Has anyone here heard of Bill Maher & his remarks about religion, particularly Christianity? Following are paraphrases, not exact quotes Maher also remarked about Noah being able to find pairs of all (or at least very many) animals to be put on his ark. He wonders how elephants, monkeys, & other jungle animals happened to be near enough to the Middle East to allow Noah to collect them.
[video=youtube;gPOfurmrjxo]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPOfurmrjxo[/video] I've always enjoyed George Carlin....
Syzygys: From your recent Post Yes !! I hope neither you nor others interpreted my Post as being anti Maher.
His remarks aren't spot on... Only a human being is capable of ''murder''... Murder is the unlawful killing, with malice aforethought, of another human, and generally this premeditated state of mind distinguishes murder from other forms of unlawful homicide (such as manslaughter). God cannot harm another soul, for to do so would be to harm Himself. From a karmic point of view, it is better to vanquished, in this life, by God, than to die in any one of the few ways a living being can die. Because it means that the soul is automatically karma-free, whereas unless the person was consciously aware of his/her spiritual identity, he/she would most likely incur debt from their thoughts and actions. Also he has to explain how it is that the souls that inhabited the body of those children were ''innocent''. I'm afraid it is Mr. Maher who is not very intelligent as he doesn't seem to understand why exactly Noah and his family were chosen. He seems to happy just to use his show, and his talents to spread disinformation about a serious subject matter. Keeping everybody laughing into the dark arms of ignorance, of God, and of spirituality. Christianity is NOT the only religion. jan.
Or a "person". Theists typically imagine that God is a person. In other words, the killer has to be the sort of being to which it makes sense to ascribe moral predicates in general, and responsibility and blame in particular. Again, theists typically imagine precisely that, insisting that 'God is good!' and even the source, essence and paradigm of goodness itself. My view is that if we aren't willing to call a particular behavior (such as genocide) 'good' if a human being does it, it's even less justifiable to call it 'good' when God supposedly does it. God needs to be better than we are, not worse. He needs to satisfy a higher standard. Being God isn't a get-out-of-morality-free card. (Just as being 'Fuhrer' and a self-imagined Nietzschian superman wasn't for Hitler.)
The flood of Noah, did not happen quickly. It did not blind sided everyone. One interpretation is there were 120 years before the flood. The people of the earth had time to prepare, but had become too unnatural to read the natural signs. Why would God wait so long between warning and the event? One theory is this was a natural disaster with signs appearing. As an analogy, say manmade global warming was real and not liberal mythology. Say in 25 years there will be a major global disaster. All Gore is warning us all to repent but nobody listens and billions die. Is it Al Gore's fault or those who did not listen? Bill Maher is a clown since he missed the entire point of the 120 year warning. Natural selecting was in effect and unnatural was not chosen. Having two of all the animals, would require natural people with animal magnetism, not those who are unnatural. Even the animals would read the signs of the time and be willing to allow predictor and prey to escape together.
If Al Gore could magically cause the flood in order to kill off the vast majority of the human race and all other animal species, sure it'd be his fault. He'd be as much a mass murderer as Bible God was.
He thinks it's 'all' bullshit and so do I. They 'all' have a creation story and consequences for those who think it's bullshit. He made a film about the bullshit. It wasn't a comedy.
I don't believe he really thinks it is bullshit, I just think he is against it, due to his reasoning. jan.
Except God is more than that, not less. Therefore God is capable of murder too, or the principle of omnipotence is false. Of course the whole premise of this is that he executed the whole human race, except, as Bill Maher notes, for one set of DNA that would reproduce the same faulty race all over again. God is omniscient, therefore the genocide by flood was premeditated. God had malice aforethought to all human beings except the bizarre persona of Noah, who we find drunk and exposing himself. This was the best person he could find? He harmed the people he allegedly killed. Being drowned, or being turned to stone, or tormented by plague, etc. are no more humane a death than any other. None of the ways God kills people in the Bible is even sanctioned as a legitimate form of execution. Sounds like bad karma for God. That is, once we decide to sanction karma within the myths of the Bible. That sounds like a good argument to use to disengage religion from the abortion controversy. I'm quite certain Bill Maher knows the Flood Myth of the Bible was borrowed from the Mesopotamian antecedent. Of course it wasn't Yahweh doing the executing back then, it was Ea, Anu, Marduk, etc. They weren't punishing humans for being evil, but for appealing to the gods all the time, sort of like deadbeat parents who punish the kids for crying when they've gone neglected. Otherwise it's essentially the same story, but it takes place in the region of Ur, long before any person claimed to be Noah would have descended from the people who migrated to the Levant, as told in Genesis, from that same locale--Ur. Once it's clear that the Bible admits to a cultural genesis out of Ur, it invalidates the rest of the text, since we have the artifacts from Mesopotamia which are the original material. That makes a literal interpretation of Genesis severely fallacious. People are laughing primarily at the stupidity of fundamentalism (literal reading of myth, legend and fable). There is no loss of ethos, just a discarding of the clumsy contrived way literalism glues it together. Maher contrasts stupid ethics with actual ethics -- social justice and humane treatment of all people, esp the needy. It's the only one that is infected by fundamentalism in the West. And that's what Maher was mainly attacking.
This is a legal definition, not a philosophical one. Do you understand the difference, jan? We restrict this concept to humans because no other animal is capable of giving their actions the considerstion that humans can. God is supposed to be the perfect example of us, the mold in which we were created. He would no doubt be capable of giving his actions thought. Inane drivel. A mishmash of half-understood ideas, the religious equivalent of word salad. Absolutely no place for this garbage in this thread. Does he? Why is that? You're certainly not in any position to call anyone stupid, least of all someone who has actually read the scriptures they're talking about. But it is the one he's talking about, so try to stay on-topic. No, really? Couldn't tell by the screenname automatically attached to your post.
But Al Gore just punted to Obama. That is, if you ignore the past 150 of science that gave the original warnings of the hazards. I guess we could say science was punting during all that time. Let's bury all those facts along with the tablets at Nineveh which contain the original flood story that the Bible twists to suit its own purposes. Bury it with the estimates done a century ago, that anthropogenic carbon would deliver just about the anomaly that played out for the last 100 yrs. Just deny all this blatant evidence and make the rest up and you've arrived at the DNA for the Religious Right. You being all the wellwishers out there, posting on behalf of Jesus and his flock, the poor abused energy companies. :bawl: Gee, makes me want to leave a tithe at the pump, Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Does this mean committing genocide, etc, is only adhering to "the standard"? The issue with such comments, Jan, is that the Bible and all Abrahamic religious texts for that matter, is full of horrific crimes against humanity, mass murder's, genocide, the slaughter of first born son's, etc.. All committed by "God". Such a standard is not advisable or recommended or desired. Because if this is the standard by which people should be adhering to, then this world is stuffed.
Aqueous Id, Quite right. That (more) is what needs to be comprehended in order to understand that God cannot be a murderer, and why murder is a concept exclusive to humankind. Here are a few verses from the Bhagavad Gita (The Song of God) that may enlighten you on why you and Maher are wrong. Maher and others are spreading disinformation, doing their bit to keep people in a state of ignorance. If the soul belongs to Him, and are part and parcel of Him, and in light of the verses I quoted, how is it possible for God to kill, and harm souls (souls being the essential reality of a person). To add to that, He explains (in the Bible) that those souls that commit sin, due to their transgressional acts, shall die Because of their own acts. Have you not noticed this in the book? The wages of sin = death The gift of God = eternal life. If you want we can go into that a little deeper. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! People die, that's the reality. What you are missing is the reasons why people die the way they do. From our perspective it seems random, bizzare, or, just by chance. But if you apply the law of karma (for every action there is an opposite and equal reaction) things may not be as random as it may seem to us. God knows each individual soul (as they are all part and parcel of Himself), and He is the author of the laws of nature, so if you drowned people, or transgressed the laws of nature in such a way that requires her to send plagues, or to turn you into stone, then the reaction you incur for yourself will be justified. The Bible doesn't have to sanction karma, it is understood as a law. But it does say: Maher is helping to turn souls from God, by using mockery and blasphemy... ''for he that soweth to his flesh shall reap corruption'', it's that simple. Nowadays people who have not been infected with this style of disinformation and blasphemy, are quite open to different aspects of religion, as much, (if not more) as those that have been. Maher was/is directly attacking God in a bid to turn people away from their spiritual identity, and toward their material/bodily identity. As I said in an earlier post, there exists in the same source, explanations of the reasons why people die, but he seems to not offer any of those, or even give his own reasons why he doesn't accept those explanations. jan.
Are you in a position to see everything that every soul does from the beginning of time, and/or in the knowledge to know how it's going to turn out? No? I didn't think so. Read the BG verses (if you like) to get an idea of how God views us. Maybe you have more understanding of why the notion of God committing murder/genocide, is fundamentally absurd. jan.
