Does anyone recall a past thread called ‘Oh by the way...’?  It involved someone named Hires who quoted mass amounts of writings about something refered to as the ‘Moral Law’.  This idea is what I’m talking about.

This entire thread was based on parody??  Oops.  Well, I guess this goes to show that non-christians can be just as gullible as christians when it comes to an appealing story.  (I’m thinking here of the Onion story about Harry Potter promoting Satanism.) Sorry Randall if I seemed like a giggling atheist-- actually, I believe in god, but not in a way easy to describe, so I’m not really an athiest.  As for ‘The Passion’, it’s a movie, okay?  I can’t see it as anything more than that-- it may be a movie that has huge repercussions socially or just a movie that makes a ton of bucks, but the movie ISN’T your faith.  It’s just one guy’s version of events that may or may not happened. 
If I sound flip, it’s because I find all this divisiveness deeply depressing.

Paddington, if you want to get into the whole Moral Law debate then take it to the forums where there’s still a thread dealing with that topic that has been argued to death at this point.

“Argued to death”?  Does that mean that my arguments and ideas are now useless “at this point”, purely becuase others have been unable to convince you of anything that you havn’t concluded as your idea for the meaning of the world?  I just thought that this idea may be relevant to this little dicussion. 

And tell me what you think of this:

Atheism is too simple.  If the world has no meaning, then we never should have found out that it has no meaning.

*Sigh*

“Argued to death”? Does that mean that my arguments and ideas are now useless “at this point”, purely becuase others have been unable to convince you of anything that you havn’t concluded as your idea for the meaning of the world? I just thought that this idea may be relevant to this little dicussion.

No, it means you should go read what’s already been said before you try to start over at the very beginning for the umpteenth time. It would also be best to take your ideas onto the proper forum thread where a discussion on this is already underway.

And tell me what you think of this:

Atheism is too simple. If the world has no meaning, then we never should have found out that it has no meaning.

First, I think it’s the most ridiculous assertion I’ve ever heard. Second, in science often the simplest answer is the correct one.

That’s interesting that my little quote seems like a ridiculous assertion to you, because it seems perfectly logical to me.  Does an animal know it’s an animal? Does a table know it’s a table?

It is ridiculous.

Atheism doesn’t assert that the world has no meaning, last time I checked. It simply asserts that there is no higher being. Or in my case (Deism) that there is no higher being that ever has, or ever will, directly communicate with us and “reveal” things. All the answers are already here...in the perfect balance of things, the laws of physics, cause and effect. And maybe if people would quit trying to find all the easy answers in a book of fairy tales and look around, they’d begin to see it.

We’re not special. We’re just mammals with extra brain power. Science is our only hope for even beginning to find any answers to the “big” questions. But until people abandon their load superstition, that’s going to be difficult.

Brandi

According to my observations, life does have meaning, last time I checked.  When I was an athiest, my main argument against the idea of God was that the world seemed so cruel, and totally unjust.  But where had this idea of just and unjust come from?  One does not call a line jagged unless one has some idea of a straight line.  What was I comparing this world to when I called it cruel?  If the whole universe is bad, why did I, who is a part of this universe, find myself in such violent reaction to it? 

I could very well have given up my idea of just and unjust by saying it wasn’t anything more then a private idea of my own.  But as soon as I did that, my idea against God collapsed too - for the argument was built on saying that the world was really unjust, not simply that it was not what I wanted it to be. 

Thus, in the act of trying to prove that God did not exist (that the whole of reality was senseless), I found I was forced to assume a part of reality - my idea of just and unjust - was full of pure sense. 

Consequently, athiesm turned out to be too simple.  If there were no light in the world and thus no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark.  Dark would then be a word without meaning.

That’s interesting that my little quote seems like a ridiculous assertion to you, because it seems perfectly logical to me.

That’s not surprising at all. There are a lot of people who think ridiculous assertions sound perfectly logical. You’re certainly not the first to show up here and try to pass off a ridiculous assertion as perfectly logical.

Does an animal know it’s an animal? Does a table know it’s a table?

And the above just clinches my point. It’s just silly. Here’s a perfectly logical question that is just as silly: Have you tried asking them? Obviously you consider animals and tables as being at the same intellectual capacity as yourself (which I’m beginning to think might be true in your case) and thus capable of contemplating such concepts. If animals and tables have that level of intelligence then supposedly they should be able to communicate with us so then the question becomes if you’ve bothered to ask an animal or a table if it is self-aware. Go try it. We’ll wait.

According to my observations, life does have meaning, last time I checked.

It certainly has meaning for me, but that’s because I give it meaning. You seem to feel it has meaning above and beyond what you attribute to it. So enlighten us to what that meaning is.

When I was an athiest, my main argument against the idea of God was that the world seemed so cruel, and totally unjust.

Certainly a common argument, but not necessarily the best one. At best it’s one part of a larger collection of problems. It does ignore the idea that there could be a God who allows the world to be unjust.

But where had this idea of just and unjust come from? One does not call a line jagged unless one has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this world to when I called it cruel?

I’ve never understood why so many believers seem to think mankind isn’t capable of developing abstract concepts without the help of a God. Why so many of them seem to ignore the educational input of their own parents who pass on their values on what right and wrong, just and unjust are as we grow up and thusly we pass them onto our children. I also find it amusing that so many of them insist that there is a single standard of what is just and unjust or right and wrong when it’s apparent to anyone who looks around them that there is a wide variety of opinions on just what these words mean to those individuals. Simple arguments for simple people I suppose.

If the whole universe is bad, why did I, who is a part of this universe, find myself in such violent reaction to it?

What makes you think the whole universe is bad? I certainly don’t. It’s neither good nor bad, it just is. If all you saw in the universe was unending cruelty then I’d say you had a pretty twisted outlook to begin with.

I could very well have given up my idea of just and unjust by saying it wasn’t anything more then a private idea of my own. But as soon as I did that, my idea against God collapsed too - for the argument was built on saying that the world was really unjust, not simply that it was not what I wanted it to be.

Which only shows that you had a poor foundation for your argument against God. Not that God exists.

Thus, in the act of trying to prove that God did not exist (that the whole of reality was senseless), I found I was forced to assume a part of reality - my idea of just and unjust - was full of pure sense.

And this just shows you don’t seem to be capable of forming valid reasons why something could be considered just or unjust without an external excuse to rely on. Sounds like you didn’t give this much thought.

Consequently, athiesm turned out to be too simple. If there were no light in the world and thus no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would then be a word without meaning.

They only thing here that’s too simple is your argument. This actually made me literally laugh out loud.

First, let’s rip apart your explanation. Dark is the absence of light so if there weren’t any light we probably wouldn’t have a word like “dark” to describe the idea that there isn’t any light. Your whole argument is dependent on the idea that we would bother to define a word like “dark” if we didn’t have knowledge of what light is. Why would you think we’d bother to define such a word if we didn’t have a need for it?

Secondly, you’re implying that words have definitions independent of what people give to them which is just silly. When the Dictionary writers sit down to write out the definitions of the words we use they don’t suddenly start praying like crazy to find out what God decrees a particular word means. They study what words people are using and the common definitions behind those words that those people accept.

Thirdly, you’re implying that humans aren’t capable of coming up with words to describe a concept without some outside influence when I can sit here and make up all sorts of nonsense words and assign definitions to them that would hold no meaning for anyone outside of myself. If I can convince enough other people to make use of those words then they could become part of the common language and end up in a Dictionary. The abstract word “cyberspace,” for example, didn’t exist or have any meaning until William Gibson first used it in a novel. For the longest time it only held meaning to fans of his novels and if you mentioned it in casual conversation with non-fans it wouldn’t mean anything to them. Eventually it got used and explained enough that it entered into common usage and thus has meaning for most people. Now you’ll find it in the dictionary. But back when he first wrote that word to describe the abstract concept of the future Internet it didn’t have any meaning to anyone other than Gibson.

If these simple arguments was all it took to get you to believe in God then I’d say you were probably more of a believer to begin with. Though I suspect the truth is more along the lines that you were never an atheist to begin with.

You never mentioned which particular religion’s concept of God you decided to believe in. Which God do you think actually exist and what about these simple arguments you’ve posed was it that made you decide that particular concept of God was the right one?

Ignoring the the fact that this thread has been completey derailed by the sort of people who should have to get a licence before they can own a computer and getting back to the original spirit - How about going to the opening of a new MAC store in a Bill Gates costume?

If I looked anything like Bill Gates I’d probably take great joy in doing that sort of thing.

First off, I came across this site about 20 minutes ago and I’ve come to the conclusion that this is the best damn site I have ever been to. I would love to find Wendell and give him a high five. As for all the discussion and contoversy I have found only one fact. There will always be violent christians. They are all throughout history, they exist today in movie theaters, and will be here everyday after tomorrow.

Hazard,,,

There will always be violent christians. They are all throughout history, they exist today in movie theaters, and will be here everyday after tomorrow.

that is a genius statement when you think about it,,"""they are all throughout history, they exist today in movie theaters"""" of course we see in the news everyday of the violence in theaters committed by the radical christian.

do you believe that only christians or violent?
is christianity the only violent religion?
is it the most violent religion?
is it more violent than islam?
is it more violent than the kkk?
is it more violent than the gangsta rap world?

is case you did not notice, the wendell story was a fabrication, that was suposed evidence of the intolerant, unforgiving christians in our world today.

do you believe that christianity in its true form is a violent religion.

if you believe that whatever violence you see in christianity today is not limited to christians, then why bring it up.

if everyone has violent tendencies why point it out in christians.

that would be like you saying ...hey christians have feet”....we all have feet. 

you may not be a physical violent person, but are you a verbal violent person?....

just asking,,,i am interested to find out about this violent sect of christianity terroizing the world today.

the KKK are very religious you know.

RANDALL, religions are like the biggests empires that exist...and to dominate they must use violence....or they will be defeated by intellectuals who are not endoctrinated.
“THAT IS WHAT THAT MOVIE IS ABOUT”
Jesus chose to be non-violent.
With his words he could have built an army...but he did not. I guess he wasn’t interested in power.
Look around you...read some history...it is in every country.

I guess it is the instinct of wanting to belong to a community that pushes some of us to become defenders of the faith. Not Jesus or the bible.

Les

People who all believe in God may be devided according to the sort of God they believe in.  There are two very different ideas on this subject.  One of them is that He is beyond good and evil.  We humans call one thing bad, and another good.  According to some people that is our human point of view. 

These people would say that the wiser you become the less you want to call anything good or bad, and the more clearly you would see that everything is good in one way and bad in another, and that nothing could have been different. 

Thus, these people think that long before you got anywhere near the devine point of view the destiction would have disappeared altogether.  We call a cancer bad, they would say, because it kills a man; but you might as well say a successfull surgeon is bad becuase he kills a cancer.  It all depends on the point of view.

The other idea is that God is ‘good’ and ‘righteous’, and a God who takes sides, who loves love and hates hatred, who wants us to behave in a certain way and not in another. 

The first idea is Pantheism.  The other view is held by Jews, Mohammedans and Christians.

With the idea of Pantheism and the Christian idea of God, there is usually another.  Panthiests, as far as I know, believe that God animates the universe as you animate your body: that the universe almost is God, so that if the world did not exist then He would not exist either, and anything that one might find in the universe is a part of God. 

The Christian idea is obviously quite different.  The think God made the universe - like a man making a picture or composing a tune.  A painter is not a picture, and he does not die if his picture is destroyed.  One may say that “He has put a lot of himself into it,” but they only mean that all it’s beauty and interest has come out of his head.  His skill is not in the picture in the same way that it is in his head, or even his hands. 

If you have not taken the distiction between good and bad very seriously, then it is easy to say that any thing you find in this world is a part of God.  But of course, if you think some things are really bad, and God really good, then you cannot talk like that.  You must believe that God is separate from the world and that some of the things that we see in it are cortrary to His will. 

When Panthiest are confronted with cancer they say, “If you could only see it from the devine piont of view, you would realise that this also is God.” The Christian replies, “Don’t talk nonesense.” For Christianity is a fighting religion.  It thinks God made the world - that space and time, heat and cold, colours and tastes, and all the animals and vegetables, are things that God ‘made up out of his head’ as a man makes up a story.  But it also thinks that a lot of things have gone wrong with the world that God has made, and that God insists on putting them right again. 

And this is what raised the original question.  If a good God made the world why has it gone wrong?  And for many years I just flat out refuses to even listen to the Christian answeres to this question.  I kept of feeling ‘whatever you say, and however clever your arguments are, isn’t it much easier and simpler to say that the world was not made by an intelligent power?  Aren’t all your arguments a complicated attempt to avoid the obvious?’ And then, this led to me start thinking about this idea of justice, which I wrote about earlier.

OK Paddington, now tell me something I don’t already know. Like… which of these two versions of a believer do you consider yourself to be? Which is what I basically asked you in the first place.

Or you could go back and answer any of the other questions I posed to you that you skipped over. Have you had any success yet with asking the animals or the table if they’re aware of their own nature yet?

But if you’re just going to explain concepts to me that I already have a clear understanding of then don’t waste your time.

serg r,,,

why did you tell me what you did in your post.  do you not understand that Christianity is not a religion.  do you not think that i know what the movie The Passion of The Christ is about.  of course i know that religion wanted Christ crucified.  religion today crucifies him afresh evreyday.  the media crucifies christ afresh everyday, and so do those like me who say they believe, and FOLLOW Christ who knowing commit sin, over and over.

...Look around you…read some history…it is in every country.

is christian violence in every country today serge r????  i see violence against christians in a lot of places

did you know that in saudia arabia it is a common thing to bring christians into the street on fridays and punish them in from of others to humiliate then because the simply share their beliefs??

i could go on and an but i guess...

intellectuals who are not endoctrinated

wouldnt care to hear the stories in fear they are too viloent.

in my post directed to HAZARD, i was asking him to show me the violence in CHRISTIANITY.  he implied violent christians were every where.

if you were questioning is kkk is religious and yes the kkk do believe they are a religious group. reasearch it. talk to some.

but i was simply asking where do christians rank in the most violent groups of america the world today????

Les

I believe in a literal Bible and am a follower of Jesus Christ.  I believe Christianity is God’s statement to us certain quite unalterable facts about his own nature, not a ‘religion’ that God invented. 

Christianity is not something that someone would have guessed, like reality. For instance, when you have grasped that the earth and all the other planets all go around the sun, you would naturally think that all the planets were made to match - all at equal distances from each other, or at least distances that regularly increased, or all the same size, or else getting smaller or bigger as they get further away from the sun. 

But really, you find no rhyme or reason (that we can see) about either the sizes or the distances; and some of them have a moon, one has two, one has four, some have none, and one has a ring.

Reality is usually something you could not have guesses.  That is one of the reasons why I believe Christianity.  It’s a religion that you could not have guessed.  If it offered us just the kind of universe we had expected, I may feel
we were making it up.  It has just the weird twist about it that real things have. 

What is the problem?  A universe that contains much that is obviously bad and meaningless, but containing creatures like ourselves who know that it is bad and meaningless.

The view of Christianity is that this is a good world gone wrong, but still retains the memory of what it ought to have been.  Dualism is the belief that there are two equal and independant powers at the back of everything, one of them good and the other bad, and that the world is the battlefield that they fight out an endless war.  I think that Dualism is the manliest and most sensible creed on the market.  But it has a catch in it. 

The two powers, or spirits, or gods - the good one and the bad one - are supposed to be quite independent.  They both are to have existed for all eternity. Neither of them made the other, neither of them has any more right than the other to call itself God.  Each thinks that it is good and the other bad.  One of them likes hatred and cruelty, the other lilkes love and mercy, and each backs up it’s own view. 

Now what do we mean when we call one the ‘good power’, and the other the ‘bad power’?  Either we are saying that we happen to prefer one to the other - like preferring beer to wine - or else we are saying that, whatever the two powers think about it, and whichever we humans, at the moment, happen to like, one of them is actually wrong, actually mistaken, in regarding itself as good. 

If we mean that we prefer the first, then we must give up talking about good and evil at all.  For good means what you ought to prefer quite regardless of what you happen to like at any given moment.  If ‘being good’ meant simply joining the side you happened to fancy, for no real reason, then good would not deserve to be called good. So we must mean that one of the two powers is actually wrong and other actually right.

But the moment you say that, you seem to be putting into the universe a third thing in addition to the two Powers: some law or standard or rule of good which one of the powers conforms to and other fails to conform to.  But since the two powers are judged by this standard, then this standard, or the Being who made this standard, is farther back and higher up than either of them, and He will be the real God.  In fact, what we meant by calling them good and bad turns out to be that one of them is in a right relation to the real ultimate God and the other in a wrong relation to Him. 

The same point can be made in a different way.  If Dualism is true, then the bad Power must be a being who likes badness for its own sake.  But in reality we have no experience of anyone who likes badness just becuase it is bad.  The nearest we can get to it is in cruelty.  But in real life people are cruel for one of two reasons - either becuase they are sadists, that is, becuase they have a sexual perversion which makes cruelty a cause of sensual pleasure for them, or else for the sake of something they are going to get out of it - money, or power, or safety.  But pleasure, money, power and safetly are all, as far as they go, good things.  The badness consists in pursuing them by the wrong method, or in the wrong way, or too much.

I do not mean that the people who do this are wicked in any way. I do mean that wickedness, when you examine it, turns out to be the pursuit of some good in the wrong way. You can be good for the sake of goodness, but you can not be bad for the sake of badness.  You can do a kind action when you are not feeling kind and when it gives you no pleasure, simply becuase kindness is right; but no one ever did a cruel action simply becuase cruelty is wrong - only becuase cruelty was useful or pleasant to him.

And let the plaigerism begin!!!!!!!!!

I’m looking forward to Les reading and responding to this one. I hope he does…

I wonder if Paddington knows/is Hires.

Welcome back DB.  Get lost on your way back from Austraila?  You really need to register on the forums and pick this up there.

Don’t think this is DB unless he really improved both his typing and his writing style while he was in Australia, does feel a lot like Hires these days though. More of that good old cut-n-paste stuff going on. I may have to close this thread early and point it to the forums.

Paddington, again, you’re posting stuff I already know. The post previous to your cut and paste session was reasonable and I thought about responding to it last night, but decided against it at the time.

As for your conclusion that you believe in Christianity because, like reality, it’s “something you could not have guessed” all I can say is: What the fuck? That’s some seriously fucked up thinking you got going on there.

Les, why does that seem so ‘fucked up’?  Many people say that Christianity is totally a man made religion.  But I believe it becuase the complications of it could not have been thought up by any person.  It’s way too complex. Guessing it’s complexness seems overly impossible for our puny minds.