Describing Christianity - Page 24

On October 19 2013 03:56 Myrkskog wrote:
The default position is still disbelief.

On October 19 2013 04:34 sam!zdat wrote:


the default is knowing nothing at all about anything. including what the question is and why we are arguing about it in the first place.

On October 18 2013 03:55 packrat386 wrote:

PLease tell me what "tests" you have run to see if there is a god. Given that God exists outside of the material universe, did you go there and look?

he fact that your god is internally consistent does absolutely nothing to answer the question whether it is true. Nothing.

On October 19 2013 05:54 ninazerg wrote:


You didn't go to the North Pole though, did you?

Exactly.

On October 21 2013 23:49 ETisME wrote:
if you would describe Christianity as love, it is a selfish form of love that binds people to follow their rules and banish those who don't.
This is a shame because Christianity as a religion should be spreading love, instead of establishing what are right and wrong.

This is why I dislike religion as a whole.
They started with a very good intention: bring people together, form what's good for the society, teaches love and peace and forgiving EVEN to those that are born in a harsh environment and receive no education.

But now they are just degraded themselves further with arrogance, ignorance, power corrupted etc.
This is what happens when Church has too much wealth and power.

On October 21 2013 23:49 ETisME wrote:
if you would describe Christianity as love, it is a selfish form of love that binds people to follow their rules and banish those who don't.
This is a shame because Christianity as a religion should be spreading love, instead of establishing what are right and wrong.

This is why I dislike religion as a whole.
They started with a very good intention: bring people together, form what's good for the society, teaches love and peace and forgiving EVEN to those that are born in a harsh environment and receive no education.

But now they are just degraded themselves further with arrogance, ignorance, power corrupted etc.
This is what happens when Church has too much wealth and power.

On October 21 2013 23:28 Shiori wrote:


Actually, it does say some rather important things. It doesn't give you truth value, to be sure, but it does give you something, namely consistency. See, while there are notions like Russell's Teapot or the Invisible Pink Unicorn, some of these are less consistent than others, which, while not (always) ruling them out as true, definitely affects their credibility. To take one example, an Invisible Pink Unicorn isn't internally consistent, for a number of reasons. First, it's both invisible and pink, which is a contradiction in terms, and, further, it is generally asserted to be an immaterial entity. But unicorns are essentially (at least insofar as we think of them) physical things; they look something like horses and exist in the material world. A thing cannot simultaneously be material and immaterial in the same respect at the same time. It would be a contradiction in terms.

Of course, I'm sure there are some loopholes you could use to tweak the example to make it less obviously contradictory, but the general point is that the sort of God philosophy concerns itself with is generally a very minimalist, abstract one. Notions like the Flying Spaghetti Monster, therefore, make poor parodies, because their ridiculousness comes from added, physical properties, rather than from an exaggeration of the defined traits of some hypothetical deity.

I think you missed the point of the FSM. Ofc the added properties are physical and thus obviously ridiculous. But you can add any abstract trait to the deity without changing the credibility of it. Just the appeal changes.

So why is god "good, loving and merciful" if he could be "bad, cruel and unforgiving". What if he created the universe to watch us suffer? How do you choose one version over the other but just by appeal?

On October 22 2013 05:04 Shiori wrote:


Not to my mind. The problem I'm getting is that isn't me missing the point of the FSM; it's that those added properties are ridiculous specifically because they're self-contradictory. Again, you can't be an immaterial entity if you are the FSM, because your form is physical. Of course, you could easily tweak the FSM into something with less contingent properties, but I think you'd always end up with contradictions-in-terms any time you try to add physical properties.

The FSM defines itself into non-existence in virtue of its ascription of physical properties. "Spaghetti" refers to a particular thing. To be a "spaghetti monster" isn't really a property at all, because monster doesn't really mean anything, in particular, but that it induces (presumably) fear. That it can fly is fine. Don't get me wrong: I'm not taking the FSM seriously, because I know it's basically a joke/argument ad absurdum, but it fails because it has really nothing to do with any sort of God that a philosopher would be interested in (since they're much more abstract). If there is a deity, even the use of Occam's Razor (ironic, I know) would eliminate any twisted, physical-but-not-physical, spaghetti-laden creatures.

On October 22 2013 05:04 Shiori wrote:


I think (and I really hope it's true, or else the human race is fucked) that moral decision making is fundamentally a matter of reason. A maximally powerful, hyper-intelligent (i.e. way more intelligent than, say, a human being) would, to my mind, probably be at least as moral as we are, on average. I don't think you need to be a genius to figure out that killing persons (whether they be humans or aliens) is a pretty terrible thing to do. I'd like to think that an entity with the ability to do literally anything possible would be able to wrap its head around that.

Basically, I don't think you could be in the position of an evil deity (with the evil deity's level of knowledge/intelligence) and engineer needless suffering, because personhood is discrete. It's not like humans to ants. Once you're a person, you're a person. Any moral agent is a moral agent. This, to me, makes the notion of an evil-but-supremely-intelligent/powerful deity completely ridiculous. If such a thing could exist, then it would stand to reason that, given its knowledge/intelligence, it would probably know more about morality than we do. So you have a dichotomy (or nearly, anyway) between our morality being wrong but us not being smart enough to understand that, or that this evil moral agent is improbable relative to a less-evil moral agent.

On October 22 2013 07:17 Hryul wrote:


great. you are still shooting at something that isn't there.

On October 22 2013 05:04 Shiori wrote:


I think (and I really hope it's true, or else the human race is fucked) that moral decision making is fundamentally a matter of reason. A maximally powerful, hyper-intelligent (i.e. way more intelligent than, say, a human being) would, to my mind, probably be at least as moral as we are, on average. I don't think you need to be a genius to figure out that killing persons (whether they be humans or aliens) is a pretty terrible thing to do. I'd like to think that an entity with the ability to do literally anything possible would be able to wrap its head around that.

Basically, I don't think you could be in the position of an evil deity (with the evil deity's level of knowledge/intelligence) and engineer needless suffering, because personhood is discrete. It's not like humans to ants. Once you're a person, you're a person. Any moral agent is a moral agent. This, to me, makes the notion of an evil-but-supremely-intelligent/powerful deity completely ridiculous. If such a thing could exist, then it would stand to reason that, given its knowledge/intelligence, it would probably know more about morality than we do. So you have a dichotomy (or nearly, anyway) between our morality being wrong but us not being smart enough to understand that, or that this evil moral agent is improbable relative to a less-evil moral agent.

But you start your thinking with humans to deduct the properties of a deity. We are as successful as we are because we are teamplayers/gregarious animals. Launching a space shuttle or passing knowledge becomes impossible for "the lone ranger" type of animals.

From this we also deduct our morality: It's wrong to hurt anyone of my species because it weakens the group. It could also happen to me etc.

This is a rough sketch but I hope you get the idea.

Now an all powerful deity isn't anything like that. It doesn't rely on others to help it. It doesn't need a group of scientists to develop anything. It builds the entire universe on its own. Why should it have a morality caring for others instead of an "everyone is on its own"-type? It created the universe. Why should it care for tiny molecules in it if it could collapse it in the glimpse of an eye and rebuild another one?

But I think another strong point comes from the ST:voyager episode "Death Wish": Imagine you have every puzzle solved, every mathematical theorem proven, thought of every possibility. Wouldn't the existence as an all-powerful being not be boring? How couldn't it be.
So you either create a universe with a lot of Drama in it simply to be entertained or you commit suicide.

On October 22 2013 08:18 Shiori wrote:


That's kinda the point.





This is an evolutionary account of why humans tended toward certain modes of behaviour. It is not an ontological grounding for morality (whether or not something "weakens the group" is irrelevant without a presupposed value judgment). I like to think that, even if we went back 5000 years, murdering people would still be wrong, and if people disagreed it would be because they were ignorant, not because murder was magically a good thing before someone formalized it.

On October 22 2013 01:37 IronManSC wrote:


Not every church is like this. I know mine isn't. Please don't generalize and say that all Christian churches are bad now. You just haven't been to a good church yet.

On October 22 2013 09:55 ETisME wrote:

Of cause, I am sorry if I offended anyone.
But it's my belief that if the church remains in a structural order, such as the core church saying gay marriage is not acceptable, no matter what teachings there are,the church has failed to set an example of understanding and loving because it sets command of the fellow Christians to follow their decision.

But I think another strong point comes from the ST:voyager episode "Death Wish": Imagine you have every puzzle solved, every mathematical theorem proven, thought of every possibility. Wouldn't the existence as an all-powerful being not be boring? How couldn't it be.