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cpaf posted:Is there really any difference between someone who worships a God in the Christian tradition and someone who worships the rejection of that same God in the Christian tradition Don't have to get up early on Sunday.
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Feb 6, 2015 15:02
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Get to eat meat during Easter? Oh erm, get to pretend to believe in Old Norse paganism for fun, that's a good one.
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Feb 6, 2015 15:04
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Rodatose posted:ended monarchial serfdom Technically the puritans had a good go at that over here.
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Feb 6, 2015 15:10
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Regulated freedom, much better than normal freedom.
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Feb 6, 2015 15:47
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Miltank posted:and yet, religion ended slavery. I'm not sure you can attribute all the good things achieved in the world to religion because a lot of people are religious, unless you also attribute all of the bad things for the same reason.
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Feb 6, 2015 16:10
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Miltank posted:Abolitionists were anti-slavery because of Christianity. Slaveholders were pro-slavery because money. I'm also not sure you get to redefine christianity to exclude everyone you disagree with, then appeal to its pure morality as a worthwhile thing. Either its morality is prescriptive, or descriptive, if you simply ignore every time someone uses it to justify evil as "not really christian" then its morality is not at all prescriptive. It is only morally pure because you only apply it to morally pure people. Miltank posted:Using religion to justify cultural inertia is different from using religion to promote radical anti-establishment egalitarianism. Not really it isn't. Not in terms of deciding whether the religion itself is good or not.
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Feb 6, 2015 16:25
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Miltank posted:Slavery without Christianity: keeps on going forever until Christianity stops it. Well, more like Slavery without Christianity: Keeps going until Christianity happens, at which point it becomes slavery with Christianity, and after a while of that, a large, international and pantheistic societal change, roughly coincident with the enlightenment, over the course of a few centuries results in the gradual reduction and abolition of slavery across much of the western world.
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Feb 6, 2015 16:58
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It also rather ignores the mechanism by which you might get rid of religion. If you just deleted religion from the human consciousness by some magical means then yes, people would probably turn to something else to believe in, if you remove it by removing the need to believe in it, which isn't a fundamental human need, just something a lot of people like to do, then why would people seek another alternative?
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Feb 8, 2015 14:53
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Rationality cannot conjure ethics from the ether, no, but religion is certainly not a good ethical basis either. It's full of arbitrary and demonstrably detrimental guidelines that do not promote the propsperity and happiness of all humans. If you're going to apply rationality to religion to filter out the stupid bits, why bother with the religion at all as a basis for ethics? You are obviously capable of deriving some kind of ethical system without following it rote from a book, so why bother with the book at all? Rationality can certainly be a great aid in developing good systems of ethics that promote good outcomes for all, far moreso than just sticking to the traditional practices in all things, at least.
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Feb 8, 2015 18:39
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Perhaps theists and atheists of all philosophies can unite in their belief that Richard Dawkins is an insufferable berk.
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Feb 10, 2015 16:09
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I could probably quite easily attribute my dislike of strong atheism more or less entirely to Richard Dawkins. When he was big news back when he wrote The God Delusion all the atheists in my school bought it and said it was awesome, whereas personally I couldn't see the point. So thanks Dick, for more precisely defining my atheist identity as "absolutely not like Richard Dawkins if I can help it"
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Feb 10, 2015 16:20
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I think it requires more introspective and intellectual ability to forgive someone for being a smug twat than it does to simply recognise and dislike it. Smug is smug to everyone, it's not a very good way to convince anyone of anything.
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Feb 10, 2015 16:56
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I think Dawkins probably likes lots of money for books and TV programs and enjoys being a self righteous bellend at people he thinks are stupider than him. Which I guess technically we all would like but there is such a thing as moderation.
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Feb 10, 2015 17:02
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Is "New Atheist" a definite term for something that I didn't get the memo for?
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Feb 10, 2015 18:01
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That doesn't really seem very new, strong atheism has been around for quite a while.
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Feb 10, 2015 18:36
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SedanChair posted:Nobody said it was new, only that it is a defined movement with leaders. I guess colour me unimpressed. Seems depressingly similar to the thing they're supposedly trying to get rid of.
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Feb 10, 2015 20:00
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Infinite Karma posted:I understand this already. It makes literally eating God to prove how much you love each other that much more strange. Perhaps fellating God was considered too crass? Perhaps he just likes a swallower and doesn't want to say it out loud.
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Feb 10, 2015 21:35
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Nice to see where Attila got his playbook from.
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Feb 11, 2015 01:24
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Valiantman posted:Are you seriously arguing that the majority (or significant portion of) Christians believe that God is a biological being of flesh and nervous systems? The bible explicitly states that god created man in his image, as humanity has been scientifically proven to be a species of african ape, and that likeness works both ways, God is something like an ape, same as us. How you reconcile that with all the other stuff about god is up to you.
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Feb 11, 2015 19:29
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Disinterested posted:Brandor this is my routine reminder that you should learn to speak English. There are fundamental problems with the way that you write that move beyond the stylistic. I quite liked this post: BrandorKP posted:Beliefs are beliefs. We do lovely things with them (or alternately they use us to do lovely things). Christianity has a hell of a a lot to say about this. Some of Jesus' metaphors seem to indicate a rather strong opinion about it too. There is also the whole cross thing, Though it's a bit wordy, I can trim it down a bit: BrandorKP posted:Tautology. Bad things happen. Christianity has opinions about bad things happening, so does Jesus.
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Feb 11, 2015 21:27
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vessbot posted:1. Incorrect, the majority of Christians do believe that God (who is the same person as Jesus, according to trinitarianism) is a person of some sort. Not in the sense you seem to be trying to imply. Most Christian denominations that I know of hold god as being impossible to understand, you can know some stuff about him, rather a lot of weirdly specific stuff in some cases, but no sect claims to have 100% mapped the personality of god, or even really claims that god has a personality that would make any sort of sense to a human. I mean, I know you keep saying that Christians believe god is a person but it really isn't correct to my knowledge.
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Feb 13, 2015 05:48
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V. Illych L. posted:That sounds incredibly expensive and rather wasteful for the zero effort he's clearly invested in it. There is a Modern Russia joke in there somewhere I think but I lack the specialist knowledge to make it. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 23:26 on Feb 13, 2015 |
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Feb 13, 2015 23:23
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vessbot posted:For the sixth time, I'm not saying that Christians take God to be a physical person. You do seem to be engaging it a bit of false equivocation, or at the least using the descriptions of god's personhood as a prescriptive idea to infer lots of other things about god, which doesn't really work. Christianity is quite clear on the notion that humans cannot understand god, because god is very complicated. Your proposal would be like looking at the tip of an iceberg and deciding that because it looks a bit like a tail, the rest of it is shaped like a dragon.
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Feb 14, 2015 01:43
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Agag posted:Atheists don't figure into it. Nor it the analogy to science very helpful to you, literary criticism is a better comparison. We're going to read Moby Dick, and we are going to dissect it and talk about different potential readings of given passages, allegorical references, context specific details, and so on. That would depend on the theology in question. If it is academic internal theology then you are correct, but if it is theology which exists to decide or justify actions in the real world, that can be criticised on the basis that its fundamental premises are flawed.
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Feb 14, 2015 05:40
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Agag posted:An atheist doesn't so much criticize the premises as deny them outright. Person A says "we should do this because the Bible says so" and person B says "well I don't believe in the Bible or give a gently caress what it says." Those are both coherent positions but there is no real dialog that can take place. Depending on the atheist they may say "there is no evidence to support those premises and thus acting upon them is not justifiable" which, while equally difficult to discuss given the disinclination of theists towards evidence-based reasoning, is possibly the most coherent criticism which can be leveled against the premises. You are essentially limited to either faith based reasoning, which would tell you to simply not question them, or observation based reasoning, which would lead you to question them in a way that the faith based thinkers don't regard as valid. There isn't really a criticism of the fundamental premises of religion that an adherent of it would consider valid. Which is sort of a problem if you're going to require the criticisms to be valid before engaging them.
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Feb 14, 2015 05:48
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Agag posted:Again, there isn't any evidence to provide for metaphysical claims. And my original point was that theology doesn't exist to answer external challenges. Its a given that people who aren't religious or belong to a different religion consider its claims invalid because they reject its premises. But that does not make the empirical criticism of faith-driven action not actually criticism. It is criticism and it is the most valid that any criticism can be. That a faith-based thinker may ignore all criticism of their faith, on the basis that anyone who does level criticism against it is not accepting the premises upon which it is based, and thus their criticism is invalid, is a deficiency of faith-based thought. You are essentially saying that the only valid criticism of theologically derived actions and opinions is to be a member of the religion and accept its fundamental premises. Which would logically render any faith-based decision impossible to criticise as long as it is derived from the fundamental premises of the religion. You don't see an issue with this?
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Feb 14, 2015 06:03
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You are arguing that because people treat god somewhat like they would a person, and that when they purportedly interact with god they do so as they would a person, that god therefore is more or less exactly like a human. Which doesn't really work because Christianity very clear that god is very complicated. That humans tend to interact with everything they perceive to be intelligent as they would another human, doesn't mean that everything is another human. People also think about their pets as though they are people but that doesn't make them very much like a human. I would think the consistent Christian view is that god looks like a person to you because that is the easiest way you can understand him, but he is actually rather more complicated than that. You're being prescriptive because you're taking every time someone expressed their impression of god as being person-like and then using that to tell people that they actually believe god is basically a human being. And in doing so you're ignoring all the other times they say god is not at all like a human being. It is possible to say that a thing seems human to you, while also knowing that it is not. You can't really do a big 'aha gotcha!' thing by only paying attention to the former and ignoring the latter.
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Feb 14, 2015 19:20
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Agag posted:Anybody can criticize anything, I'm just saying theologians don't have any role in rebutting external criticism, and the criticism that atheists would level at theologians wouldn't really have anything to do with their work as theologians, but their identity as a religious believer. That is unfortunate, as theological arguments are often used as the justification for actions which affect many people, thus making it extremely pertinent to criticise them. If theologists or those who argue from theology are not interested in defending their positions from outside criticism, they should probably concede their points.
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Feb 16, 2015 08:15
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Agag posted:As I said previously, this is tied in to theism or atheism. If God exists then He presents and objective morality. You deny the existence of any objective morality when you deny the existence of God. Neither position is "provable." Why does god present an objective morality?
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Feb 18, 2015 05:00
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vessbot posted:No assumption. I get it from the common religious accounts of God who has human emotions, wishes, and proclivities. He is said to care about people's hopes about which group of other people can more effectively cooperate to move an inflated elliptical skin bladder across a mark on a grass field FFS. Quit acting like my only basis is a single phrase. The problem is that your argument requires you to be able to tell people what they believe. If you ask any given religious person whether or not they think your argument is correct, they will almost certainly tell you no, because god isn't as you describe him. You can't disagree with that because you don't know better than other people what they believe about god, and claiming to do is is literally the definition of a straw man argument. You are claiming that your opponent holds a position they will universally profess not to hold and then arguing against that position, rather than their actual stated position.
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Feb 27, 2015 22:29
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vessbot posted:My argument does no such thing as telling people what they believe. I sourced it from the beliefs of regular believers (Pew poll), theologians, and some guy that wrote a FAQ-style website. I didn't make any of that stuff up. Except the believer isn't required to do that, they can just say "god can do that because he's magic" or even something as simple as "god is very powerful because he created the universe so it stands to reason that what we see of him is not the entire thing" God doesn't really have logical implications on account of being, well, god. He can be as needlessly complicated as he needs to be. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 00:05 on Feb 28, 2015 |
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Feb 28, 2015 00:02
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All I can say is that you appear to be taking the most tortuously long winded approach to pointing out that religious belief is often a bit silly by the standards of non believers.
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Feb 28, 2015 10:58
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JawKnee posted:does a perfect god have needs? I believe the traditional way to answer any question about god, is yes, even when it's contradictory.
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Feb 28, 2015 22:11
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vessbot posted:Well I'm showing why, not merely pointing it out. Furthermore, it's by the standards of believers too, as applied to everything but the special-pleaded belief. If you believe in god, you grant god special exemption from logic because he's god. Essentially the only thing you're going to convince anyone of is that non-believers think belief in god is silly. Which I don't think anyone needs convincing of.
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Mar 1, 2015 16:15
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CommieGIR posted:You can claim its not as much of a problem, but it IS a problem, and one that directly affects me and people around me. Perhaps your issue is not that religion is more overbearing and integrated into american politics than it ever has been, but that it is less so. If religion were more fully integrated into politics and society in America, you would be less likely to be in a position which takes issue with that. I would suggest that it may be a symptom of the increasing secularity of American society that you exist, and are so put off by the remaining presence of religious overtones in politics and society.
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Mar 4, 2015 00:29
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Disinterested posted:Hate the sin, love the sinner! It's difficult and, personally, not something I think religion is very good at fostering, but it's quite possible to take that attitude. Though a good proxy for whether someone does take that stance is generally how they go about hating the sin. If you find actions to be abhorrent, the best way to oppose them is seldom to throw a fit and scream about how horrible they are, you can do more damage to a behavior through positively reinforcing actions other than it, or which are in contradiction to it, than you can by getting angry and yelling at/jailing/murdering people who perform the action you hate. If you focus very much on that, it's possible that you are relatively uninterested in the sin other than as a justification for hating the sinner.
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Mar 5, 2015 16:22
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Disinterested posted:Well that statement is very often made in relation to homosexuality by people who quite clearly hate gay people but don't want to say it. But I also think it's splitting hairs, since homosexuality is a fairly intrinsic quality, as is acting on the urges to which it gives rise. To me saying 'I hate the sin but love the sinner' there is drawing an artificial distinction - there you're talking about someone's nature. Strictly speaking people who hate gay people shouldn't, even by their own logic, it's buggery that God apparently dislikes, not homosexuality. Again I think they're just bad at applying their own supposed beliefs in that case. Disliking what someone thinks or even is inclined towards thinking is exceptionally er, anal, even for religions. Also did you mean to type don't in that second bit? Reads a bit oddly if so.
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Mar 5, 2015 20:25
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Personally I would take the stance that hating people is seldom productive, it isn't generally conducive to taking an effective approach to dealing with them, whatever your objective. Ethics aside, it's not really practical to hate people if you can avoid it. Even if you're trying to kill someone, being cold and calculating about it will probably make you more successful. There is no person who is well served by hatred of others. Except possibly the person who can profit from other people's hatred and the poor decision making that leads to. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 00:21 on Mar 6, 2015 |
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Mar 6, 2015 00:13
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Disinterested posted:That logic is exactly what I am talking about, I'm not sure why this is being presented as news. My argument is that it's bullshit. Having gay sex is an intrinsic quality of gay people, (no more or less so than it is for heterosexuals) so it seems to me that 'hate the sin, love the sinner' is pretty universally bullshit. To hate men having sex with men is to hate homosexuals and I think the argument that a separation between sin and sinner can be made in such an instance is absurd. Displacing that question by saying 'men can't be married to men, so all gay sex is unwedded sex' seems to me no better. I would sort of disagree with that, having sexual impulses doesn't mean you have to act on them, monogamous relationships are dependent on that idea and I don't think they are bullshit. You can certainly argue that there is no productive reason to object to gay sex, but arguing that gay sex (or sex in general) is completely essential to a person's being is not, I think, a very solid position.
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Mar 6, 2015 14:07
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In practice I don't disagree with you, but I do disagree with that line of argumentation, there is a very important and well understood difference between actions and desires, our entire society is founded on the basis of people separating the two, and not doing things simply because we desire it. That the kind of people who object to homosexual behavior are probably not able to distinguish between homosexuality and homosexual behavior, is not an argument that there can be no distinction between thoughts and inclinations, and the actions which stem from them. Nor is it necessary to make that argument in order to disagree with people who regularly abuse and degrade people based on harmless sexual tendencies.
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Mar 6, 2015 18:19
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