Posted on 02/08/2013 5:37:02 PM PST by grey_whiskers
Oh, and btw, you wrote
Whatever it is that we are asking Him for has to come from Him.
Speaking of Christian music, why does this remind me of Sixpence None The Richer? (whose name also derives from C.S. Lewis)...
Cheers!
Yes, private intuition, but not completely. Every individual reacts to situations based on instincts and conditioned learning. In human societies, that would be consensus rules that formed to keep the social order intact, more or less, so that the individual may accrue the benefits of being part of that society, and the society as a whole may benefit from the contribution of that individual. You wouldn’t have a tenth of the chance you had in surviving as far as you did, were you to have been a “lone wolf”, living a solitary existence. For you to enjoy the protections and benefits of society, you are expected to follow those consensus rules. Killing, murder, infidelity, etc. all promote factors which break down society, and lo and behold, you have disparate cultures independently forming similar rules on these topics (of course, with the “free love” era we are in, we are already seeing the effects of that violation in our own societies today).
Let me answer you by asking you this question: Were you totally, completely, utterly comfortable with 1 Samuel 15:3 as you chanced upon it? Is (or was) there anything inside you that made you find the verse troubling? If not, why not, and if so, why? If your god had granted you the power to edit, would you rather have preferred that the verse about this god-entity ordering a man to kill infants to have not been associated with that same god? Answer honestly.
As for the beef, it’s in my plate. Fifty percent, Grey_Whiskers. 50%. That’s how many human conceptions end up being spontaneously (naturally) aborted by the mother’s body almost always without her even knowing about it... that’s nature for you. In all its callous glory.
If God has the right to send people to Hell forever, then He has the right to kill them here.
For the 50% -- so what? What are you doing, since it bothers you so much, to advance medical research to the point that these short-term miscarriages never happen?
Nice try, though.
I liked the quote by South Park’s Trey Parker.
“Basically ... out of all the ridiculous religion stories which are greatly, wonderfully ridiculous — the silliest one I’ve ever heard is, ‘Yeah ... there’s this big giant universe and it’s expanding, it’s all gonna collapse on itself and we’re all just here just ‘cause ... just ‘cause’. That, to me, is the most ridiculous explanation ever.”
While he certainly isn’t religious himself, it certainly casts light on just how ridiculous the atheists’ position is, as well.
LOL, not so fast.
You have no problem that the infants needed to be allowed to be conceived, by a supposed god which wanted them destroyed, not by its own efforts (which it could have avoided having to do so, by preventing their conception), but by the hand of a man, ordered to stomp, chop and slice babies as if they were scrub vegetation? I don’t believe you. Mind you, their short lives would also imply that they didn’t have any free will to exercise their options, as to whether they truly deserved “Hell” or not. If this god could foresee their eventual behaviour beforehand, then what was the point of their conception in the first place, and their premature destruction before they actually committed evil? If you don’t see a problem with the entire arrangement, I don’t have much to say other than that I assume you are lying (to yourself, and to me) about your level of comfort with it.
You would have to endure massive levels of cognitive dissonance almost to the level of what would classify as a psychological disorder, in order to “zone out” of the internal contradictions you are forced to deal with, here. On top of that, accepting such a god for its “recorded” behaviour would make it impossible for you to make a moral case against someone’s belief in, say, Allah. Since your version of god can do anything it wants (even contradict itself) then where is the limit? Nowhere.
The point about the spontaneous abortions was to highlight the callousness of existence, of suffering which has no meaning, no purpose. There is little that can be done to save them because their destruction was induced by the mother’s body due to mechanisms evolved which prevent her body from bringing these embryos to term - because of the risk they would eventually pose to the mother’s survival. Artificial intervention to force a body to continue a pregnancy to term which would have naturally been ended would involve causing more damage than good. Not to mention privacy violations because devices would have to be put in place in the mother’s body to detect such a fertilisation, as the mother herself is not aware most of the time.
Work your way through all this and let me know your thoughts.
Since you are an atheist, all you have is reason. And liver.
The laws of thermodynamics guarantee the extinction of all life: we know of know life anywhere except Earth, so focusing on life is actually an instance of the narrow, provincial "geocentrism" for which the medieval Christians were so roundly castigated.
And if all you have is probabilities, then you have no morality from which to declare "killing is wrong."
What you are doing is taking an emotional view, using it to try to bootstrap socially shaming arguments, and trying to bludgeon me into agreeing that Christianity is unaware of evil.
Which is absurd even on the social level, since the worldwide symbol of Christianity is that of a religious minority, an itinerant manual laborer under military occupation, who was betrayed by His friends, convicted by a kangaroo court of His culture, and executed under torture by the occupying authority, by a method so painful that its very name has become a synonym for "painful torture".
And even more absurd on a Theological level, for Christianity's tenet is that this Man is God Himself, come to partake in our suffering and death ("he has tasted death for every man") and in doing so, to destroy the ultimate power of death.
Your opinion is inconsistent. I'm comfortable with mine.
Cheers!
The laws of thermodynamics... ahem, if I may interrupt, there is no proof or theory available to us that tells anything conclusively about the ultimate fate of the Universe. The latest findings based on Dark Matter and Dark Energy lean towards supporting a Cyclic Model. All life (in the present cycle) may indeed be extinguished, not only by the laws of thermodynamics, but even by something as lowly as a meteor strike. Life can rise again, and fall again, with each cycle. Not quite as "geo-centric" or "narrow" as you might be wont to conclude, if the Universe does operate in cycles.
And if all you have is probabilities, then you have no morality from which to declare "killing is wrong."
Re-read my previous comment. I explained this, Ref: societal obligations. Self-preservation is survival. If an individual entity benefits in terms of survival from its physiology and its environment, the individual's self-preservation will correspond with the preservation of the aforementioned variables. For man, society forms a core part of his success as a species. Anything that breaks society down, harms man's survival in turn. Murder would be one of those things (coincidentally recognised more or less universally by disparate cultures as, ahem, immoral). Likewise, other things.
What you are doing is taking an emotional view, using it to try to bootstrap socially shaming arguments, and trying to bludgeon me into agreeing that Christianity is unaware of evil.
All I did was show you a self-contradiction in your adopted dogma. Too bad you feel you were being bludgeoned; that was not the intent. When you said you didn't experience any difficulty in accepting a divinity figure ordering a man to slaughter infants, I recognised you were lying. My mention of the same earlier was not questioning your acceptance of your god's plans that lead to the slaughter - that is a given, akin to how a believing Muslim sees no lapse in morality when his faith compels him to eradicate non-Muslims by the means sanctioned in the Quran - I was asking if you were comfortable with the slaughter itself. Are you admitting that you would have wanted those infants to be cut up, even if you had the choice/power to edit things, you being granted in advance the property that your edits wouldn't change the ultimate conclusion of the narrative? You implied you would, but the only people I know who are comfortable with slaughtering infants are psychopaths.
Which is absurd even on the social level, since the worldwide symbol of Christianity is that of a religious minority, an itinerant manual laborer under military occupation, who was betrayed by His friends, convicted by a kangaroo court of His culture, and executed under torture by the occupying authority, by a method so painful that its very name has become a synonym for "painful torture".
LOL, now you are resorting to the same thing you accused me of adopting: appealing to emotions. As if no human died a more painful death than crucifixion.
Bone cancer is excruciatingly painful, and lasts for years as the disease takes its course, and the ones suffering don't have the luxury of knowing for a fact that they can transcend death (because they know they aren't divinity). And even more absurd on a Theological level, for Christianity's tenet is that this Man is God Himself, come to partake in our suffering and death ("he has tasted death for every man") and in doing so, to destroy the ultimate power of death.
Just to remind, that 'Man' isn't the same 'man' as you are. Blurring the distinction does no one any good. The 'Man' knew he could transcend death, but 'man' doesn't. Important difference.
It's cute. It thinks it knows science.
Have you noticed that thermo has been experimentally confirmed; but not only that, it gives its results even without relying upon the atomic model?
Whereas we have no experimental evidence to confirm cycles; it's still vaporware.
Re-read my previous comment. I explained this, Ref: societal obligations.
I read it. But it's pointless. Not as a pejorative, but a description of its relation to science. Science states that individuals and species go extinct all the time; whether localized short term changes in the environment such as a flood or famine, changes in the ecological niche (receding of Ice Age glaciers kind of helped do in the Saber Tooth Viking Kitty), or the Earth being struck by a whipped cream pie (Hugo-award winning Science Made Stupid, now unfortunately out of print), or yet again, the Sun following its evolution to Red Giant, or, longer still, the Heat Death of the Universe.
Life dies out.
So whence comes your insistence that "survival good, death bad" ?
You implied you would, but the only people I know who are comfortable with slaughtering infants are psychopaths.
Naah. You're failing to realize moral development over time. People did that kind of thing all the time back then: you can even find one of the Jewish prophets speaking to a messenger from a foreign king, "I'm looking at you odd because the Lord is showing me the devastation you will cause in Israel. Killing infants and ripping open women with child."
And the dude replies, "Who is your servant, that he should do this great thing?"
The prophet answers, "The Lord has shown me you will be the next King over Syria."
So the guy goes home, smothers the King of Syria in his sleep, and assumes the throne.
Or you have the quote in Psalms, "Woe to you, Babylon you devastator! Happy is he who does to you what was done to us! Happy is he who takes your little ones and dashes them against a rock!"
But, you know, this kind of thing still happens quite often in the modern, civilized, enlightened 20th century: as the diary of Japanase troops who invaded (IIRC) the Philippines talk about "we came across a pregnant woman today. We stuck our bayonets her huge belly and skewered her like a piece of meat." (Try the Time-Life series on WWII for that quote.)
Or, for that matter, the infamous Rape of Nanking by Imperial Japan, which was so bad, that John Rabe, the official representative of Nazi Germany to Imperial Japan, became horrified to the extent that he wrote a personal letter to Adolph Hitler appealing for clemency on humanitarian grounds.
Or the Holmodor, where official testimony before the US Congress of survivors related people eating their own children -- which was also prophesied, and happened, in the Old Testament.
Or the practice of under Mao's terror of decapitating a family member then forcing the survivors to sleep in a bed with the remains.
Or the Palestinian terrorist who attacked a family and hacked them to death including infants; or the other one who came across a dad and his four-year-old daughter, shot the dad to death first, and then picked up the girl and bashed her head in against a rock, so the last thing she remembered was the death of her father before her eyes.
If I really thought death bothered you, you'd be complaining about these more recent examples, rather than the GNUatheist approach of "OOH, look, I found this bloodthirsty God on an atheist site and I'll cut and paste and humiliate this Christianist because I know his Bible better than him."
The problem with this, is the same as with the other supposed gotcha of "why doesn't God heal amputees?"
They are both reduced cases of theodicy, relying on novelty for emotional impact.
It's not working.
LOL, now you are resorting to the same thing you accused me of adopting: appealing to emotions. As if no human died a more painful death than crucifixion.
No, it's easier than that. You thought you were going to wow me with suffering, because to you, Christianity is just SWPL, so I would be horrified if I knew what the world was "really like."
I just showed how your central contention was based on a chronic *mis*understanding of Christianity. You tried to pretend that if you came up to me and made a big scary face "BWUHAHAHAHAHA" I'd shit my pants and run. Which is funny, because a generation or so ago, the big fad among atheists was attacking Christianity as merely being a crutch for those who were hopeless in this life -- opiate of the masses and all that; the exact opposite of the current fad of accusing Christians of being spoiled and indifferent.
I guess the KGB-type controllers behind all your organizations figured out that it wasn't working, and also figured nobody would notice if they suddenly did a 180 on their accusations.
You atheists are too stupid to notice; as G.K. Chesterton pointed out, it begins to look as if no stick is too weak or absurd with which to try to attach Christianity.
If death bothers you, great. It's supposed to...but there is nothing in scientism which justifies this belief; whereas Christ came down and was resurrected to defeat death. You're barking up the wrong tree.
Incidentally -- as far as killing children, it's the atheist Peter Singer who advocates killing unwanted healthy children after birth at the mother's whim.
Suck on that.
Jews *used* to kill, but only within strict geographical boundaries; Christians killed, to counter hundreds of years of forcible conversion and invasions from Islam, then began pissing matches with each other (note, for the nonce, the Christians outgrew it from within, whereas the Muslims haven't even had anything corrsponding to the Reformation); Atheists began killing with the French revolution, then the Russian revolution and have left everyone else in the dirt in terms of body count: and if you read the exhortations of the Socialist and Communist leaders, you will find that they openly and continuously speak, almost in terms of sexual lust, for torture and death. And their deed follow them.
Similarly with the Muslims.
But that's not allowed to get mentioned, because shut up, because you're only supposed to prove your open mindedness by attacking Christianists.
You remind me of the Film Actors Guild from Team America:
Nice try.
Ah, rats, I thought it was going to be about Phil Keaggy.
Thanks for the ping!
Have you noticed that thermo has been experimentally confirmed; but not only that, it gives its results even without relying upon the atomic model?
Whereas we have no experimental evidence to confirm cycles; it's still vaporware.
Your point being? Relativity took approx. 50+ years to confirm experimentally. The Dark Energy / Dark Matter findings are barely half a decade old, and their ramifications on the older models are not so easy to brush off under the carpet, so much so even the famed Cosmological Constant is under consideration for revision. So... no sale. And by the way, the Cyclic Model does not conflict with Heat Death necessarily (Baum-Frampton Model, 2007).
I read it. But it's pointless. Not as a pejorative, but a description of its relation to science. Science states that individuals and species go extinct all the time; whether localized short term changes in the environment such as a flood or famine, changes in the ecological niche (receding of Ice Age glaciers kind of helped do in the Saber Tooth Viking Kitty), or the Earth being struck by a whipped cream pie (Hugo-award winning Science Made Stupid, now unfortunately out of print), or yet again, the Sun following its evolution to Red Giant, or, longer still, the Heat Death of the Universe. Life dies out. So whence comes your insistence that "survival good, death bad"?
Quite simple, really. Survival implies the preservation of the mechanisms promoting life. Survival has necessitated evolutionary mechanisms that force pain to be felt when survival is threatened - a hard-wired encoding relegating survival as "good" and death as "bad". The models that didn't hard-code this way, failed for obvious reasons, validating the importance of survival to life. You ought to try harder than this.
Naah. You're failing to realize moral development over time. People did that kind of thing all the time back then: you can even find one of the Jewish prophets speaking to a messenger from a foreign king, "I'm looking at you odd because the Lord is showing me the devastation you will cause in Israel. Killing infants and ripping open women with child."
And the dude replies, "Who is your servant, that he should do this great thing?"
The prophet answers, "The Lord has shown me you will be the next King over Syria."
So the guy goes home, smothers the King of Syria in his sleep, and assumes the throne.
Or you have the quote in Psalms, "Woe to you, Babylon you devastator! Happy is he who does to you what was done to us! Happy is he who takes your little ones and dashes them against a rock!"
But, you know, this kind of thing still happens quite often in the modern, civilized, enlightened 20th century: as the diary of Japanase troops who invaded (IIRC) the Philippines talk about "we came across a pregnant woman today. We stuck our bayonets her huge belly and skewered her like a piece of meat." (Try the Time-Life series on WWII for that quote.)
Or, for that matter, the infamous Rape of Nanking by Imperial Japan, which was so bad, that John Rabe, the official representative of Nazi Germany to Imperial Japan, became horrified to the extent that he wrote a personal letter to Adolph Hitler appealing for clemency on humanitarian grounds.
Or the Holmodor, where official testimony before the US Congress of survivors related people eating their own children -- which was also prophesied, and happened, in the Old Testament.
Or the practice of under Mao's terror of decapitating a family member then forcing the survivors to sleep in a bed with the remains.
Or the Palestinian terrorist who attacked a family and hacked them to death including infants; or the other one who came across a dad and his four-year-old daughter, shot the dad to death first, and then picked up the girl and bashed her head in against a rock, so the last thing she remembered was the death of her father before her eyes.
If I really thought death bothered you, you'd be complaining about these more recent examples, rather than the GNUatheist approach of "OOH, look, I found this bloodthirsty God on an atheist site and I'll cut and paste and humiliate this Christianist because I know his Bible better than him."
The problem with this, is the same as with the other supposed gotcha of "why doesn't God heal amputees?"
They are both reduced cases of theodicy, relying on novelty for emotional impact.
It's not working.
LOL @ "moral development over time." Suddenly, an "absolute, universal" standard of the "divine" becomes as flaccidly impotent as the vagueries of human consensus-based morality. Divinity tells Saul to slaughter the infants, the natural repulsion to such acts (because they don't promote social cohesiveness, ref: social evolution) sees slaughter as wrong, and the likes of you scream, "Oh, that's the effect of moral development over time!"
Please.
It becomes hard to tell one from the other, ultimately - because both are the products of the human mind, contradicting the qualities of absoluteness.
You've cleverly avoided answering me, though, about your choice if you had the power to edit without distorting the overall theme of the narrative. That was the crux; all else is fluff to avoid addressing that.
No, it's easier than that. You thought you were going to wow me with suffering, because to you, Christianity is just SWPL, so I would be horrified if I knew what the world was "really like."
I just showed how your central contention was based on a chronic *mis*understanding of Christianity. You tried to pretend that if you came up to me and made a big scary face "BWUHAHAHAHAHA" I'd shit my pants and run. Which is funny, because a generation or so ago, the big fad among atheists was attacking Christianity as merely being a crutch for those who were hopeless in this life -- opiate of the masses and all that; the exact opposite of the current fad of accusing Christians of being spoiled and indifferent.
I guess the KGB-type controllers behind all your organizations figured out that it wasn't working, and also figured nobody would notice if they suddenly did a 180 on their accusations.
You atheists are too stupid to notice; as G.K. Chesterton pointed out, it begins to look as if no stick is too weak or absurd with which to try to attach Christianity.
If death bothers you, great. It's supposed to...but there is nothing in scientism which justifies this belief; whereas Christ came down and was resurrected to defeat death. You're barking up the wrong tree.
Incidentally -- as far as killing children, it's the atheist Peter Singer who advocates killing unwanted healthy children after birth at the mother's whim.
Suck on that.
Jews *used* to kill, but only within strict geographical boundaries; Christians killed, to counter hundreds of years of forcible conversion and invasions from Islam, then began pissing matches with each other (note, for the nonce, the Christians outgrew it from within, whereas the Muslims haven't even had anything corrsponding to the Reformation); Atheists began killing with the French revolution, then the Russian revolution and have left everyone else in the dirt in terms of body count: and if you read the exhortations of the Socialist and Communist leaders, you will find that they openly and continuously speak, almost in terms of sexual lust, for torture and death. And their deed follow them.
Similarly with the Muslims.
But that's not allowed to get mentioned, because shut up, because you're only supposed to prove your open mindedness by attacking Christianists.
Lose the hyperventilation. You've lost yourself in irrelevant tangents. Even the Japanese became a docile, lamb-like society from what they were famous for, during WW2 - disproving the exclusivity of the "civilization over time" effect you tried to play out above. As for those "attacks", they've swept the length of the spectrum through the ages, precisely because the arguments are valid.
Two centuries ago:
"What havoc has been made of books through every century of the Christian era? Where are fifty gospels condemned as spurious by the bull of Pope Gelasius? Where are forty wagon-loads of Hebrew manuscripts burned in France, by order of another pope, because of suspected heresy? Remember the Index Expurgato-rius, the Inquisition, the stake, the axe, the halter, and the guillotine; and, oh! horrible, the rack! This is as bad, if not worse, than a slow fire. Nor should the Lion's Mouth be forgotten. Have you considered that system of holy lies and pious frauds that has raged and triumphed for 1,500 years?"
- John Adams, letter to John Taylor, 1814.
You remind me of the Film Actors Guild from Team America.
And you, a card-carrying member of the same?
:^)
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.