Keep your scarecrow in your closet.

You are imagining things that are not there. Not just human senses but all other hi-tech equipment we have developed over the years has failed to detect any God(s).  Abstract truths are just abstract truths.

That is the point.  

It is not reasonable to have faith.  Where faith begins, reason ends.

To me it seems that if you are only doing good deeds because you are afraid of god or because you want to look good for god then you are not a good person. However if you are doing good things just because you want to or you like to make people happy, then yes, you should be considered a good person.

Yes, I fail to perceive your delusional reality.

My senses are failing me in detecting your "unknown and undefined agent who is outside of this universe and influences everything in this universe, an agent who decided to inspire people to write some books but not others, etc."  I am paraphrasing as I don't remember all the details of your delusion.

I suspect you are not only delusional but also paranoid.  You see evil in any progressive thought, people who criticize the Bible, or people who believe in some other religions.  I suspect you view Atheists are the evilest of all people.  I think you have more in common with Islamists than you are willing to admit.

Yet, you admit that you are against slavery.  At least you are better than your God on that point, LOL.

You are an enigma, but I am not an expert in Psychiatry so I cannot help you further.

I suspect your delusion is not as severe as BADecker's or notbatman's, but I cannot be sure.  You could be masking it well because you are brighter than most people who suffer from these religious delusions.

Your error here is assuming technological advancement built on a foundation of moral subjectivism is progress. Such advancement taken to its logical conclusion and stripped of objective morality will ultimately make us all the slaves of nature not its master.
...

The Abolition of Man
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=idgYLTnSzxI

It means a lot coming from a person who believes the evolution is a hoax.  He exposed his own lunacy, that is about it.

See you guys in the movies.

PS. All three of you, notbatman, BADecker and you should get together to iron out the details of your individual delusions. Clinically, you are all the same. Failure to perceive reality.

I think that's something religious people cannot understand, the fact that you cannot choose to believe in god or anything for that matter, when you believe in something is because you are convinced of it for some reason but if you don't, you simply cannot force yourself to believe in it just like you can't force yourself to be gay if you are not.

A comment on my publisher’s website asks:



My suggestion: Pray.

Also, consider that the Christian worldview is more coherent, robust, and rational than any secular worldview.
Our model explains things such as why stars look fair and beautiful to our eyes when it serves no credible Darwinian purpose to do so.

Our model explains the naturalistic fallacy, that is, the gap between ‘is’ and ‘ought’ which secular philosophy cannot explain, and some cannot even address.

Our model explains how free will can exist inside a deterministic universe. A materialist cannot even formulate the question in a rational way.

Our model explains why humans seek beauty. Social-evolutionary explanations for this are less convincing than astrology.

Our model explains how creatures with free will capable of grasping intellectual abstractions can arise in a universe which contains no such thing as intellectual abstractions.

Our model allows investigation of final causes in nature, without which nature cannot properly be understood.

Our model explains the prevalence of so many theists throughout history. The theory that over nine tenths of mankind, including some of the most brilliant thinkers in their age, were raving lunatics who hallucinate about imaginary sky beings is not credible and not supported by evidence.

Our model explains the various miracles and supernatural wonders that are in the older history books, and which, for no scientific reason, were excised from being reported.

Our model explains both why there is a plurality of religions and why there are striking similarities between them.

Our model explains the origin of the universe. By definition, if the universe were all that existed, exists and ever will exist, than a material cause for it is impossible.

Our model explains the current hegemony of the West and makes clear the meaning and purpose of what otherwise seems like insane and suicidal attempts by the apparently sober and sane men on Left to undermine and destroy it.

Our model explains why you should not let your daughter whore around. She is immortal, and will outlast any nation, and language, any institution and human work on Earth.

Our model explains why you should not, once you have truly and deeply contemplated the vastness of the universe and the oppressive span of time to follow the death of everything you know, fall into despair, and end your meaningless life.

Our model gives something to live for nobler than one’s own pleasure seeking.

Our model avoids the logical paradox of asserting man can create meaning in life out of a vacuum. That would require an ability to create meaning out of meaninglessness, which is absurd.

Our model explains why men and women are different, and how we must arrange the dangerous mystery of the mating dance between the sexes to improve our chances to achieve joy rather than misery.

Our model gives rational hope of seeking the departed dead again.

Our model explains human psychology better than perverted old Freud dressing up old Greek myths in make believe, and far better than cranky old Thomas Hobbes and his cynicism.

Our model makes sense. Others are either incorrect, incomplete, or paradoxical, or lead ultimately to wrath or despair. Our model is the sole one which sees life as not futile and death as not bitter.

And, on an intellectual level, our model is the one to which to turn once your mind has become wearied with the reductionist, absurdist and postmodern models, which are in fact no models at all, but rather, are excuses why one should not make a model of the universe, nor seek any answers to deep questions.

It is the model to which to turn once you are heartily sick of hearing “It Just Happened” as the explanation for the origin of man, the universe, and all things.

Naturally, I do not expect any reader to take any of these conclusions as if they were persuasive arguments. Each would require a separate and in depth conversation. This is just a list, and a partial list at that, of the intellectually satisfying fullness of Christian thought. It is the scent and savor of the feast of Christian philosophy, not the meat and potatoes.

This list is not meant to argue the point. It is meant to whet the appetite of intellects starved and desiccated after vain attempt to feast on the shadows, dust and ashes of modern thought, and show the contrast.

There are additional reasons beyond this. All human reason can do is clear away false objections to faith. Faith itself is a supernatural gift bestowed by God to protect his own from the sudden, irrational loss of confidence in the self evident to which our foolish race is prone.

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Our reality is material, whether you like it or not.  If it was not, I would not be a materialist.
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...Is a metaphysical one - not a matter of 'evidence'. And that insight (metaphysics not evidence) is the first step.

The situation is that Life is a mixed-picture: the decision is whether Life is validated by its best moments or times; or destroyed by its worst.

As I said, evidence does not help - the question is not quantitative. This is a matter of primary assumption.

And the question is not answerable in isolation - Life can only be validated if Life has 'meaning'; and the nature of validation depends on the nature of that meaning.

On the other hand, if you have already accepted that life has no meaning - is merely determined, or random - then you have already made your Big Decision. (Whether implicitly or explicitly) your basic assumptions ensure that for you Life is defined by its worst aspects - indeed the single, most extreme worst-of-Life is the truth-of-Life (both for individuals, and en masse).

Nothing can be done for you - because any possible Good will be negated by One Bad Thing - even when that Bad is merely the evanescence of Good.

On the other hand; if you understand, and live-by, the conviction that the best of Life is the truth of life (despite that this cannot be continuous) - then you have indomitable strength, assurance, and hope.

Not really a choice.  There is no evidence to support anything but materialism.

I cannot believe in fairy tales just because someone wrote them.

I use this thing called brain to figure out what is real and what is not.

Materialism is real.  Non-materialism is not.

I have not chosen it.  You have not provided any evidence of the objective moral code.  

I have just pointed it out that the moral code that you think is objective is actually very subjective as evidenced by the silly Bronze Age, Bible rules.

You have decided that the Christian moral code is objective.  That very decision was subjective.

The problem you have is that you subjectively chose the 'right' God (for you).   That is why your resulting moral code can never be objective.  It will be the moral code of the people who started your religion.

Have you noticed that most people are very lucky to be born into the 'right' religion, LOL.

Why did you reject the Quran as the source of the 'objective morality'?  Why did you reject all other religions and over 3000+ other Gods?

You see, we are not that different.  I just rejected one more God than you.

I love the remark made by one Oxford don about another: ‘On the surface, he’s profound, but deep down, he’s superficial.’ That sentence has more than once come to mind when reading the new atheists.

Future intellectual historians will look back with wonder at the strange phenomenon of seemingly intelligent secularists in the 21st century believing that if they could show that the first chapters of Genesis are not literally true, that the universe is more than 6,000 years old and there might be other explanations for rainbows than as a sign of God’s covenant after the flood, the whole of humanity’s religious beliefs would come tumbling down like a house of cards and we would be left with a serene world of rational non-believers getting on famously with one another.

Whatever happened to the intellectual depth of the serious atheists, the forcefulness of Hobbes, the passion of Spinoza, the wit of Voltaire, the world-shattering profundity of Nietzsche? Where is there the remotest sense that they have grappled with the real issues, which have nothing to do with science and the literal meaning of scripture and everything to do with the meaningfulness or otherwise of human life, the existence or non-existence of an objective moral order, the truth or falsity of the idea of human freedom, and the ability or inability of society to survive without the rituals, narratives and shared practices that create and sustain the social bond?

A significant area of intellectual discourse — the human condition sub specie aeternitatis — has been dumbed down to the level of a school debating society. Does it matter? Should we not simply accept that just as there are some people who are tone deaf and others who have no sense of humour, so there are some who simply do not understand what is going on in the Book of Psalms, who lack a sense of transcendence or the miracle of being, who fail to understand what it might be to see human life as a drama of love and forgiveness or be moved to pray in penitence or thanksgiving? Some people get religion; others don’t. Why not leave it at that?

Fair enough, perhaps. But not, I submit, for readers of The Spectator, because religion has social, cultural and political consequences, and you cannot expect the foundations of western civilisation to crumble and leave the rest of the building intact. That is what the greatest of all atheists, Nietzsche, understood with terrifying clarity and what his -latter-day successors fail to grasp at all.

Time and again in his later writings he tells us that losing Christian faith will mean abandoning Christian morality. No more ‘Love your neighbour as yourself’; instead the will to power. No more ‘Thou shalt not’; instead people would live by the law of nature, the strong dominating or eliminating the weak. ‘An act of injury, violence, exploitation or destruction cannot be “unjust” as such, because life functions essentially in an injurious, violent, exploitative and destructive manner.’ Nietzsche was not an anti-Semite, but there are passages in his writing that come close to justifying a Holocaust.

This had nothing to do with him personally and everything to do with the logic of Europe losing its Christian ethic. Already in 1843, a year before Nietzsche was born, Heinrich Heine wrote, ‘A drama will be enacted in Germany compared to which the French Revolution will seem like a harmless idyll. Christianity restrained the martial ardour of the Germans for a time but it did not destroy it; once the restraining talisman is shattered, savagery will rise again…  the mad fury of the berserk, of which Nordic poets sing and speak.’ Nietzsche and Heine were making the same point. Lose the Judeo-Christian sanctity of life and there will be nothing to contain the evil men do when given the chance and the provocation.

Richard Dawkins, whom I respect, partly understands this. He has said often that Darwinism is a science, not an ethic. Turn natural selection into a code of conduct and you get disaster. But if asked where we get our morality from, if not from science or religion, the new atheists start to stammer. They tend to argue that ethics is obvious, which it isn’t, or natural, which it manifestly isn’t either, and end up vaguely hinting that this isn’t their problem. Let someone else worry about it.

The history of Europe since the 18th century has been the story of successive attempts to find alternatives to God as an object of worship, among them the nation state, race and the Communist Manifesto. After this cost humanity two world wars, a Cold War and a hundred million lives, we have turned to more pacific forms of idolatry, among them the market, the liberal democratic state and the consumer society, all of which are ways of saying that there is no morality beyond personal choice so long as you do no harm to others.

Even so, the costs are beginning to mount up. Levels of trust have plummeted throughout the West as one group after another — bankers, CEOs, media personalities, parliamentarians, the press — has been hit by scandal. Marriage has all but collapsed as an institution, with 40 per cent of children born outside it and 50 per cent of marriages ending in divorce. Rates of depressive illness and stress-related syndromes have rocketed especially among the young. A recent survey showed that the average 18- to 35-year-old has 237 Facebook friends. When asked how many they could rely on in a crisis, the average answer was two. A quarter said one. An eighth said none.

None of this should surprise us. This is what a society built on materialism, individualism and moral relativism looks like. It maximises personal freedom but at a cost. As Michael Walzer puts it: ‘This freedom, energising and exciting as it is, is also profoundly disintegrative, making it very difficult for individuals to find any stable communal support, very difficult for any community to count on the responsible participation of its individual members. It opens solitary men and women to the impact of a lowest common denominator, commercial culture.’

In my time as Chief Rabbi, I have seen two highly significant trends. First, parents are more likely than they were to send their children to faith schools. They want their children exposed to a strong substantive ethic of responsibility and restraint. Second, religious people, Jews especially, are more fearful of the future than they were. Our newly polarised culture is far less tolerant than old, mild Christian Britain.
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What objective morality? Decided by whom?  Birds, fish or a specific species of primates?

Morality by definition is subjective.  All this talk about objective morality is nonsense.

Who wrote/decided on the moral code written in the scriptures?  Homo sapiens did, that is who.

What you have in the Bible are subjective views on morality by the Bronze Age people.  
Similarly, the Quran's moral code is subjective reflections of people who lived in the 6th century.

Hello?!?  Anybody home?

The bottom line is that science and secularism will speed up technological progress.  
The less religious you are the faster you'll get there.
The more religious you are the more you'll be stuck in the past

Your pick.

...

Religions were against science all the way.  They still are today.
...
Point is religions are regressive, they impede the technological progress.

That is the proper way to look at it.

What was the life expectancy in the US 100 years ago?  50 years ago?  25 years ago?
Was the US more Christian 100, 50 or 25 years ago?

Who is against stem cell research?  You know, the technology that can save and extend lives.

Healthy, stress-free life, with lots of social life, is not the domain of Christians or religious people.  I would argue that being religious adds more stress to your life as you have to worry about what your God will think, every second of your life, you have to constantly think: "Would I make it into heaven or would I end up in hell?"  Atheists do not have this issue.

When you know you have one life to live, you take care of your body, your mind, your relationship with others because you know after you die there is no second chance.  You, on the other hand, think that afterlife is what matters, this life is only temporary, 120 years at most vs the eternity.  So rape here or there, abuse of your wife or your body, kill few men here or there is all ok, as long as you accept Jesus as your savior before you die, LOL

Now, who has a more healthy outlook on our life on this planet?

PS. What is the global population growth rate?  Should it be increasing at 4 or 5% as is the case in communities of most orthodox religions?

PPS.  On average, are Christian or Atheists more educated?  Who do you think would make a better manager, better policymaker, better scientist, better engineer, better doctor?  

So far we are doing quite well without your stoning and cutting off hands and heads, without crucifixions and stake burnings, so thanks but no thanks.

It would help if you could just get the fuck out of education and science classrooms.  Humanity will do well going forward without your Bronze Age or 6th-century wisdom.

My religion?  WTF?  Talk about delusional.

Not playing sport is not a sport.

Scholars have failed to agree on a definition of religion. There are however two general definition systems: the sociological/functional and the phenomenological/philosophical.[4][5][6][7][8]

Emile Durkheim defined religion as "a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say things set apart and forbidden - beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a church, all those who adhere to them."[9]

Max Lynn Stackhouse, defined religion as "a comprehensive worldview or 'metaphysical moral vision' that is accepted as binding because it is held to be in itself basically true and just even if all dimensions of it cannot be either fully confirmed or refuted".[10]

Except some might argue, myself included, that religions are the source of evil in this world.

The holy scriptures are definitely evil so you might need to work a little bit more on your 'theory of progress'.

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What barbarism am I advocating?
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You are simply deluded not only about your belief system but also of what actually happened in history.

You are doing a typical apologetic tap dance.  "Oh, well, those particular laws were given to ancient Israelites, not for us, etc."

Where are the 10 commandments?  Whom were they given to?  Why are you obeying some laws but not the others?

Because you are not a Bronze Age barbarian that is why.

Christians, Muslims, and Jews don't kill gays because of the secular laws are preventing them from doing so.  That is one of the reasons why they do not obey 'God's laws'.  Other reason might be that they are good people and ignore the Bible or Quran, as sane people in the 21st century should.

If we removed the secular laws, and go by the biblical/quranic laws only, we would have a lot of massacres on our hands.

The point is the scriptures are seriously fucked up.  They were written by barbarians for barbarians.  End of story.

Nothing to discuss, move along.