Jan. 2004 - Tolerance vs. Respect

[JFRobot]

If god were a reality, should we be comforted that whatever it fancies is The Right Thing?

We should. But what if what God thought was the right thing goes contrary to what men think the right thing is?

How is this god absolute when it says "No killing" then commands the slaughter of whole populations, down to their animals?

If the populations were truly innocent, then God would be considered corrupt.

Absolute measure?

That isn't the word i would use.
Inconsistant, fickle, childish, depraved, petty... those fit better.

Maybe in your opinion. But not very many people would think that.

and besides, this is basically a "might makes right" argument. Just because god would have the power to inflict his will on us doesn't mean he's right

But then, the question one should ask is "are we right then?"
If God's not right, are we? We are people who only know 0.01 to the power of infinity of God's knowledge and yet we act like we know what is truly right and what is truly wrong?

or that our opinions on how we should be left to live in peace and cooperation is nothing compared to his opinion that we should live our lives in abject prostration, and murder those who don't oblige.

I could say that even for Atheism there is a strange, forceful tendency as if Atheists almost demand people of religion to believe their Atheism. They may say they do not care about it, but the way they speak and their actions against religion, specifically Christianity, tell otherwise.

Just my two cents.

[ant]

if god were a reality, should we be comforted that whatever it fancies is The Right Thing?

I've noticed what is most consistent about your expressions of the existence/non existence of a "god" is that it is a very limited perception.

You continually harangue about a god that posses human characteristics.
What is this talk from you about a god who "fancies" this or that?

We can talk about how you fancy jeans, french fries, ice cold beer, women in red lingerie. and other things that titillate your fancy. We can not discuss what the creator of a universe or universes fancies. It simply and quite possibly is beyond your limited conception. Have you ever stopped to think about that? No, because you continue to bully the god of the old testament. A god that possess human qualities because of a very elementary understanding of it at that particular time in man's evolution.

There can be no god who acts like the god of the old testament. Therefore, there is no god. That essentially is your reasoning.

And don't give me your explanations about nature being able to explain everything as an orderly accident.

You do not understand the complexity of nature. You do NOT understand consciousness. You do NOT understand how consciousness came into being.
You do NOT understand quantum physics. Nobody does, Johnson. Not even some of your favorite physicists.

You simply do not understand and can not convince anyone with an iota of intelligence, wonder, and awe that a god of some sort does not exist.

[Interbane]

We should. But what if what God thought was the right thing goes contrary to what men think the right thing is?

Then we should base our choice on what produces the most human flourishing. What god thinks is the right thing has historically lead to untold horrors, wars, and bloodshed. What men think is the right thing has lead to the same thing!

If you want a set of morals that maximizes human flourishing, don't look that far into the past. Neither god's rules nor ancient man's rules have served us well. Check the humanist manifesto's that can be found across the web. They will give a good account of what "the right thing" is. We have advanced, in spite of many men's demands that we revert to ancient ineffective moral frameworks.

The best that can be done is that we re-interpret the old moral frameworks to the modern age. In almost every case, the interpretations tend progressively. They match up to what we've found increases human flourishing, and deviate from the literal interpretations found in the bible. No sane person today thinks we should kill women for disobeying laws regarding their sexual tendencies.

If the populations were truly innocent, then God would be considered corrupt.

Show me a single population where every member is deserving of rape and death. That is a fantasy used to rationalize away the brutality found in the bible.

You do not understand the complexity of nature. You do NOT understand consciousness. You do NOT understand how consciousness came into being.
You do NOT understand quantum physics. Nobody does, Johnson. Not even some of your favorite physicists.

When some people face the current state of human knowledge, they wiggle in their seats demanding a "certain" answer. Uncertainty is like poison to them. They would rather have false certainty than truthful uncertainty. Gaps in our knowledge do not point to a god ant, and do not reflect badly on science or philosophy. Until humans have complete knowledge of how the universe works, there will be uncertainty and unknowns. That's inevitable. It is not an argument that supports the idea of a god.

[JFRobot]

Show me a single population where every member is deserving of rape and death. That is a fantasy used to rationalize away the brutality found in the bible.

It is my belief that, in technicality, every man including myself deserves death. Rape? It's one of the products of the reason why we deserve death

[JFRobot]

if god were a reality, should we be comforted that whatever it fancies is The Right Thing?

I've noticed what is most consistent about your expressions of the existence/non existence of a "god" is that it is a very limited perception.

You continually harangue about a god that posses human characteristics.
What is this talk from you about a god who "fancies" this or that?

We can talk about how you fancy jeans, french fries, ice cold beer, women in red lingerie. and other things that titillate your fancy. We can not discuss what the creator of a universe or universes fancies. It simply and quite possibly is beyond your limited conception. Have you ever stopped to think about that? No, because you continue to bully the god of the old testament. A god that possess human qualities because of a very elementary understanding of it at that particular time in man's evolution.

There can be no god who acts like the god of the old testament. Therefore, there is no god. That essentially is your reasoning.

And don't give me your explanations about nature being able to explain everything as an orderly accident.

You do not understand the complexity of nature. You do NOT understand consciousness. You do NOT understand how consciousness came into being.
You do NOT understand quantum physics. Nobody does, Johnson. Not even some of your favorite physicists.

You simply do not understand and can not convince anyone with an iota of intelligence, wonder, and awe that a god of some sort does not exist.

It's been my observation that most atheists and agnostics will bully the God of the old testament. They tend to attack that God more than they do the others.

Anyone notice how strange that seems? They're mostly fine with gods like Krishna or Allah....but God? The Atheists hate him!

[Interbane]

It is my belief that, in technicality, every man including myself deserves death.

Right, the babies deserved having their skulls smashed in. We are speaking of something specific here, don't drift to generalizations. Is this really what you believe?

[johnson1010]

I attack the nonsensical claims presented to me on the basis that they are nonsense, and not rooted in any evidence to support them.

If i dealt with muslims, hindus, ancestor worshipers, or wicca on a daily basis, and was continually confronted with transparently false stories presented as absolute truth, they would get treated no differently, directly proportional to the amount of nonsense contained, and to what degree it was asserted to be true.

You do not understand the complexity of nature. You do NOT understand consciousness. You do NOT understand how consciousness came into being.
You do NOT understand quantum physics. Nobody does, Johnson. Not even some of your favorite physicists.

Qualitatively, yes i do. Quantitativly no i don't. I have a pretty decent understanding of it. I have a pretty good understanding of it. I am an amatuer enthusiast, so i'm sure a working physicist would be able to explain better than i, and probably point out things that i've got wrong, but lets just say i haven't got NO idea what i'm talking about.

[johnson1010]

I might also take issue with the statement that nobody understands quantum physics.

Certainly i've heard that said before, just as you have. even by the pioneers of the field. But i think this is meant in a different way than you are using it.

If nobody understands quantum physics then we wouldn't be able to use it. But we do. all the time.

In fact, it is very widely used by any number of physicists all over the planet who use it to make some of the most accurate predictions the world has ever seen.

But do they have a conceptual, easy to imagine, "physical" grasp of it? Not so much. It is a major stumbling block of quantum physics that it isn't like newtonian physics, where this experiment basically boils down to billiard balls colliding, or an inflating balloon, or the arc of a cannonball. Quantum physics is so hard to get a handle on conceptually as in "this thing is doing this to this thing" because of the fundamental nature of quantum behaviors. They don't behave like little balls whizzing around, or waves exactly, because both of those phenomena are a result of the quantum behaviors, not the other way around. we have no day to day experience with individual quantum behaviors, and that's what's so confusing about how it does what it does.

So, in a way, "nobody understands it." But that doesn't mean there's nothing to say about it. It doesn't mean that anything at all can happen because we don't know how to analyze it, or that it is completely opaque to human understanding. That just isn't correct.

[Doulos]

I attack the nonsensical claims presented to me on the basis that they are nonsense, and not rooted in any evidence to support them.

If i dealt with muslims, hindus, ancestor worshipers, or wicca on a daily basis, and was continually confronted with transparently false stories presented as absolute truth, they would get treated no differently, directly proportional to the amount of nonsense contained, and to what degree it was asserted to be true.

Careful you're not throwing out baby with his bathwater.

I think you would be correct that many Biblical stories are not history or fact in the way that modern 20th century Western humanity would understand them. This does not mean that general events did not happen, but rather that the specific styles and genres of writing in the ancient near east do not correspond to our own modern ones.

ie. Biblical statements that 'we killed all' obviously do not always mean that literally, as evidenced by the reappearance of those people shortly after in the text. I was speaking to an Afghani recently (of the Gurjar people) because I found he grossly exaggerated certain themes in his writing. When I spoke to him about this, he agreed with me that people from his culture would have understood his meaning clearly, but that it created confusion for Western readers. I would suggest that much of OT writing in particular needs to be looked at in this context.