cardinals in the Church, and his name often comes up on the short list of “papabili”—or papal candidates to eventually succeed Pope Francis.
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My grandma is an adventist and she couldn't eat pig, rabbit most sea food and a few more. In all honesty, those are quite stupid rules, you either meat or you don't, those seemingly random chosen animals make no sense to me. That's why I can't take the bible seriously. Not even believers of the bible come to an agreement, you have christians, adventists, orthodox and many more.
There are two issues here that are worth exploring. 1) Can costly ritual create purpose in and of itself? Ritual requires sacrifice of material, time, or behavioral modification. Participating in ritual does several things. First it reinforces to the participant that he or she is serious about his belief structure. One paying only lip service to a concept would not undertake a hardship in its service especially if he did not fully understand the reason for the hardship. Aesop's Fables were colllected and written 620 and 564 BC. One of the most famous is the story of the farmer and the viper. We know the story is at least 2500 years old and as an oral story it could be far older. The story concerns a farmer who finds a viper freezing in the snow. Taking pity on it, he picks it up and places it within his coat. The viper, revived by the warmth, bites his rescuer. The farmer dies reproaching himself "for pitying a scoundrel,". One of the transformative elements of religion is the fostering of reciprocal altruism among strangers. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. This principle if widely adhered to is fundamentally transformative. The world, however, is full of vipers and behaving altruistically with a viper is dangerous at best. It is not advisable for example to take a homeless person into your home to help him "get back in his feet" until you learn quite a bit more about him and the reasons for his homelessness. So how do we determine who is a viper and who is not. If we are serious about the principle of mutual altruistic reciprocity we have to make this determination. One of the most powerful ways is to determine if the individual in question has committed themselves to a set of known core beliefs. It is very easy for a sociopath to lie. It is incredibly difficult for a sociopath to participate in costly rituals expressing allegiance to concepts they distain especially over prolonged periods of time. Participation in voluntary ritual thus serves not only to reinforce internal commitment but also as external signaling informing others who you are. It's not a perfect source of information but actions always speak louder then words. 2) Is it possible that the Bible could be true but our understanding is simply lacking or our interpretation overly simplified? This at least warrants consideration. Humans have a general tendency towards arrogance unwarranted extrapolation and overstating both our knowledge of the world and the reliability of that knowledge. In recent years there has been a growing body of data indicating that eating pork might be actually unhealthy and we are better off with alternative sources of meat. I am unaware of similar data on shellfish or if it has been studied. See: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1373864.msg17257930#msg17257930For these reasons I don't think we can conclude that these rules and rituals are stupid. At most we can say that we do not understand their purpose and question their value. |
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Morality is tricky. There was a time where I thought everything was pretty meaningless, a bit of a nihilistic view, and that nothing really was bad or good, everything was simply pointless. However I still couldn't force myself to do what I considered bad things even though I knew it didn't really matter. There is definitely some genetic factor at work, I get angry very quickly for example, I can control it but I still can't avoid getting angry in the first place. I'm personally struggling right now to decide whether eating animals is good or bad, I'm thinking it is morally wrong but I'm still debating it with myself.
Vegetarianism and the morality of eating meat is a difficult one. There is not a single tribal society that is known to be vegetarian so it is reasonable to infer from this that eating meat provided a historical competitive advantage. Thus eating meat likely kept our ancient ancestors alive and without meat they would have perished. It is problematic to classify something as immoral when it was necessary to ensure our current existence. There are also some poorly understood downsides to a vegan diet. See: Vegan diet increases the risk of birth defects https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/health/news/4902648/Vegan-diet-increases-the-risk-of-birth-defects-scientists-warn.htmlVegetarian diet linked to lower sperm count http://www.adventistreview.org/church-news/vegetarian-diet-linked-to-lower-sperm-countOn the other hand there appear to be significant health benefits to giving up meat later in life. Several studies suggest that vegetarians live many years longer then their meat eating counterparts. Given this juxtaposition my personal opinion is that the best course is to eat meat until one is finished having children and then work towards minimizing it as one becomes older. However, I claim no special insight on this issue. Below is the Jewish view on eating meat. Judaism places stress on the proper treatment of animals. Unnecessary cruelty is forbidden. http://www.jewfaq.org/m/animals.htmThe Seven-day Adventist a Christian denomination known for their health and longevity strongly favor vegetarianism but do not require it. The Seven-day Adventist who choose to eat meat are supposed to follow the health laws of Leviticus which makes their very diet similar to that of the Jews. The sensation that everything feels meaningless is part of the crisis of nihilism. Once you no longer have up or down you are in a very bad place. Jordan Peterson describes this place as chaos in the short video clip below.
Jordan Peterson | What Nietzsche's "God is dead" means
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The Power of Religionhttps://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/02/28/opinion/the-power-of-religion.html?The benefits of faith. In his Sunday column this week, Ross Douthat issued something of a challenge to secular liberals. They think of themselves as empiricists, Ross wrote, but they’re actually close-minded about several powerful forces for good, starting with religion. “When people and societies are genuinely curious,” he continued, “they are very reasonably curious about everything, including things happening in their bodies and their consciousness and more speculative realms.” The column reminded me of a pattern that, as a secular liberal myself, I’ve long found inconvenient: Religion is correlated with a lot of healthy behaviors and positive outcomes. All else equal, religious people have higher educational attainment, earn more money, use drugs and alcohol less and commit fewer crimes, according to a long line of social-science studies (that have frequently been done by secular liberals). The question about these findings is the old correlation-causation question: Does religious faith lead to these healthy behaviors? Or is something else, independent of faith, causing them? A clever new study tries to offer some answers. It’s not anywhere near the last word on the matter, obviously, but it is intriguing. The three economists who conducted the study sound like something out of a bad bar joke, as one of them, Dean Karlan, remarked to me: “an atheist, an evangelical Christian and an agnostic Jew.” To do the research, they partnered with an evangelical anti-poverty group, International Care Ministries, in the Philippines. The group taught 15 weeks of classes to more than 6,000 very poor Filipinos. Some of the students received a version that combined religious teachings with advice on health and employment. Others received only the nonreligious parts. By comparing the different batches of students, the economists hoped to isolate the effect of religion. The results: Six months later, those who received the religious education indeed reported feeling more guided by religion. They were also earning more money, largely by shifting from agricultural work to higher-paying jobs, such as fishing or self-employment. And even small pay increases can be a big deal for people living in extreme poverty.The results did come with some contradictions. Several other measures of well-being, like food consumption, didn’t change. A few measures, like the frequency of arguments with relatives, looked worse for the religious group. But crosscurrents like these are normal in academic work. Overall, the findings are “cautiously positive” for the power of religion, said Karlan, a professor at Northwestern (and the self-identified agnostic Jew). No study is definitive. But I do find the overall evidence of religion’s ancillary benefits to be strong. That evidence hasn’t made me personally religious. I’m still quite comfortable with my secularism. But the evidence has made me more humble and open-minded about how the world can go about solving some of its problems. You can read more about the study at the Innovations for Poverty Action website. In addition to Karlan, the researchers are James Choi of Yale and Gharad Bryan of the London School of Economics. The researchers are continuing to follow the people in the study.
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Thank you for your response. At least you are not totally insane to claim is a hoax. It's true that we are still very limited but we can't just dismiss scientific theories as hoaxes. I also personally cannot just believe in god and I have read your links. I also think that if a god is real and he is truly benevolent I shouldn't need to believe or even acknowledge him as long as I'm a good person.
You are welcome. Here are some questions that I have found interesting to ponder. We all like to say we are good people but are we really or do we just tell that to ourselves that so we don't have to think about our many flaws? Does the fact that we can point to others more evil and malevolent then ourselves really make us good? Much of our inherited goodness comes from our parents and our society. We as individuals can claim only very partial credit for it. Perhaps what matters more is not what we were gifted but what we choose to do with the gift. Do we point ourselves at an ideal and struggle towards it? Do we strive towards reducing evil (especially in ourselves) or do we squander our gifts? If we set ourselves toward the ideal how do we even define it or for that matter define good and evil? The alternative of course is the dark and nihilistic claim that there is no good and evil and that the ideal is untrue. Don't feel obligated to actually respond to any of these questions unless you really want to. They are most useful as reflective exercises. |
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Ugh, scientific theories change all the time. The theory of evolution is the best theory to explain natural evolution, there is no other better theory or even hypothesis. Maybe Coincube could explain this better to you since you seem to listen to him.
Natural Selection holds that organisms adapt to their environments over time. This adaptation is thought to occur through a process of direct selection, fitness related reproduction, and occasional random search. Natural selection can coherently describe the historical situations leading to relatively small differences between organisms – perhaps up to the level of creating new and related species. What so very few people realize is that Natural Selection is less a biological theory and more of a metaphysical frameworks for biology. Furthermore this framework is appears to be fundamentally incomplete. There are several areas where natural selection seems to lack sufficient explanatory power. Most of these revolve around the problem of short-term disadvantage tending to undermine long-term advantage at the ‘Major Transitions’ of evolutionary history – which include sexual reproduction but also the evolution of the simple (prokaryotic) cell, the complex (eukaryotic) cell, multicellular organisms, and social organisms. Each of these transitions requires overcoming the fact that natural selection operates much more powerfully and directly upon the lower, simpler and smaller levels of organization that replicate more rapidly; so that there is a constant pressure and tendency for these lower levels to become parasitic upon higher levels. In sum; natural selection is much more rapidly and powerfully dis-integrative than integrative. The general problem is therefore that the net effect of natural selection alone would be to break down the major transitions of evolution before they can be established – unless this tendency is overcome by some as-yet-unknown purposive (and indeed cognitive) long-termist, integrating and complexity-increasing tendency. Neither natural selection, nor indeed artificial selection done by Man, has been observed creating a new genus, nor any taxonomic rank more fundamental such as a new family or phylum. There is no observational or experimental evidence which has emerged since 1859 of natural selection leading to major, qualitative changes in form – nor the originating of a novel form. Nobody has, by selection, changed a cat into a dog, let alone a sea anemone into a mouse (or the opposite); nobody has bred a dinosaur from a bird, nor retraced, by selective breeding, a modern species to its assumed ancestral form. By all appearances natural selection appears to be a radically too small a metaphysical frame - it is not false but it leaves out too much. Biology cannot exist without a metaphysical framework – and the current one may not be the best, since it has so many, such serious, failures to its name. This is the foundation for various challenges to the current dominant theory of human development. The critiques are serious and should not be casually dismissed. For more info on this I recommend this excellent paper by Charlton. I borrowed from it liberally in this post. Reconceptualizing the Metaphysical Basis of Biologyhttps://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/2016/03/reconceptualizing-metaphysical-basis-of.html?m=1 |
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Coincube maybe, you not so much. I also think he accepts evolution as a fact but I'm not sure.
I accept evolution as our current most probable model of human development not as fact. We have seen some limited evidence of micro evolution during humanities brief era of recorded observations. See: Bacteria micro evolution https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=plVk4NVIUh8We know from the fossil records that there were many forms of life in the past that are no longer around today. Given this data extrapolation into the theory of gross macro evolution over time appears to be the most probable current explanation of the known data. I think it important to be humble in these matters and acknowledge that we as a species are so very limited in what we really understand. Evolution for example is the theory of how life changes over time. If there is no time is there any evolution? The illusion of time : past, present and future all exist together https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vrqmMoI0wks |
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However, all the experiments and tests are written somewhere and I can also study the subject and perform the experiments myself, you don't have that possibility with religion because there are no experiments, no tests, no math, even If I wanted to test them by myself I couldn't because there are none. Sure you have to trust science in some things unless you want to study about everything and perform tests yourself but at least you have the possibility to actually do the experiments or at least understand them, again, you don't have that in religion, you are supposed to believe in it blindly because badecker says so and we can't understand god so we just have to follow what he says because he says so. There is no logic there. Science works, religion doesn't.
Even if you repeat a science experiment yourself the very act of repeating an experiment means you have accepted the apriori assumptions of science. Metaphysical Foundation of Science: ✧ The external world is real and knowable. ✧ Nature itself is not divine. It is an object worthy of study, not worship. ✧ The universe is orderly. There is uniformity in nature that allows us to observe past phenomena and to understand and predict future occurrences. ✧ Our minds and senses are capable of accurately observing and understanding the world. These assumed truths are so deeply ingrained in us now we have difficulty even recognizing them as assumptions but they are necessary for science to exist. If you don't believe the assumptions science becomes impossible for you. The progress and maintenance of scientific achievement requires that these assumptions be accepted and propagated at least by an educated elite. The same situation applies to the apriori Truth of God which rests at the foundation of western culture. Undermine the assumption and the whole society starts to wobble. This is what Nietzsche foresaw when he announced "God is dead" in 1882. Nietzsche predicted drastic consequences as a result. He predicted millions would die in the 20th century in wars of extremist ideologies. Peterson describes these ideologies as parasites that act on a damaged religious substructure. Nietzsche also predicted that it would not be until the 21st century that we would be forced to acknowledge the crisis of nihilism. These predictions given in 1882 are an intellectual tour de force. Believing blindly without contemplation still works for some but that blanket of protection is gradually being pulled away. Going forward it will increasingly be necessary to fully define oneself down to your core metaphysical truths. Unless you can look into the abyss of nihilism and reject it with certainty the abyss will sooner or later pull you in. |
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I agree, Jordan Peterson is a very smart man and his approach is definitely different than 99.9% of believers on why they believe in what they believe. For example, he does ''believe'' in evolution unlike your friend badecker and he is definitely a hardcore christian, if only every religious person was like him the world would be a better place. However asserting that morality comes from an outside source without proof of any outside source or even that it is an external source and not an internal source without any proof of either is ludicrous. I will point out that it was society and not religion or your god that determined that slavery is immoral. This would indicate that morals are a construct of society and not a greater being that can't be proven.
It is important to seperate the message from the messenger. All messengers are potentially subject to error but if we can reconstruct the same ultimate message from a multitude of messengers regardless of their differences and starting positions and then we must carefully consider the message for it has proven itself robust. Let's briefly look at some of the various messengers we have discussed in this thread. Bruce Charlton approached religion through a metaphysical framework highlighting that all knowledge is ultimately reducible to basic and unproven axioms. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1373864.msg22344436#msg22344436Perry Marshall examined the axiom of God and showed us that it is not falsifiable. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1373864.msg23796852#msg23796852Dennis Prager explained how the axiom of God leads directly to the reality of freedom. https://www.prageru.com/videos/i-am-lord-your-godMoshe Chaim Luzzatto shows how starting from the axiom of God one can understand free-will, the existence of evil, and why bad things sometimes happen to good people. http://www.livingjudaism.com/the-way-of-god.html Jordan Peterson approaches the Bible from an perspective of evolutionary psychology and finds psychological truths. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=f-wWBGo6a2wWhat all of these vastly diverse approaches have in common is that they converge on is a single basic message. God = True This is the critical axiom the foundation that ultimately supported the rise of western civilization and the enlightenment. If we can show that morality follows from acceptance of the axiom is that morality coming from an external or internal source? The very question is almost irrelevant answerable in either the affirmative, the negative or perhaps both. |
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But what If I'm looking for the truth rather than something that would make me feel good? Choice number 3 has also a few thousand choices, which god should I chose? Does anyone pick his God based on research or rather indoctrination and luck? That is the problem with religion and gods. Sure it's better to believe in god than believing everything is pointless and nothing matters. I was a nihilist for some time but then I realized that nihilism is also a form of ''religion'' because the only truth is that we simply don't know. We don't know if something happens after death or what the universe really is or why we are here, that's my point of view now and many times I look at the stars and I wonder too if there is something up there but I can't just blindly believe in things.
It sounds to me like you are doing exactly what you should be doing which is searching for truth. In the very recent past we were all enveloped from childhood in an unquestioned and unchallenged truth structure. This is no longer possible. The enlightenment and the rise of reason has dramatically increased the burden on man with regards to our beliefs. Now we are forced to deeply explore our faith down its foundational first principles or failing that risk being cast adrift and picked up by whatever foolish ideology or branch of nihilism we stumble across. Blindly believing in things is not the goal or even desirable. What we need is a fully integrated system of belief and representation. Recently I have been watching the Biblical series by Jordan Peterson. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1373864.msg30641980#msg30641980He approaches the topic in a very different manner then I did in our back and forth a few months back. It makes for very interesting material and may be helpful. |
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So am I supposed to just believe in something that I will never understand? Even if I knew god existed how would I ever know that what he is doing is the right thing? Why would anyone worship god if we can't even understand if he is good or not? Sure the bible says he is but how would we ever know?
Without knowing it is impossible to believe. Belief at its deepest manifestation is knowing. You have touched upon perhaps the deepest challenge facing modern man. In a world where as Nietzsche stated "God is dead" how does one know God? I found it helpful to understand the full implications of Nietzsche's famous quote. See: Nietzsche and ChristianityHumanity is no longer in its infancy where we can simply be told what to believe and more or less accept it blindly. We have instead entered a rebellious adolescence where we have the freedom to forge our own beliefs for better or for worse. It was inevitable that the quest to seek truth born from monotheism and religion would turn on the dogma at its foundation, yet this attack on our cultural roots places us in a very tenuous position. As pointed out in the video on Nietzsche and Christianity we probably only have three choices. 1) We can embrace one of the many parasitic and extremist ideologies available (See: Communism and Nazism for insight on where this path goes). 2) We can sink into existential nihilism which is accompanied by its own darkness. 3) We find a way to resurrect God and repair the foundation of our culture. Personally I find the third choice by far the most compelling. God is dead, long live God! |
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^^^ Fact: empirical measurement proves the Earth is flat. The globe can't be proven empirically therefore it is only theory, a shitty one that's proven wrong in the face of all the empirical evidence that shows it's flat and also motionless.
Stop projecting your pozz onto others and get the fuck into my mass grave.
I am amazed this flat earth thread is still going. Astargath you will never make any progress because notbatman has locked himself into a sphere of irrationality. There is no point in debate as he has already chosen his answer and having done so will disregard all evidence to the contrary. If you presented him with an astronaut who had been into space he would dismiss him as an actor. If you spent millions and built a rocket just for him and flew him into space on landing he would walk away complementing you on your fantastic CGI and artificial zero gravity and decide that you were one of the actors too. When one adopts a false premise and defines false as true reality increasingly pushes back and provides ever increasing empiric contrary feedback. To maintain the illusion that false = true one must engage in increasing mental gymnastics to maintain the falsehood eventually being pushed into a corner where one must dismiss all contrary data as conspiracy. |
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God sacrificed himself to himself to forgive us. Another nonsense from the bible right there. It makes absolutely no sense and we are not even saved, we are still here, aren't we? Why did an omniscient and all powerful god need to sacrifice his ''son'' to forgive humanity? Why not just forgive us? What is there to forgive anyways, he already knew everything that would happen.
This is a complex question Astargath. To start with we must understand what the Bible means when it talks of sacrifice. That in itself is a very deep topic. I believe Jordan Peterson articulates it far better then I could so I have linked to his discussion of Biblical sacrifice below.
Biblical Series V: Cain and Abel: The Hostile BrothersOnce we understand the purpose and meaning of sacrifice we can move on to the second part of your question why might tremendous sacrifice from heaven be necessary to save humanity? To try to grasp this it is helpful to try and imagine what the world would be like without Christianity. This is very difficult to do because Christianity is the foundation western culture was built upon so you have to return back to 100 AD or so and envision an alternative future world starting with a collapsing Roman Empire. The power of Christianity in reshaping the world cannot be understated. We see this in the transformation of Russia as it returns to its orthodox roots. We see it in the rapid transformation of China where Christianity is currently spreading like wildfire laying the foundation of a post communistic future. It is perhaps most clearly displayed on the Korean Peninsula where a people with a shared culture, race, and average IQ is split into two halves with Christianity punished with death in one and widely embraced in the other.  The argument that Christianity and the sacrifice at its heart was necessary to save mankind is not a trivial one. Given the facts on the ground it could very well be true in more ways then we know. |
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Attending Religious Services May Increase Lifespanhttps://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/320581.phpA recent study published in the journal PLOS One has revealed that regularly attending religious ceremonies, may lead to greater health and increased longevity in middle-aged people and seniors.
The paper's first author is Ellen L. Idler, Ph.D., a joint-appointed professor in epidemiology from the Emory Rollins School of Public Health and Samuel Candler Dobbs professor of sociology.
Death risk cut by 40 percent
Prof. Idler and her collegues focused on the data gathered between 2004 and 2014 on more than 18,000 participants. The scientists applied Cox proportional hazards models to calculate the link between religious attendance and all-cause mortality during the decade studied.
"After adjustment for confounders, attendance at religious services had a dose-response relationship with mortality, such that respondents who attended frequently [i.e., at least once a week] had a 40 percent lower hazard of mortality compared with those who never attended."
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If unbelievers can be saved after death and people can be changed into ''pure'' souls then there is absolutely no need for any of this, everything that we are experiencing now is absolutely useless.
The necessity to burn away the evil in you in an afterlife is not so attractive if down to the core you are evil. In extreme situations there might not be anything left once the process was completed. What you are experiencing now is the forging of a crucible that for better or for worse will be subjected to the fires and tribulations of the future. If you do not create anything worth saving in the present what possibly could there be to save in the future? My own opinion is that the Seventh-day Adventist view on hell is more logical then other interpretations. See: Annihilationism
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I believed in god 100% when I was a kid, when I grew older I started to have my doubts so I asked him, honestly, for a little proof of his existence, guess what, he didn't send me anything. God is fictional. As an example of the absurdity of heaven:
I'm walking with my girlfriend and a robber tries to rob us and shoots her. I was a believer but she wasn't.
50 years later, the robber and I both die, the robber a few years before dying accepts jesus christ and repents his sins.
We are now both in heaven and I'm supposed to be happy knowing that not only my girlfriend is going to be eternally tortured but also that I'm going to spend all eternity living with the man who actually killed her.
Furthermore if she lived maybe she would have accepted jesus christ just like the robber did yet she didn't have the chance to do so.
Humans in our current state are utterly unfit for eternal life. If you have Netflix I recommend the dark and disturbing series Altered Carbon. It explores what humanity would do if we discovered a technology that allowed us to upload ourselves into new bodies and use this technology to live forever. The series set some 300 years in the future. What would we do with eternal life? Simple we would turn the earth into a living hell. The series is so dark because it so accurately describes human nature. Both the Catholics and the Jews believe in purgatory. This is a place where the evil in us that makes us unfit to enter heaven is purified aka burned away. If there is a heaven the need for such a place follows logically from the utter darkness in human nature. What does it mean to "purify" an evil that is inherent to our very nature. Well it means that a big part of what we are the darkness has to be burned away and die. If that is 95% because you like to shoot and murder people then I imagine such a purification would be rather unpleasant. I certainly would not want to be the guy who has to have 95% of who he is consumed by a burning purification of truth so that a deeply remorseful 5% suitable for eternal life and can continue. Can someone who died in their youth or did not have a chance to fully explore the devine be saved? To the degree they lived their life in alignment with truth and that anyone can be saved they certainly could be. Nowhere in the Bible does it explicitly say that unbelievers cannot be saved after death. Clark Pinnock a prominent Christian theologian is a compelling author and defended this line of reasoning. https://www.amazon.com/Wideness-Gods-Mercy-Finality-Religions/dp/0310535913The take away message is that we should align ourselves with truth and the transcendent to the core of our being. To the degree we succeed we transform ourself into something suitable for an afterlife and prevent the manifestation of hell on earth. |
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''Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened. Which of you, if your son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake? If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him''
According to these verses, prayer is an opportunity to approach the greatest father of all time and openly express our needs and desires and directly ask for help yet prayer doesn't work, no one has seen a dead person revive or a amputee grow back an arm.
Indeed what exactly is the meaning of this very famous passage? Since I referenced Peterson upthread I will share his interpretation which is in part 7 of his biblical series. I have linked directly to the relevant section below, however, it's a deep topic so it's still about 18 minutes from the start of the link to a detailed analysis of your passage above. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gFjB9FTN58&t=56m54sIf you can spare the 18 minutes I highly recommend watching it. |
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I can't read the last link and by the way ''Individuals living in devout countries were more likely to help strangers even if they themselves were not religious.'' Basically saying that even though they are atheists they only helped because they live in devout countries? Most countries are extremely religious anyways, it's quite hard to find the few that aren't so this is a flawed argument.
Unfortunately it looks like all copies of that third article are behind paywalls. Let's mark it as disputed and move on. In my opinion the correct way to approach a question like this not to ask does ___ make people good or lack of ___ make people bad but instead to ask a more basic question. Are humans at evil? It's pretty clear that we are quite evil in general. Looking at the history of the last hundred years brings this into crystallin focus. We are not completely evil we do have some redeeming qualities but probably not nearly as many as we fool ourselves into believing. Once we acknowledge this disheartening truth it behooves us to pursue the goal of mitigating the deficiency. |
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