Others beg to differ ... especially those to whom it has been established.
What does religion do for mankind that the statement "Be kind" doesn't do better?
- Thread starter Seattle
- Start date
Hardly.
Interesting to note the lengths you have to go to make the caricature cogent.
"Hardly" is hardly an intelligent response.
That doesn't make sense. Its just like saying that people are either categorically healthy or sick and medicinal practices simply places doctors as interlopers between you and your health.
To address your struggles with theodicy would require a departure from the topic.
If one's requirements don't dare to venture beyond gregariousness, volunteer work, employment (which, funnily enough, you draw up as being the ultimate fruit of education) or intimidation, perhaps you would have a point .... but that all said, even for one who is somehow content within such myopic parameters, the failure for individuals or collectives to steadfastly obey the addage of "Be kind" remains perennial.
IOW, existing in a world that, in regard to nurturing kindness rather seems to be at war with it through the agencies of which there is no escape ..... namely of living entities other than one's self, natural phenomena, or even the very body and mind one happens to be decked out with. All this proposes serious philosophical problems with how one views the self in relation to the world that cannot be solved by a pursuit of kindness (what to speak of volunteer work, employment, intimidation, etc).
It was appropriate.
True. I could have settled for 3 chuckles in one sentence; the fourth was a stretch. Hardly a record - my personal best is seven - but good enough for the current venue.
God is a disease???
DaveC426913
Valued Senior Member
Claiming something - even with personal certainty - is not the same as establishing it.
Lots of people claim the Earth is flat, but that doesn't make it established.
Seattle
Valued Senior Member
Then the question isn't pointless.
Which leads inevitably to the question of "established to whom?" .... which gets in to tricky territory when you start talking about the top end claims of knowledge. If you want to bring democracy to knowledge (how many people can/have establish/ed findings that require an electron microscope) , the world becomes rapidly stupid ... what to speak if the package also comes with a truckload of attitude, as in the case of those vouching forth the claim of atheism.
Actually in that analogy, God would be "good health".
In your eagerness to assert the atheist agenda via caricatures, it appears that you temporarily lost the ability to read or something.
Ah, now i get it! The preachers get in between you and your good health.
Nope again.
Its more like the poor fund of knowledge that drives atheism tends to fuel a willful pursuit of a small minded political agenda that ruins a persons capacity to even read an analogy, much less comprehend it.
Why can't fundies write grammatical English?
QED
That analogy fails in the sense that a doctor generally posses greater knowledge and skill regarding the practice of medicine than the layman, while the preacher has no more knowledge of an actual god than those they preach to, in this case it’s essentially the blind leading the blind.
Regardless of what contemporary standards or experiences dictate, knowledge and the practitioners of such knowledge exist as primary categories. A predominance of snake oil peddlers may make the prospect of receiving bonafide medical treatment troublesome, but the category of "bonafide medical treatment" doesn't suddenly cease to exist simply because one, for whatever reason, has no access to it .... in fact you could say that such a an unfortunate predominance establishes the bonafide practitioner as even more valuable than what they might otherwise be.
A poor fund of knowledge makes a clean, high-octane fuel, compared to a rich fund of superstition, which makes an inefficient polluting fuel.
But, Oh, how I wish I could much less comprehend an analogy!