The Religious Thread

[M. Beaux-Eaux]

Blaise said:

Why did God create predators? How did they fit into the Grand Plan? Is this part of Intelligent Design? Enlighten me if you can.

The prime function of every human being is to enlighten him- or herself. No-one can do it for you. A teacher will find you when you are ready. If at first you don't succeed you will try again (and again).

[franko]

Blaise said:

Why did God create predators? How did they fit into the Grand Plan? Is this part of Intelligent Design? Enlighten me if you can.

1. God didn't invent Predators, Bettman did.
2. Expansion fees.
3. Nothing to do with Bettman is intelligent.

[Toronthab]

Blaise said:

Why did God create predators? How did they fit into the Grand Plan? Is this part of Intelligent Design? Enlighten me if you can.

As I re-read the posts on this too good thread, ya really have to give it to habs-fan-in-la. If not the arguments, for sure pithiness, l'esprit du corpus.

Great question. Predators. living through the deaths of other living things. the shear mountain of evil. I find Augustine's definition of evil to be the finest ever offered. Evil is the abscence of a good that should be there.

I just got in from some great tennis, but what you are asking about is usually discussed uner the rubric of "The Problem of Evil", and I think that most reasonable theologians would probably generally agree that predation is hardly a great sign for a supposedly loving God. John Stuart Mill wrote the best piece I ever came across aginst there being a God in his sumptuous description of the problem of evil.

At this moment I am suffering the abscence of a hot but dead chicken that should be in my stomach. A good thing. I will return to bore you some more. There are answers to the problem of children being left by all of us to starve, moral evil, and mountains that slide down on people in their "golden "years. They don't provide emotional satisfaction, but they are reasonable and sound. Further, as I recall, they are in the field of apologetics and not strictly philosophical. Now, I've got to get that dead prey.

[blaise]

Toronthab said:

At this moment I am suffering the abscence of a hot but dead chicken that should be in my stomach. A good thing. I will return to bore you some more. There are answers to the problem of children being left by all of us to starve, moral evil, and mountains that slide down on people in their "golden "years. They don't provide emotional satisfaction, but they are reasonable and sound. Further, as I recall, they are in the field of apologetics and not strictly philosophical. Now, I've got to get that dead prey.

Perhaps you are using the rationalization that you didn't kill it, and what the heck, it would only decompose or be gnawed by rats if you didn't eat it.

Of course, in their relatively brief tenure on earth, humans have slaughtered more animals than all of the lions, wolves, sharks, and pythons combined. And none of those predators ever fashioned adornments from skulls, feathers, or hides.

[Toronthab]

Blaise said:

Perhaps you are using the rationalization that you didn't kill it, and what the heck, it would only decompose or be gnawed by rats if you didn't eat it.

Of course, in their relatively brief tenure on earth, humans have slaughtered more animals than all of the lions, wolves, sharks, and pythons combined. And none of those predators ever fashioned adornments from skulls, feathers, or hides.

You're right. There certainly does seem to be a dirth of animal artisans. Aristotle's final cause argument holds that that which constitutes an end to the highest degree is THE REASON FOR THE EXISTENCE OF ALL THAT WENT BEFORE IT. If you were to ask him what causes grass to exist, he would say that you are the cause of grass. You have more perfections, you are being to a higher degree. Your unreflective responses, your natural actions would ordinarily find you choosing to run over a lawn rather thatn run over a child. Or a cat.

I don't find I need to rationalize eating meat, much more than cereal, but I definitley do grant you the seriousness of the whole question of predation.

Back to final cause, the end or purpose for which things exist. Interesting to note that Aristotle an awesome scientist who's idea of god incidentally was "Thinking thinking", thought that the ultimate cause of all motion and all changes was love. That which moves others without itself being moved, like a beautiful girl at a bus stop turning all (or at least most) of the heads of the football players on the bus going by. Carrots move rabbits, and even planets are drawn to one another.

[Toronthab]

Blaise said:

Why did God create predators? How did they fit into the Grand Plan? Is this part of Intelligent Design? Enlighten me if you can.

I found the following treatment of the problem of evil of a Catholic apologetics site and rather liked its' directness. It was not as you will see if you read it ordered towards a totally secular mind but seems pretty practical and realistic.

The Problem of Evil

By E.I. Watkin

First I would insist as a truth certain to any unprejudiced mind that good exceeds evil. In every department of experience, I maintain it with the utmost confidence, the amount and force of good far exceeds the amount and force of evil. We must not, with so many modern observers, exaggerate the world’s evil. If evil were equal to good in degree and in quality, in power and reality, why do we regard it, rather than good, as a problem requiring solution? Why should we expect to find goodness in the universe, in our fellowmen, unless man’s fundamental nature is good and the fundamental nature of the universe is good? If anyone tells you he has found more evil in his fellows than good, we may well inquire of him whether he believes himself to be more evil than good. I do not think he will readily admit this preponderance of evil in his own character. It is true that the saints speak as though the evil in them enormously exceeded the good, if, indeed, they are not wholly evil, but this language is explained by their realization that the good in them is the gift of God (the sole source of all goodness natural and supernatural), the evil alone from themselves. This, however, is not the position of our pessimist. His complaint is that there is actually more evil than good in men. If, however, he is unwilling to apply this to himself, what ground has he to place himself among a favored minority? . . .

It is also true that nature does not directly subserve human purposes. If, however, nature did thus immediately reflect an ethical order, there would be no moral test: Man would be compelled to be good by obvious self-interest. If the course of evolution had been perfectly and immediately ethical, or if natural laws immediately served man’s moral and rational needs, moral and intellectual conflict, his toilsome and painful advance and struggle toward good, would be at the least gravely attenuated. But what if this struggle, this toilsome and painful advance, were itself among the highest goods, among the most ethical and spiritual ends of creation? No one of a truly spiritual insight would, I think, deny this. Nevertheless spiritual progress and struggle need not have been so slow, so toilsome, so painful, so costly of waste and failure as they have in fact been; and we are compelled to seek a further cause for these apparently unnecessary evils. Catholic doctrine declares this further cause to be sin—original and actual. But of this, more hereafter.

While a predominance of moral good over evil is thus a demonstrable fact of experience, there is perhaps more to be said for a predominance of the lesser evils, pain and sorrow, over pleasure and joy. But if the greater good—that is, moral good—predominates over the greater evil—that is, moral evil—then it must be admitted that good still predominates over evil, even if we must grant that the lesser—the physical—evil of suffering outweighs the lesser—the physical—good of happiness. Whether this be actually the case is highly debatable. Much can be said on both sides of the question.

Most probably it is impossible to reach a certain answer of universal application. In any case the goodness of God is not refuted even if suffering weighs down the scale. For if the Christian doctrine be true, and we are discussing the problem from that supposition, there is no reason to expect an excess of happiness in this life. On the contrary Christ has promised his followers, suffering in this world, joy in eternity; the cross here, the crown hereafter. Indeed, the Church teaches, and with the Church is the unanimous consent of all mystics and deeply religious souls, sinful man cannot in the very nature of things attain to the spiritual happiness for which he was created, without suffering. Purgatorial suffering, whether in this world or in the next, is the inevitable passage and entrance into the divine joy. There is, moreover, so the experience of the noblest and holiest souls bears its consentient witness, a peculiar and a sovereign joy in the suffering itself when rightly borne, a joy which surpasses all other joys attainable on earth and renders the suffering as desirable to them as it is hateful to us who do not share their secret.

That modern man tends to adopt a world outlook in which evil predominates is largely due to a psychological change. This psychological change, in virtue of which his valuations are differentiated from those of his ancestors, may be described as an increased sensibility to suffering, a decreased sensibility to sin. The latter is not a decreased sensibility to all forms of moral evil, for the modern man often possesses a heightened sensibility toward many forms of such evil. But it is a decreased sensibility to the evil of a will freely averted from the divine law. The increased sensibility to suffering is clear gain. For the increased sensitiveness of any organ means an increased utility and delicacy, an increased perception. To charge the modern soul with a weak sentimentality because of its keener and more delicate apprehension of pain is as if the shortsighted man charged the keen-sighted with a perverted imagination or the pagan polygamist taxed the Christian monogamist with a hypersensitive conscience in the matter of purity. But the decreased sensibility to sin has produced an exaggerated notion that evil in all its forms is independent of free will, and a failure to see also the purgative and expiatory values of suffering. It also leads men to regard suffering as an evil equal to, if not worse than, moral evil. This radical perversion of values cannot fail to give birth to a distorted vision of experience, an unfounded pessimism which is unable to deal with the problem of evil because it sees that problem in a false perspective. If, on the other hand, we realize that good is more natural, more powerful, more real, more widely extended, more deeply rooted than evil, we shall be able so to perceive the divine origin of the world, and God working in the world of human experience, that we can in peaceful faith commit its unsolved and insoluble problems into the hands of our heavenly Father.

Not only is evil less extensive, less potent, and less real than good, it has no existence apart from the good. In this sense, and in this sense only, it may be said to be unreal. For evil is not a mere absence of good, it is an absence of due good, of good that ought to have been present; hence, a privation. A privation, however, may be extremely real. What more real than famine? To people slowly dying of starvation, their lack of nourishment is the most actual and dominant reality of their experience. Yet privation of food is obviously a nonentity. If it is asked how evil, being merely a privation, can possess its hideous force, its power of destruction, of infection, I reply that this force, this power to infect and destroy, is grounded not in the evil as evil but in the positive and therefore good thing or person in which that evil inheres. Evil as such is powerless. Only sub specie boni, that is, in virtue of something good to which it belongs, is it a force whether of attraction or destruction. The destructive power of gunpowder is per se a good thing, capable indeed of good use when, for instance, it destroys not a Gothic cathedral but a piece of rock which obstructs a line of railway. Men never sin for the sake of evil but for the sake of some good. Consider even wanton cruelty, sheer delight in the infliction of pain for its own sake. Psychology shows that even this apparently unmixed love of evil is a perversion of the desire to exercise power—in itself a good desire—combined in extreme cases with a nervous perversion whereby the infliction of pain causes pleasure. Consider again the infectious power of manufactured war or class-hatred. This power depends on an appeal to positive instincts in themselves good, social instincts of love and loyalty to a nation or class of our fellow men. The evil lies in limitations such as blindness to the good in other groups, ignorant credulity, mental laziness, lack of selfcriticism, and the like.

Evil, then, is a negative thing, even while it is something very real. If we admit a positive entity in evil, we cannot escape one of two alternatives. Either there is a radical dualism in the constitution of reality, a bad principle in opposition to the good God, or evil is a reflection and participation of the one ultimate reality, that is to say, a reflection and participation of divine nature in one of its aspects. . . But this negativeness of evil does cut at the root of any pessimism which would see evil as more than, or as equal to, the good in the world or which would ascribe evil to the fundamental nature or the source of reality.

These general considerations directed against an exaggerated pessimism should make us see evil not as the dominant fact of experience but at most as an imperfection however extensive in a universe essentially good. But if the universe and its order are essentially good, the goodness of its Author is not rightly called in question by an imperfection whose cause is at worse unknown. It would be equally unjustifiable to deny the genius of an artist because a portion of his picture was seriously damaged or because even a considerable portion of that picture were in such darkness that no coherent design could be made out.

[blaise]

This is too Panglossian for me.

What if the Nazis had WON?

What if the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and the Hutus in Rwanda had had greater resources?

Evil COULD have triumphed despite the philosophies which decree that good must win out because it is morally superior.

If good is extirpated on earth, there is no guarantee that it will be found in the afterlife. That is the most dubious supposition in human thought.

[franko]

A lot of Protestant thought centres on the erroneous assumption that God exists for mankind’s (well, the individual evangelical Christian’s) happiness. He doesn’t. They/we need to deal with it. Sometimes life just sucks. Does it mean that God doesn’t care about me? No. It means that what I have done and what others have done has influenced what happens on this planet – sometime to the detriment of its inhabitants.

[blaise]

I haven't visited this thread in awhile. Here goes some cage rattling:

Who's the greatest abortionist in the universe? Why, it's God of course. Only one third of all conceptions result in live birth. God easily surpasses all the physicians and back alley butchers in His wantonness. Why doesn't the Pope chastise and threaten to excommunicate God for sins against the innocent?

Intlligent design? The designer doesn't know his/her/its ass from its elbow, considering all the defects in human and other mammalian anatomy and the very existence of mutation. Let the believers in intelligent design absentmindedly stroke their male nipples and flex their weak backs and flat feet and squint with their astigmatic, myopic eyes and rewire the glitches in their nervous systems. Whoever came up with this design couldn't pass Shop 101. The True Believers must be blind to the defects they were born with, not to mention that many of them have to endure cosmetic ugliness and embarrassingly inadequate penises.

[Toronthab]

Blaise said:

This is too Panglossian for me.

What if the Nazis had WON?

What if the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and the Hutus in Rwanda had had greater resources?

Evil COULD have triumphed despite the philosophies which decree that good must win out because it is morally superior.

If good is extirpated on earth, there is no guarantee that it will be found in the afterlife. That is the most dubious supposition in human thought.

Panglossian! What a great word! I will use it desfois but probablly won't remember to give you proper credit. I did warn that responses to the problem of evil aren't emotionally satisfying. They are however, not too shabby. Evil not only could triumph...take the used IBM laptop, I bought only to screw it up gooood. Evil triumphs all over, all the time. Everything is a struggle. But the nature of evil remains what it is , an absence of something that should be there. Blindness, a broken arm, losing the idea that people have a value beyond my desires....look at our economy , the poor.
Evil is always a taking away from what is good. It has no positive nature. It negates.

It's hard..everyday... not to get too distracted by evil even in its' banality. Best movies ever...."Jean de Fleurette" and "Manon of the Spring" won best foreign in Britain 1988. Treat of the problem of evil...and Manon is beautiful. You will ove the movies if you haven't yet seen them. Subtitles, but you forget about them.

Why be concerned about justice if there is no supranatural Justice, just human expediency. Is there selfless love? What is the "good"?. Are things good insofar as they have being? Is the universe moved by love? Does it become a conscious thing in humans? If we are materially assembled from stardust in an ongoing event that is nothing but mindblowing unless we're really feeling jaded, what is difficult about the idea of being somehow reconstituted? Given the universal desire to live and commune with those we love (somewhat) who went before us it seems plausibe indeed: a hell of a lot more plausible than the absurd unintelligable accident in space notion, which is way too goofy for most, myself included.

If the universe was made for the sole intent of utterly gratuitous love, then the freedom not to love, not to choose the good, to choose the lesser, the unloving is necessarily a part of this or ther can be no freedom.

Gotta go to bed having. Having Panbuggered my defenceless littl laptop my life is now complete

[Toronthab]

Blaise said:

I haven't visited this thread in awhile. Here goes some cage rattling:

Who's the greatest abortionist in the universe? Why, it's God of course. Only one third of all conceptions result in live birth. God easily surpasses all the physicians and back alley butchers in His wantonness. Why doesn't the Pope chastise and threaten to excommunicate God for sins against the innocent?

Intlligent design? The designer doesn't know his/her/its ass from its elbow, considering all the defects in human and other mammalian anatomy and the very existence of mutation. Let the believers in intelligent design absentmindedly stroke their male nipples and flex their weak backs and flat feet and squint with their astigmatic, myopic eyes and rewire the glitches in their nervous systems. Whoever came up with this design couldn't pass Shop 101. The True Believers must be blind to the defects they were born with, not to mention that many of them have to endure cosmetic ugliness and embarrassingly inadequate penises.

Just saw this one after signing off on the last. You big tease you. Oh well..another day, another diatribe.

[blaise]

M. said:

The prime function of every human being is to enlighten him- or herself. No-one can do it for you. A teacher will find you when you are ready. If at first you don't succeed you will try again (and again).

I wouldn't expect you to attempt to enlighten me. The question was posed ironically and was directed to the True Believers. You are a True Believer only in a microcosmic sense, confined to the Canadiens. Without them you are adrift, having lost your faith in humanity. You are martyred by the lockout.

[blaise]

Toronthab said:

Just saw this one after signing off on the last. You big tease you. Oh well..another day, another diatribe.

The believers in Intelligent Design should in all honesty and decency admit that the grand designer was no Einstein. He/she/it didn't have the brains to create an Einstein or a pantheon of other notables. Just think, he/she/it allowed a George W. Bush to become the most powerful ruler in the world. I believe I've said it before, but subatomic particles are classified by their mass. Heavy particles are referred to as baryons. Bush is obviously a lepton. Why couldn't Bush have been one of the two-thirds of embryos or fetuses who undergo spontaneous abortion?

[M. Beaux-Eaux]

Blaise said:

The believers in Intelligent Design should in all honesty and decency admit that the grand designer was no Einstein. He/she/it didn't have the brains to create an Einstein or a pantheon of other notables. Just think, he/she/it allowed a George W. Bush to become the most powerful ruler in the world. I believe I've said it before, but subatomic particles are classified by their mass. Heavy particles are referred to as baryons. Bush is obviously a lepton. Why couldn't Bush have been one of the two-thirds of embryos or fetuses who undergo spontaneous abortion?

Now, now, let's not go anthropomorphizing the Unknowable. That would be a very, uh, "fundamentalist" thing to do. Rather, accept Mystery into your life. Or is that too frightening a step to take?

[blaise]

M. said:

Now, now, let's not go anthropomorphizing the Unknowable. That would be a very, uh, "fundamentalist" thing to do. Rather, accept Mystery into your life. Or is that too frightening a step to take?

I'm an analytical person, Al. I prefer to keep my head clear. I wouldn't drink absinthe or snort cocaine or shoot myself up or believe in an imaginary supranatural being. The only plunge I take into the unknown is falling in love.

[Habs_fan_in_LA]

Blaise said:

Faith, mirages, hall of mirrors, DTs, psychotropic drugs, electrical stimulation of the brain--they can all produce distortions of reality. I just don't want anyone, least of all my government, to preach to me when I'm ill-disposed to receive the sermon. When George W. Bush talks about his faith it produces a retching sensation that prompts me to hit the remote control. I'll have to hand it to organized religions for commissioning great art, architecture, and music. I attend churches only to hear the marvelous oratorios by Johann Sebastian Bach, Heinrich Schütz, William Byrd, Marc-Antoine Charpentier (no, he doesn't play right wing in the QMJHL), and other sublime composers, or to admire the Cologne cathedral or the Sistine chapel.

I am amazed at the people who criticize Bush for his faith based initiatives for after school care of children, but side with the Sunni and Saperlipopettee radicals who promise everlasting martyrdom to murdering fanatics.

[HabbaDasher]

Habs_fan_in_LA said:

I am amazed at the people who criticize Bush for his faith based initiatives for after school care of children, but side with the Sunni and Saperlipopettee radicals who promise everlasting martyrdom to murdering fanatics.

Who here has sided with Sunni & Shiite radicals?
This strikes of Bush logic.
You're either with him or against him.
If you don't agree with him, you agree with the bad guys.
Good and evil.
Black and white.
Sounds suspiciously similar to the way those murderous radicals think....

[Habs_fan_in_LA]

HabbaDasher said:

Who here has sided with Sunni & Shiite radicals?
This strikes of Bush logic.
You're either with him or against him.
If you don't agree with him, you agree with the bad guys.
Good and evil.
Black and white.
Sounds suspiciously similar to the way those murderous radicals think....

I think that you have uncovered the element of truth that differentiates the post 9/11 world from our simple pastoral society pre 9/11.
You are with us or against us!
If you sell guns to the enemy, you are against us.
If you encourage martyrs to blow themselves up, you are against us.
If you sell anti-tank rockets, you are against us.
If you proliferate neuclear bomb production, you are against us.
If you harbor fugitives, you are against us.
Iceland and Switzerland can claim neutrality, but anyone who has airports with departing flights to the US, ships with containers bound for the US, ability to produce anthrax, terrorists in the Phillipines, Iraq, Pakistan, North korea. We now see the world as a dangerous place and have to take lighters and nail clippers away from airline passengers. Wait in long lines to pass through airport checkpoints.
The simple days of neutrality are behind us, and we must seek self-preservation. The alternative of benign coexistance is no longer a safe option.

[blaise]

So what is Dubbya doing about the nuclear weapons programs in North Korea and Iran? Nada! What about his failure to stop Putin from selling arms to Syria and nuclear technology to Iran? And he sure got Putin to stop his undemocratic moves in Russia? And he sure convinced the Europeans not to sell arms to China. Yeah, his foreign policy is a booming success.

By the way, what are these Bush posts doing on the Religion thread? Surely you can read the headlines. There's a thread for Bush, or did you overlook it. Ah, I've got it, Bush is your religion.

[franko]

Blaise said:

I haven't visited this thread in awhile. Here goes some cage rattling:

I was going to ignore the faith-in-logic against faith-in-God diatribes but thought “Hey, I’ve got a few minutes” . . . though I know that we’re so far apart on this particular matter that it doesn’t really matter . . . but it’s fun, no?

Who's the greatest abortionist in the universe? Why, it's God of course. Only one third of all conceptions result in live birth.

Hadn’t heard that one before. Really.

God easily surpasses all the physicians and back alley butchers in His wantonness. Why doesn't the Pope chastise and threaten to excommunicate God for sins against the innocent?

Don’t care about the Pope myself . . . in fact, like Queen Elizabeth should he should step down graciously.

I guess the God-of-the-natural-abortion is one-up on the back-alley butchers in that those who suffer from spontaneous abortions don’t feel an oppressive guilt for actively being involved in the abortion. But since I’ve never had one nor had to make the choice . . .

Intlligent design? The designer doesn't know his/her/its ass from its elbow, considering all the defects in human and other mammalian anatomy and the very existence of mutation. Let the believers in intelligent design absentmindedly stroke their male nipples and flex their weak backs and flat feet and squint with their astigmatic, myopic eyes and rewire the glitches in their nervous systems. Whoever came up with this design couldn't pass Shop 101.

Ah, but [justification alert!] we aren’t necessarily dealing with design but with application of the design. As to the male nipple thing, the designer set the process in motion from the same mould, but didn’t make arrangements for non-essential parts to be removed at completion. For whatever reason.

As to glitches and bodily frustrations . . . part of that comes from the fact that we are created to work and work hard, not sit at desks all day and play on the computer.

The True Believers must be blind to the defects they were born with, not to mention that many of them have to endure cosmetic ugliness

Now now . . .

and embarrassingly inadequate penises.

Speak for yourself. Mine works very well for the work it is intended to do, thank-you-very-much. And for a good Protestant (yea, Evangelical) that includes reproduction and practising the reproductive work . . . enjoying – I say again – enjoying sexual activity (no angst here . . . oh, how I pity the others who have not been freed )

[franko]

Blaise said:

The believers in Intelligent Design should in all honesty and decency admit that the grand designer was no Einstein.

No problem there. He has never created anyone to be His equal, so He is just a little bit smarter than Einstein.

Just think, he/she/it allowed a George W. Bush to become the most powerful ruler in the world.

And He allowed you and me to live on this dust-mite called Earth.

Why couldn't Bush have been one of the two-thirds of embryos or fetuses who undergo spontaneous abortion?

I wonder the same about Hitler, to be honest.

[franko]

Blaise said:

I'm an analytical person, Al. I prefer to keep my head clear. I wouldn't drink absinthe or snort cocaine or shoot myself up or believe in an imaginary supranatural being. The only plunge I take into the unknown is falling in love.

Ah, love . . . the kind shown by a supranatural being when "His only-begotten" was crucified. I knew we'd be able to get this trhead back on track!

[franko]

Habs_fan_in_LA said:

I think that you have uncovered the element of truth that differentiates the post 9/11 world from our simple pastoral society pre 9/11.
You are with us or against us!
If you sell guns to the enemy, you are against us.
If you encourage martyrs to blow themselves up, you are against us.
If you sell anti-tank rockets, you are against us.
If you proliferate neuclear bomb production, you are against us.
If you harbor fugitives, you are against us.
Iceland and Switzerland can claim neutrality, but anyone who has airports with departing flights to the US, ships with containers bound for the US, ability to produce anthrax, terrorists in the Phillipines, Iraq, Pakistan, North korea. We now see the world as a dangerous place and have to take lighters and nail clippers away from airline passengers. Wait in long lines to pass through airport checkpoints.
The simple days of neutrality are behind us, and we must seek self-preservation. The alternative of benign coexistance is no longer a safe option.

Careful, HFLA -- I can only support you when you are right. You've missed it here -- the US arms establishment doesn't really care wehre the guns go, as long as they are sold. US weaponry is turning up everywhere, including in the hands of the "bad guys". So I guess there is evil in the US of A as well.

Benign coexistence has never been an option -- the threat of war and/or retaliation has always driven mankind. There has always been the possibility of a preemptive strike and the US proved it when they moved into Iraq.

But let's move this to the Bush-bashing thread (or one of the many) and let this be the God-bashing/God supporting thread.

[Toronthab]

I still think this is a pretty ballsy site. Ya gotta like people who fancy themselves the voice of reason ablaze with "analytic" thinking, while frankoly thinking, another thinks he's in a battle with "logic". NNNNOTTTT!

Being afire with no intellectual tools at hand is upon analysis, emoting, specious pleading, not argument, while throwing out human reasoning is only reasonable if the content of faith is non-propositional. It further presupposes that God goes to the trouble of what is it..80 million years for intelligent reasoning life only to ask it to perform irrational acts vis-a-vis a putative relationship. NNNOTTT! Shake your head.

If one wants to be "analytic" in the Kantian or non-Kantian sense of the word, preferably non-Kantian who as Anthony Rizzi says in "the Science before Science" is trapped inside his head, get the book he wrote. Confront, analyse, consider this brilliant work. You will not regret it, I promise you.

Oh ya..on that note whoever likes reading will LOVE the "Secret History of the CIA. Did Oswald kill Kennedy?

1 awesome book

1 very interesting book

Yea Ebay.

[blaise]

franko said:

But let's move this to the Bush-bashing thread (or one of the many) and let this be the God-bashing/God supporting thread.

I keep admonishing HFLA to direct his Bush worship to the appropriate thread but he still charges ahead like a wounded rhinoceros. Banish Bush from religious argumentation, I say. Where to drop him off? Any convenient toilet will do.

[HardCap]

Sean Lynch, writes about atheism:


I wonder if this has anything to do with the fact that socialism and atheism seem to go hand in hand? There must be a certain humility in believing there is a higher power than you, at least when you believe you do not know for sure what that higher power’s purpose is for you, or even if it has one. Certainly some people believe that God talks to them and only to them. However, it takes a special kind of arrogance to believe that you (or any human for that matter) can direct an economy. This is the same kind of arrogance that allows one to say with certainty “there is no God” and that others should join the “reality-based community.”<br>
Do understand that I’m talking about a particular kind of atheist here. There is, of course, the Sartrian atheist, who says “Holy crap! There’s no God! Now what do I do?” The same sort of humility can come from the belief that one is alone in the universe and has no set purpose as from the belief that there is someone much more powerful than you. But there is also the type of atheist who believes that he or she can be God, because the position is open. This person, in my opinion, must be watched far more closely than the Jerry Falwells of the world.

[blaise]

HardCap said:

Sean Lynch, writes about atheism:


I wonder if this has anything to do with the fact that socialism and atheism seem to go hand in hand? There must be a certain humility in believing there is a higher power than you, at least when you believe you do not know for sure what that higher power’s purpose is for you, or even if it has one. Certainly some people believe that God talks to them and only to them. However, it takes a special kind of arrogance to believe that you (or any human for that matter) can direct an economy. This is the same kind of arrogance that allows one to say with certainty “there is no God” and that others should join the “reality-based community.”<br>
Do understand that I’m talking about a particular kind of atheist here. There is, of course, the Sartrian atheist, who says “Holy crap! There’s no God! Now what do I do?” The same sort of humility can come from the belief that one is alone in the universe and has no set purpose as from the belief that there is someone much more powerful than you. But there is also the type of atheist who believes that he or she can be God, because the position is open. This person, in my opinion, must be watched far more closely than the Jerry Falwells of the world.

I sharply disagree. Atheists tend to be independent thinkers and don't band together. The Falwells and other pious fakers form tax-free but profitable organizations and act as ayatollahs who impose their views and meddle in people's lives.

[HardCap]

Blaise said:

I sharply disagree. Atheists tend to be independent thinkers and don't band together. The Falwells and other pious fakers form tax-free but profitable organizations and act as ayatollahs who impose their views and meddle in people's lives.

There you go judging others again - you can tell who is truly pious and who is not - that's quite the power you have...lol

[PTH]

HardCap said:

There you go judging others again - you can tell who is truly pious and who is not - that's quite the power you have...lol

If you actually want to prove him wrong, why not find a few relevant facts ? For example, dig up a few organisations that define themselves as being atheist, and you'll prove him wrong.

No need for just blasting one another as you're starting to do here.

[franko]

PTH said:

No need for just blasting one another as you're starting to do here.

Are you actually trying to bring reason into the debate discussion? Good luck! The . . . um . . . rhetoric is flying thick in both directions, with few words of substance.