EPTEven if God is "evil" or "good", there's nothing you can do about it, if he really exists. So what if he made Eva eat the apple, kill people or w/e. Going to sue him? If he's almighty there's nothing you can do but to bow down.
Refute my logic. - Page 2
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Perfect Assassin
Mexico56 Posts
Even if God is "evil" or "good", there's nothing you can do about it, if he really exists. So what if he made Eva eat the apple, kill people or w/e. Going to sue him? If he's almighty there's nothing you can do but to bow down. | ||
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Track
United States217 Posts
On September 01 2009 03:23 HuskyTheHusky wrote: While I'm sure most anyone who's read any of my posts already knows my beliefs, I will just say, you are a brave brave soul for dating someone who is extremely Christian while you are not yourself. Now, I dont have anything against them (except the ones that try to convert me), but I cant imagine falling in love with someone who has such extreme different views. Thats just me though, and its good to hear you two are able to make it happen. That aside, as someone posted recently (forget if it was here or another forum), being an atheist is just denying one more god than all the gods Christians deny. Thus your logic rox! Edit: I'm not really atheist btw... I just know Christians think they're all going to hell etc etc. That's just the thing though, we AREN'T able to make it happen.  . I'm having to compromise, which I'm not really okay with, but I'm willing to do it to be with her, as intellectually heinous as that is. Since you are a deist, I will offer my argument since I consider myself to be one as well. To note, however, seeing your sophiscated argument I think mine may not be good enough, but I will try. First we will establish the faith for an all-loving being, call it God. Since you are a deist as you claimed, I trust that you have no problem with God, but may get sore noses on the "all-loving" part. In my personal opinion, if you cannot have the faith that any possible supreme beings are all-loving and all-good, there is little point left in deism (and you might as well go athiesm). If you can do that, the rest is quite trivial (we don't need omnipotency or any other bullcraps). The Christianity God is all-loving and all-good, which is compatible what I have described earlier. Therefore, there is no reason why you should not believe it, as you should be compatible with its moralities, etc.. If, however, it turned out that the Christian God is not the real God, that should be OK since the all-loving, all-good real God will forgive you for making such mistakes - you were simply fooled for a clever con-artist. This is an intriguing concept. I certainly concur with your assertions regarding an "all-loving" God, and it does give me a bit of a sore nose. I have no problem with accepting Christian morals, etc(though admittedly not the applications of those morals throughout history, nor most of the morals in the Old Testament). The only thing in my way of accepting Christian belief is the contradictions within it: namely that of free will that I talked about in the OP. How can I believe Jesus died for my sins if he caused me to sin in the first place by setting my variables to make sinning inevitable? -- Misrah, here's the thing. In what I wrote in the OP, I concluded that, from our premises regarding what we know of God(in a Christian sense anyway), God DOES control us. That's the whole point: I think I've defeated free will. Therefore we do NOT have control over our actions. We cannot be held accountable for behaving in a manner in which we were created to. If I were to accept, as you say, that it's "all part of his plan", then I'd have to come to terms with the fact that God DOES want man to suffer, that God DOES want man to behave in an evil fashion, and that he is happy with all the strife and unhappiness and despair that occurs on Earth, since he directly caused it by causation. Can we call that creature God that behaves in such a manner? Certainly not a benevolent one, anyway. Railxp, I wish it were that easy, honestly. But we simply can't agree to disagree on this point. | ||
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Hieros
United States83 Posts
On September 01 2009 03:51 Mah Buckit! wrote: "God is dead" - Nietsche Saying free will doesn´t exist is madness. I think I saw a research which said that our brains make decisions before we "make" them, so in a way I think free will exist but it might not be our conciousness that makes the decisions. Firstly, you misspelled Nietzsche. Secondly, I don't think Nietzsche himself believed in such a thing as free will. He certainly despised Kant's ethical system and its notion of the transcendental agent, which is the canonical example of an explanation and defense of a "free will", that is, being a self-legislating being able to act upon logical reasons that come from oneself (not that this does justice to Kant, but I'm really not that concerned in that anyways- there are plenty of modern day Kantians to do that). Thirdly, why would you think there is such a thing as free will, and (more importantly) what do you mean by those words? | ||
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cosiant
Canada616 Posts
On September 01 2009 03:27 HuskyTheHusky wrote: This picture I've found also angers a lot of Christians I've talked to. Though honestly I dont really get into religious debates anymore. People will believe what they've always believed and almost never change (at least from a single conversation). + Show Spoiler + ![[image loading]](http://www.hennessy.id.au/quentingeorge/archives/god-v-satan.png) And don't you fucking forget it. | ||
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Sixer
United States278 Posts
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Track
United States217 Posts
On September 01 2009 04:04 Hieros wrote: Firstly, you misspelled Nietzsche. Secondly, I don't think Nietzsche himself believed in such a thing as free will. He certainly despised Kant's ethical system and its notion of the transcendental agent, which is the canonical example of an explanation and defense of a "free will", that is, being a self-legislating being able to act upon logical reasons that come from oneself (not that this does justice to Kant, but I'm really not that concerned in that anyways- there are plenty of modern day Kantians to do that). Thirdly, why would you think there is such a thing as free will, and (more importantly) what do you mean by those words? I believe there is free will because I'm a Deist, and I don't believe God gives two shits about what we do. The proof I provided was operating under Christian premises. By free will I mean operating under one's own power with no external agent affecting(or effecting) decisions. | ||
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bN`
Slovenia504 Posts
3. Given premise 1, God does not make mistakes, and he fully understands the consequences of everything he does, since he knows the future. So he fully understands the consequences of natural disasters, people killing in his name etc etc. This is guy is just made of love man, oh and btw he needs some cash. Drop him a buck or two next time you're in church. On a less cynical and much more hilarious note. Just look at the platypus. P.S.: I used to be very serious with a Christian girl a couple years back. While I let her know upfront that I'm not really into Christianity we still had a nice, initially non-conflicting time together. However, fate-induced or not, she tried change me from my normal cynically sarcastic self. Constantly telling me to smile and that God loves me and whatnot. It didn't work out. | ||
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SwEEt[TearS]
Canada1575 Posts
![[image loading]](http://img.allvoices.com/thumbs/event/598/486/18181940-conventional-logic.jpg) | ||
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citi.zen
2509 Posts
Even in very narrow and seemingly well defined fields such as math or physics, things we used to think were "True" with a capital T often turned out to not be so. Doing geometry on a disc (non-Euclidean space) is rather different than doing it in the usual Cartesian plane, and all sorts of weird things happen (infinite number of parallels to a line through a fixed point, sum of angles in a triangle is not 180 degrees, etc. etc.). This is just a tiny example of how limited and system of reference dependent our knowledge is: there will always be "stuff" we do not know. A Christian priest/minister would rephrase this (admittedly roundabout) discussion as follows: God's wisdom is infinite and cannot be questioned or comprehended with our limited human understanding. If you want to believe, do so. If you do not, your choice / damnation / etc. + Show Spoiler + By the way, some people would argue that being somewhat irrational and / or hard to accept ADDS to the usefulness of a religion, to some degree. Religion is about signalling to others you share a common set of beliefs, that you are a good person by a commonly accepted standard. This was HUGE a while back, when laws were not well enforced, there were no credit score and so on. This also means there need to be some costs associated with producing this signal, otherwise everyone could "fake it" and get the benefits of instant acceptance. Hence the memorized passages, church attendance, funny hats, circumcisions, flagellation, etc... A prediction could then be that as the usefulness of the signal diminishes (perhaps governments get better at taking some of these functions over) the "harshness" of religion decreases. | ||
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Hieros
United States83 Posts
On September 01 2009 04:08 Track wrote: I believe there is free will because I'm a Deist, and I don't believe God gives two shits about what we do. The proof I provided was operating under Christian premises. By free will I mean operating under one's own power with no external agent affecting(or effecting) decisions. I was replying specifically to that poster, as I am generally skeptical of people quoting Nietzsche out of context. (The God is Dead quote, for example, first appears in the Gay Science (book V if I recall correctly) in an account of a madman that is a reference to an old Greek philosopher (note that he holds a lantern in the daytime, can't remember which one off the top of my head) and is, as almost goes without saying, highly metaphorical and hardly a statement as simple as that the notion of God is incoherent.) But to take up a similar question, what do you mean by operating under one's own power without an affecting/effecting agents? Do you need the notion of not being under the effect of other agents to lack free will? Please explain. | ||
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SanguineToss
Canada815 Posts
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Track
United States217 Posts
On September 01 2009 04:12 citi.zen wrote: You are going about this the wrong way. God (or the lack thereof) are not demonstrable propositions. Even in very narrow and seemingly well defined fields such as math or physics, things we used to think were "True" with a capital T often turned out to not be so. Doing geometry on a disc (non-Euclidean space) is rather different than doing it in the usual Cartesian plane, and all sorts of weird things happen (infinite number of parallels to a line through a fixed point, sum of angles in a triangle is not 180 degrees, etc. etc.). This is just a tiny example of how limited and system of reference dependent our knowledge is: there will always be "stuff" we do not know. A Christian priest/minister would rephrase this (admittedly roundabout) discussion as follows: God's wisdom is infinite and cannot be questioned or comprehended with our limited human understanding. If you want to believe, do so. If you do not, your choice / damnation / etc. + Show Spoiler + By the way, some people would argue that being somewhat irrational and / or hard to accept ADDS to the usefulness of a religion, to some degree. Religion is about signalling to others you share a common set of beliefs, that you are a good person by a commonly accepted standard. This was HUGE a while back, when laws were not well enforced, there were no credit score and so on. This also means there need to be some costs associated with producing this signal, otherwise everyone could "fake it" and get the benefits of instant acceptance. Hence the memorized passages, church attendance, funny hats, circumcisions, flagellation, etc... A prediction could then be that as the usefulness of the signal diminishes (perhaps governments get better at taking some of these functions over) the "harshness" of religion decreases. I understand that logic cannot be accurately applied to God's person in general. But, when one makes sweeping claims about the natural world(ie, that God created everything, and wants us to behave in a certain fashion), how do you not apply logic to that? If God is an inherent contradiction in what we understand to be true, how can that be reconciled? The simple addition of faith merely precludes one from needing to ask questions, or from caring what the answers are. | ||
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SanguineToss
Canada815 Posts
On September 01 2009 04:19 Track wrote: I understand that logic cannot be accurately applied to God's person in general. But, when one makes sweeping claims about the natural world(ie, that God created everything, and wants us to behave in a certain fashion), how do you not apply logic to that? If God is an inherent contradiction in what we understand to be true, how can that be reconciled? The simple addition of faith merely precludes one from needing to ask questions, or from caring what the answers are. You just answered your own question right there. | ||
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Track
United States217 Posts
On September 01 2009 04:16 Hieros wrote: I was replying specifically to that poster, as I am generally skeptical of people quoting Nietzsche out of context. (The God is Dead quote, for example, first appears in the Gay Science (book V if I recall correctly) in an account of a madman that is a reference to an old Greek philosopher (note that he holds a lantern in the daytime, can't remember which one off the top of my head) and is, as almost goes without saying, highly metaphorical and hardly a statement as simple as that the notion of God is incoherent.) But to take up a similar question, what do you mean by operating under one's own power without an affecting/effecting agents? Do you need the notion of not being under the effect of other agents to lack free will? Please explain. An example of what I mean would be this: we don't consider a confession given when an policeman is breaking your fingers to be one made of free will. You can clearly see how there is an external agent(ie, the policeman) operating on your decision making, coercing you into doing something. In much the same way, albeit a more fundamental one, God shaped our thoughts, and our thoughts are what make us sin, so how can it be said that we sin against God of our own free will, when his influence is effecting our decisions? No, you need the notion of not being under other agents to HAVE free will. If there ARE agents operating on you, be they policemen or God, you can't be said to be operating of your own volition. Only when there are NO agents affecting your reasoning can it be said that you're operating under your own free will. SanguineToss, do you see any flames? There are no rules preventing discussion of religious concepts, so if you disapprove of my blog you can feel free to not take part in the discussion. | ||
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AcrossFiveJulys
United States3612 Posts
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Navane
Netherlands2748 Posts
Apply this to your case. | ||
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Picture
Canada75 Posts
On September 01 2009 04:27 Navane wrote: God is so powerful, that He can create a sword which can and at the same time can't destroy the shield he made. Which is very strong too. It's like quantum mechanics; God is so powerful that he can make 1 = 0. Apply this to your case. I cant believe you didnt use the burrito quote from the Simpsons instead. And yes if omnipotence exist we wouldn't be able to understand it with our logic. | ||
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Track
United States217 Posts
Navane, could you elaborate? Are you simply proposing that God is inherently paradoxical and that as such these questions simply do not have answers? | ||
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niteReloaded
Croatia5281 Posts
Nondualistic teachings make much more sense, and are actually able to withstand logical questioning. | ||
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qrs
United States3637 Posts
The entire argument against free will is based on the axiom that everything must have a prior cause, which itself has a cause, and so forth. It's natural to think this way, since in the world around us things work that way, but ultimately the chain of cause-and-effect cannot run forever. In fact, one variation of this is an argument for the existence of God: a cause for which there is no prior cause. If you don't believe in God, perhaps you believe in a Universe that just exists, but again, that would be something without a cause. Once you are willing to go that far, I don't see a problem with believing in free will. This would mean that the self-aware consciousness that you think of as "you" (the soul, if you like), has the ability to make decisions independent of the factors that go into them. Suppose, for instance, that you have the desire to smoke a cigarette, and the knowledge that eventually, smoking will pose a hazard to your health. For argument's sake, let's suppose that no other factors go into the decision. Sure, you could posit that one of the two factors must have a stronger weight in your mind. But can't you also conceive of the possibility that a third quantity is able to decide between the two? What is the decision based on? It doesn't have to be "based on" something other than the soul itself. Free will is the self's ability to make decisions. Specifically, it's premise 4 that I take issue with. Premise 4 seems to imply that all decisions must be founded on a deterministic thought process. If one believes in free will, he believes that this is not the case. By the way, the little I know about quantum mechanics doesn't square with determinism either. Do you believe in stuff like Schrodinger's cat? edit: PS- this took a bit of time to write; therefore, some of the later posts in this thread had not yet been posted when I began to write it. Apologies if anything I wrote is redundant | ||
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