Yeah, why would an infinite being do anything different? Why would He create a universe? Why does he need a universe now that he didn't need an infinite amount of time before now?
And if you want ludicrous, why does He need worship? Why would an omnipotent, omniscient, timeless being need to be told how great he is by His own creations?
Option one assumes an evil God. I’ve given this a good deal of thought and I can’t come up with a reason for an omnipotent, omniscient being to be evil. In our species evil always seems to spring from a need or desire. People commit evil acts because they will get, or think they will get something from the commission of that act. A person steals because she needs or wants a material thing. A bully bullies because he has low self-esteem and by making others suffer he makes himself feel more important. What can an omnipotent omniscient being possibly have to gain from the commission of an evil act? (For that matter, what can an omnipotent omniscient being possibly have to gain from the commission of a good act? But that’s a whole other discussion).
IMO, option 2 is more likely. The Deists believed in a God that set everything in motion but thereafter did not participate in the universe. If any God exists (which I doubt), this one makes the most sense.
That's an interesting way to put it. It seems undeniable to me that the vast majority of people accept the religious teachings that they received in childhood. This is evidenced by the fact that populations of one religion or the other remain that religion from generation to generation. If people thought for themselves about such matters there would be a lot more change.
So, if I understand you correctly, you are saying it's possible that an interventionist God exists but that His threshold for intervention is greater than the holocaust.
That's true, and it's a good point. But if that's so, divine intervention is so rare as to be statistically insignificant. My point in this debate is that people pray for intervention in things that are far less important than the genocide of millions of people, and we know He didn't stop the holocaust.
Yep, I agree with the above argument. Hardly surprising since I'm the one who made it.
Well, to use your example, in a democracy, either representative as practiced in the US or parliamentary as practiced in Europe and elsewhere, we wouldn't be voting for "x", "y" or "z". We would be voting for representatives who would vote on "x", "y" or "z". Presumably proponents of "x" and "y" would come to some sort of compromise and defeat "z". At least that's the way it's supposed to work.
The role that political parties would play in this scenario would depend on the ramifications of the issue on whatever binds the party together.
And, BTW, what binds the party together may not be political ideology. Today the US parties are divided along ideological lines with the Republicans representing conservatives and the Democrats representing moderates and liberals. But that's not how it always was. Up until about forty years ago, both parties had liberal and conservative wings and region played a much bigger role.
You make several excellent points. I find it ironic that many of the very same people who would criminalize the burning of the flag, are the one's applauding Joe Wilson's shameful act of disrespect.
The flag is a symbol. Physically, the flag is of no importance and of minimal value. It's importance and it's value are in what it symbolizes, not in what it is. You can burn what it is, but you cannot burn what it symbolizes and what it symbolizes is personal. To one person it may stand for everything that they perceive as being right about America, to another it may have exactly the opposite meaning. If what we call "freedom" has any meaning at all, it means that we are free to believe what we will and we are free to express our beliefs.
I may think that a person who burns the flag is an idiot, but I will stand of for his right to do it. I have no problem with that because I know that no matter how much he tries, he can do nothing to harm what that flag means to me.
A convenient argument, but completely untrue. He was Catholic, although I don't think he was a particularly religious one. Even so, he made frequent references to God in his speeches.
Of course, it could be argued that he was a secret Atheist who only used God to further himself politically, and that may very well be true. If so, it is probably equally true of many of our Bible-thumping American politicians.
If I ever go to a Bible class, I want you teaching it Hadrian, at least I won't have to worry about falling asleep.
Yes, the Confederate flag (or more precisely "The" battle flag of the Confederacy") stands for all of those things, and more. Most often, when people display it they are expressing racist, contemptible, despicable, offensive, idiotic ideas...... as is their right under the First Amendment. If the First Amendment only protected inoffensive speech, many of us would never be allowed to open our mouths.
Yes, that's exactly true. A person burning the flag is expressing an idea. It may be a contemptible idea, but the First Amendment allows us to express our ideas, not just the ones that other people like.
Hitler hated Atheists and put more than a few into his concentration camps.
While I come down on the same side of the debate as you, I disagree with virtually everything you said.
First of all, your notion that Christians generally have better morals. I strongly doubt that you have any support for that statement and frankly your caveat that that doesn't mean that Atheists are bad people doesn't carry much weight since your argument is that Christians are better.
Your statement that Christians doing bad things are not truly Christians (or are not being Christian) is a self-serving argument that is known as the Scotsman fallacy. (All Scotsmen wear kilts and eat haggis. My Uncle Angus doesn't do either. Then he's not a true Scotsman). It's an argument that can be used on any group to support anything, and it is utterly meaningless.
I agree that that Christianity should not be blamed for every evil act that is done in its name, but neither can it be absolved in every instance. The Southern branches of Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian and Episcopal churches (as well as others) all came into existence through schisms over the issue of slavery and those churches found plenty of scriptural support for their position. You can argue that they misinterpreted the Scripture, and that’s fine, but the fact remains that in the area of the country that was (and continues to be) the stronghold of American Christianity, millions of passionate committed Christians lacked the moral compass to identify and oppose one greatest evils in American history.
And it didn’t stop there, these same churches, and the decedents of these same Christians championed Jim Crow and segregation and bitterly opposed integration and Civil Rights for more than a century after the Civil War. It was only a few years ago that one of these churches, the Southern Baptists, admitted that they were wrong.
Yes, there were Christians in the North who were on the other sides of these issues and we should give credit to the Christians and churches that fought slavery and segregation, but Christianity itself cannot be absolved for its part in the evil, the condoning of evil, or the ignoring of evil in this case.
No, that's way too general a statement, even when it's spelled correctly. Religion certainly has been causal to some of the most horrendous immoral acts in history, but so too has politics, philosophy and greed and none of those things (even greed) necessarily lead to immoral behavior.
Religion is very often used in an attempt to excuse or justify immoral behavior, but there again, so are a lot of other things.
There's one other way around the Epicurean argument, that is to hypothesize a God that does not interfere with the universe, or at least has not done so since setting it in motion. Such a God might even be seen as the sum total of the universe and the laws of nature. Mind you, that is not my belief, but it is the only view of God that I see as logically defensible.
Obviously, such a God is not relevant to a discussion of the evil and cruel God imagined by Christianity and Islam.
jthm39, you are engaging in a battle of wits with an unarmed man.
If you can't, or won't defend you position you shouldn't try to express it in the first place. And if the best you can do is "that's the way things are because that's the way things are", don't even bother.
Why does free choice have to include Hell? I can certainly make a choice without being punished if the choice is not the one that God prefers. In fact, since the tools that I use to make the choice (my mind and my reason) were supposedly given to me by God, it seem pretty cruel to punish me if I come up with the "wrong" answer.
And how can you say God doesn't send people to Hell? Who's in charge? Is He omnipotent or not? It's His system, not mine, it seems silly to absolve Him of any responsibility.
One can be both because "believing" and "knowing" are two different things. There is no reason at all that a person cannot believe something despite the fact that he or she cannot know it with certainty. I can believe that my favorite team will win their game next week. In fact I can believe it very strongly, since I know that their rivals are not very good and are not given much chance. But I can also believe that it is impossible to know with absolute certainty, since anything can happen in a sporting event. Believing that it is impossible to "know" a thing does not preclude a person from having a belief about that thing.
Having fun, enjoying life is a bad thing for which you must suffer eternally. Nice God you've got there.
Well, I guess that depends on what it is that they think God told them to do. If they think that God told them to commit a crime and they do so, then they should be treated exactly the same as anyone else who commits that particular crime. If that means going to jail, then they should go to jail.
If, on the other hand, they think that God told them to smile pleasantly at everyone they meet then I, for one, would be against sending them to jail (although, depending on my mood, I may have the urge to slap them upside the head).
Disbelief is not rejection. I do not reject Santa Claus, I simply do not believe that he exists. But if Santa does exist, and if he is a "jolly old elf", then he would not punish me for my lack of belief.
Obviously, no benevolent being, supernatural or otherwise, would subject another being to even 5 minutes of indescribable agony for believing a certain way.
In order to accept the notion that a God would do such a thing one must believe that;
a) God would bring into existence billions of creatures knowing that the vast majority of them would end up suffering in Hell,
b) That a minority of these creatures could escape this fate by accepting the religious beliefs that they were taught as children,
c) That the vast majority of these creatures could escape this fate only by utterly rejecting the religious beliefs that they had been taught as children and (not just that!) also, picking out from the thousands upon thousands of remaining religions the one "True" one.
The kind of God that would set this sort of system into motion is the exact antithesis of benevolent.
Picture a child that squats over an ant hill with a magnifying glass burning all the ants that come out of the hole except for those that travel a very narrow path. Is that child benevolent towards the ants? Or is that child mean-spirited and cruel?
I wouldn't go quite so far as to say everyone, but I do think that any reasonable person must in fact be an agnostic. Many religious people do claim to "know" things that they cannot possibly "know".
Hey! I responded to your "Efficacy of Science" debate, but nobody else did, not even you.
I wasn't going to comment until I saw that I would not be tolerated.
Only if they refuse to wear one themselves. ....... ....... ...... ....... ...... ....
No thanks, I already had some.... Oh... sorry, I thought you were offering.
As with all issues of morality I think it all comes down to the golden rule. If the other person is a consenting adult, if you are respectful of that person, if you do not misrepresent yourself, if you take reasonable precautions to avoid STDs and unwanted pregnancies..... in others words, if you are considerate of your partner and other people who may be effected, then you are behaving morally.
Illogical arguments are necessary, after all, somebody's got to lose.
Volker, how can you say that not allowing gay marriage doesn't have anything to do with the nanny state, it is just one more example of the government making your most personal decisions for you. See my expanded argument below.
Absolutely, conservatives like to pretend that they are for less government but the truth is that they want to make our most personal decisions for us.
Yes, Volker, I’ll agree that conservatives are no longer actively trying to prohibit premarital or gay sex, but they fought tooth and nail against the reversal of the laws that did, it wasn’t until 2003 that the sodomy laws were taken off the books, and then only because the Supreme Court struck them down. Even after that, Texas tried to argue that the court decision only applied to heterosexual sex acts, it took further court action to decide the issue. In all likelihood none of this would have happened with our current, more conservative court.
And while it’s true that most conservatives are not trying to ban alternative religions, they are actively trying to make Christianity the state religion. Thirty or forty years ago, most Christian conservatives at least paid lip service to the idea of separation of Church and State. These days they are openly fighting against it. Many, probably most, conservatives are arguing that the US was founded on Christianity and that it is a “Christian nation”.
Many items on the conservative social agenda are basically religious issues. Gay marriage is being resisted because homosexuality is an “abomination”. Churches that that believe in Gay marriage are denied the right to practice their religious beliefs.
Abortion is also basically a religious issue. It’s difficult to profess that at the moment of conception the zygote is morally equivalent to a human being is you don’t invest it with some property more than the few cells that makes it up. That something is the soul, a religious concept if ever there was one.
I live in perhaps the most conservative state in the Union, South Carolina. Here, I can’t go shopping until after 1:30 on Sunday afternoon because the conservative local government officials think I should be going to church, presumably a Christian church since the Sunday “holy day” is a Christian concept. I also can’t buy alcohol on “the Lord’s day”.
When the government makes your most private and personal decisions for you, and when it encroaches on your decisions in matters of conscience, I consider that more, not less government.
Obviously God did not intervene to stop genocide in Nazi Germany, in the killing fields of Cambodia, or in Rwanda. It seems preposterous to think that a God who ignores the cries of millions of people as they perish at the hands of ruthless and evil men, helps others to find their lost keys, secure a promotion or even to be healed of a disease.
Even more preposterous are idiots like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell who claim that God sends hurricanes to punish gays. Apparently their God considers consensual adult sex to be a worse sin than non-consensual mass murder.
It seems a safe bet to me that if God exists, He or She has a strictly hands-off policy.
Olbermann may be a bit bombastic at times, and he certainly is partisan, but I've never known him to outright lie like Sean Ann O'Limbaugh. But then, I've been drinking.
But that's exactly what he said he was going to do. During the campaign he said he would draw down in Iraq and increase the effort in Afghanistan.
You lost me on that one. ....... ........ ........ ......... ............. ......... ........
But a preponderance of evidence is not proof. I can be 99 percent sure that God does not exist and still acknowledge that it is impossible to know with certainty. Thus, I can believe that God does not exist and also believe that it is impossible to know with certainty.
Yeah [sigh], an asshole insults a jerk and an idiot starts a war.
Have you read "How The Irish Saved Civilization"? ........................
Yeah, the Soviets took a brief lead in the space race but once the US got serious about it they (the Soviets) really didn't have a chance. They got off to a quicker start in rocket technology than we did. I'm not sure why that is since I think we got most of the scientists from Peenemünde.
I noticed you were careful to use the word "observed" with Helen Keller and deprived me of the chance to make a joke at your expense.
I share your love of history, although my favorite era is ancient Greece and Rome. Of course, you can't really understand the Middle Ages if you don't know about the Roman Empire.
The first and second.
I think we were pretty much agreeing on the Communist issue too.
Are you sure you're not Michael? Have you checked your ID?
Very interesting article. We can fairly say that the blood-sucking doctors did not have his well-being as their primary motivation.
You are probably right that the Onion is no more factual than Disney, you could probably also say that it is no less factual than the Bible.
You're confusing folks, Hade, they don't know you like we do.
