davewhite04
Valued Senior Member
These responses are exactly what Sarkus pointed out. Which you seem blissfully ignorant of.
What position are you? Theist, atheist, agnostic, other?
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Pinball1970
Valued Senior Member
That did it for me.
Do you know who Jesus was? Jesus was a peaceful radical nonviolent revolutionary who spent time with lepers, hookers and criminals, was not an American citizen, never spoke English, was anti-capitalism, anti-wealth, completely anti-death penalty, anti-public prayer, never once anti-gay, never mentioned abortion, never called the poor lazy, never fought for tax cuts for the wealthiest Nazarene, never said torture is okay, long-haired, brown skinned, homeless, community organizing liberal, Palestinian, anti-shaming, unarmed Jew.
I kind of thought we'd been through this part, before:
Jesus emerging through post-Essene influence is actually the sort of thing a usurpation of the Hebrew experience would downplay. The story of Jesus teaching at age twelve is strange enough in and of itself, has a particular gnostic flavor that even finds its way into Sufi teaching stories, and is likely a political affectation within the Lucian experience, which itself, in turn, would seem strange when considered from afar, because the tradition of Luke the Physician, while relying on the Pauline Epistle to the Colossians, affects later tradition and pedagogy according to a perception of comparative realism within a miraculous framework.
Still, though, flippant suggestions of a hippie, school dropout, or other such, aren't entirely worthless; rather, they devalue themselves not by modernity itself but the orientation of the beholder. My peer cohort had a phrase, "suburban terrorist", referring to petit-bourgeois discontent and destructive ennui, often applied to skaters and punks. Once upon a time, a borderline middle-class son of a whiff of privilege in a hypocritical family growing up to join a world-mastery, fundamentalist fleeing a world-flight commune would describe an origin story for a revolutionary.
Still, though, flippant suggestions of a hippie, school dropout, or other such, aren't entirely worthless; rather, they devalue themselves not by modernity itself but the orientation of the beholder. My peer cohort had a phrase, "suburban terrorist", referring to petit-bourgeois discontent and destructive ennui, often applied to skaters and punks. Once upon a time, a borderline middle-class son of a whiff of privilege in a hypocritical family growing up to join a world-mastery, fundamentalist fleeing a world-flight commune would describe an origin story for a revolutionary.
And that doesn't even include the part about his grandparents being guided by voices.
But we do have another intersection with Sufism according to an obscure distinction between an inward component and the balance of religion, the latter being a fancy phrase for all the accreted baggage of what makes religion.¹ And it's kind of a fascinating intersection: Part of the difference, here, is the magical fantasy. Jesus doesn't really need to be so literally magical at this point. If it's difficult to describe my horror hearing a Missouri Synod preacher extol one of the most childish iterations of bodily resurrection I didn't think there was anyone left who really believed in, please understand, the news about some churches playing Charlie Kirk's AI-recreated voice to reassure congregations he was okay and doing just fine in Heaven is the kind of thing that just shouldn't happen. What the hell is wrong with those people? Yeah, something goes here about the baggage of religion.
But in less shocking absurdity, no, Jesus doesn't need to be magical in order to be the savior. At this point, he doesn't even need to be real. Nor Muhammad. But the idea of a series of seizures or delusional episodes resulting in the composition (revelation) of the Quran is an extraordinary proposition for mundane origin.
What does anyone's sense of obligation require of the icon? How does your obligation obligate Jesus? Adilbai Kharkovli suggests:
There has been, both in the East and the West, an uneasiness about believing that something done from fear or hope should be rewarded by paradise; or that ordinary human duties, carried out even by the most primitive peoples, should be represented as things which a highly-evolved religious system proclaims as part of advanced religious thinking.
This involves, of course, rethinking many of the values to see whether they are not, indeed, pitched at too low a level, rather than, as fashionable theoreticians affirm, too high. "The best that we have" in institutions may be insufficient, not a matter for self-congratulation.
____________________This involves, of course, rethinking many of the values to see whether they are not, indeed, pitched at too low a level, rather than, as fashionable theoreticians affirm, too high. "The best that we have" in institutions may be insufficient, not a matter for self-congratulation.
Notes:
¹ cf. Kharkovli—
—and Armstrong—
「The phrase Sufism is the inner aspect of religion can quite easily be seen as meaning: Sufi teachings, over a period of time, become covered by social, emotional and other accretions which are stabilized into religions. The living tradition of the Sufis, however, continues. Viewed from the religionist's standpoint, of course, the Sufi element is the inward component, and the rest is the balance of the religion.」
—and Armstrong—
「The origins of the Latin religio are obscure. It was not "a great objective something", but had imprecise connotations of obligation and taboo; to say that it was a cultic observance, a family propriety, or keeping an oath was religio for you meant that it was incumbent on you to do it. The word acquired an important new meaning among early Christian theologians: an attitude of reverence toward God and the universe as a whole. For Saint Augustine (c. 354-430 CE), religio was neither a system of rituals and doctrines nor a historical institutionalized tradition but a personal encounter with the transcendence that we call God as well as the bond that unites us to the divine and to one another. In medieval Europe, religio came to refer to the monastic life and distinguished the monk from the "secular" priest, someone who had lived in and worked in the world (saeculum).」
Armstrong, Karen. Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014.
Kharkovli, Adilbai. "Those Astonishing Sufis". Sufi Thought and Action, ed. Idries Shah. London: Octagon, 1990.
Pinball1970
Valued Senior Member
C.S. Lewis I believe. I think "deluded" is unfair, he was obviously intelligent.
I just think he was wrong.
If he was born today he would be an atheist.
Pinball1970
Valued Senior Member
At least when I argue with Tiassa the exchanges are pretty short.
It usually goes ..
He makes a reference to right wing/conservative/supremacism ...blah blah
I tell him to fuck off and call him something.
I get told off, he goes back on ignore.
It usually goes ..
He makes a reference to right wing/conservative/supremacism ...blah blah
I tell him to fuck off and call him something.
I get told off, he goes back on ignore.
Unfortunately we can't put moderators on ignore.
When I see a comment worth responding to, I do so. Not because of who they are, but because of what they've posted.
Then the other starts with the bullshit: the inability to argue in good faith, the dishonesty, the ad hominems, and, well, rinse and repeat, I guess. Their inability to argue the points rather than the person becomes my fault. C'est la vie, I guess.
I once suggested that moderators have 2 accounts, one for moderating, one for posting, so that at least we could ignore the amount of crap they spew in their non-moderating capacity. But no joy.
Pinball1970
Valued Senior Member
Yeah I get itUnfortunately we can't put moderators on ignore.
When I see a comment worth responding to, I do so. Not because of who they are, but because of what they've posted.
Then the other starts with the bullshit: the inability to argue in good faith, the dishonesty, the ad hominems, and, well, rinse and repeat, I guess. Their inability to argue the points rather than the person becomes my fault. C'est la vie, I guess.
I once suggested that moderators have 2 accounts, one for moderating, one for posting, so that at least we could ignore the amount of crap they spew in their non-moderating capacity. But no joy.
I was not trying to be holier than thou or take sides, I have a bit of a temper for this kind of stuff myself so I know the pitfalls.
On the point of, "same morals": It's not impossible, and there's even an argument lending toward it, but in a monotheistic framework, there is no guarantee, or even reason why, what is "good" to God will make any sense to us.
(Maybe Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five, in re Billy and Montana and Tralfamadoran four-dimensional perception; or, perhaps, somewhere in postcyber legend like manga and anime, and real questions of living in a simulation; if God is timeless, then what does It perceive. Mysterious ways, perhaps, but what, really, is a sweet oblation compared to the blood of children if the immediacy of smell has nothing to do with perception from beyond the obligations of time.)
The stories we tell are the stories we tell; be there a supreme God, as such, our anthropomorphization of the infinite (i.e., boundless) is entirely contained within and subject to our finiteness. A romanticized living Universe: We are the eyes and ears of the Universe; it is only through life that the Universe can perceive itself. Replace "Universe" with "God" in that telling and we describe an incredibly constrained and even infinitesimal perspective.
And there is a point that arises, sometimes, about how we obligate God↑ in the course of religion. What does it mean, for instance, that God blessed your or my conception and birth, or nineteen children in Uvalde, Texas; fourteen children in Parkland, Florida; twenty children in Newtown, Connecticut. I mean, I get the whole romanticized notion, the comfort of an adult finding their moment, and dying for the children means a lot, but it's not a trade; the children are still dead. And, really, what kind of God blesses a life to grow up and become a firefighter just to die for Donald Trump? It's one thing to psychoanalyze a believer's relationship with their religion, but our expectation of God's goodness is entirely a religious conception, and thus our own expectation of God. What is HIV to God? Cancer? It's one thing to advance our knowledge and durability in the Universe by trying to cure disease, but on some level killing us in order to make us stronger is nonsensical.
†
Thus, I might ask: Think of the math involved. I mean, there really is a lot of it, depending on how we look at things. If the religionist suggests the Universe is in equilibrium¹, a more scientific expression really does have to do with the math working out. Why are the armchair Einsteins always wrong, for instance? Because their math doesn't work. And that's the thing about supernatural magick; sleight-of-hand performance art is its own thing, but actual sorcery is the stuff of legend in part because it is supernatural, and nobody can explain how the math is supposed to work. But the math involved in this proposition goes beyond the physics of a flying broomstick, or rumors of energy sources for technological application. One of the easiest things to refute "creationism" is to to hold up a mobile phone, point to the sky, and remind that if the math of the physics was so wrong, the phones wouldn't work because the satellite network wouldn't work.
And when the Universe is in equilibrium, that includes that math of your brain chemistry, cell structure, mitochondrial function, impulse communication, every infinitesimal detail of existence. Even out in a primordial soup where subatomic particles flash into existence and then decay again to potentials as if they never were, the math works out.
When something that is somehow outside all that conforms to such a narrow and obliged perspective within the rules of spacetime, what does God see? Because "if He ever saw it", says a song, "it was through these eyes of mine; and if He ever suffered, it was me who did His crying". It is hard for me to understand what God is supposed to perceive and feel in such a particular and bound relationship as these tales describe.
Or, perhaps, moral comparisons 'twixt God and humanity being, in the first place, the stuff of religion, it does not seem a question of whether God would have the same morals; there's another song that says, "God is good, God is great, God's a big invertebrate; God made the river change its route, but won't pull the microorganism out."
In its way, it comes back to summum bonum and whether God is God. Would math be God, or the Holy Spirit? The argument lending toward similarity of morals is based on the chaos game with triangles; approximately, chaos contained will reflect its containment. It's one thing if our ten fingers and toes are somehow wrought in God's image, but my daughter's generation learned polydactyl dominance, and either way, this is how the math worked out. Why didn't God ...? Because that's not how the math worked out. And that's just a chain of events that gets from the beginning of the Universe to you and me, and speaks nothing of the rest of life or spacetime.
We might suggest a perspective that, for God, When The Math Works Out It Is Good. And if we ask why God didn't start out with humanity closer to the alleviation of suffering: that's a temporal question from our perspective; it's the way the math works out; from an extratemporal perspective, the math working out is both a potentially infinite number of little things along the way, and the final product of a whole process.
The thing about religion is that it is a story in which humanity is a main character, and sure, whatever, but compared to the whole of everything all at once, we're a mathematical detail. It's not impossible that there is an objective or true morality that can be discovered and identified and enumerated, but compared to the heat death of the Universe, it seems rather a waste for God to fret about the economic benefits of first-cousin marriage. Compared to the ninety-nine (and nines) percent of the Universe that will pass by without humanity, Sir Nigel Oniehagal Macnaighal IV can probably clone his daughter and marry the copy without breaking the math. And if that also destroys humanity, so be it, because God transcends time, so the outcome was in its way already known, and the Math Works Out, so It Is Good.
†
It isn't just that people try to bind God according to their own morals, but also according to their perspective. To presume moral similarity is both easy and counterintuitive: For instance, if someone were to ask why God might expect different morals of humans, the obvious answer is the difference of existential circumstances and perspectives. There is a reason gods come off looking like clownish villains and petty tyrants; it's what the people who invent gods know. Now, be there an actual monotheistic God on high, its circumstance is going to be considerably different than we hear from the shamans, priests, and congregants who make up overly complicated stories to explain what God wants.
One thing about being an atheistic critic of religion is that nothing obliges anyone else to play along with the religionist's rules of the game. There's a certain amount of apparent logic to be debated within its framework, but if we really expect God to put so much focus into our human affairs, It will observe two people having an argument in which neither knows what they're talking about.
Or, per #481↑, "And unless you take into account God's nature and position, you can not accurately or meaningfully judge God's morality", and that accounting is, well, difficult and subtle to say the least: Our brains are literally finite; a monotheistic God tends toward the infinite, but even still, the compared to a rock too heavy for God to lift—or how about a computer of such Augustinian scale—the difference comes down to who can fit it all inside their head long enough to make sense. Spoiler alert, ain't happening; it is quite literally too much information for a finite number of brain cells obliged to temporally-sequential calculation to actually contain, speak nothing of calculate.
There is a lot that we assign to, or oblige of, God according to the needs of religion, but when we account for what a monotheistic story actually tells us, almost all or our expectations are, as such, the balance of religion.
____________________
Notes:
¹ Perdurabo, "Samson"↱:
「The Universe is in equilibrium; therefore He that is without it, though his force be but a feather, can overturn the Universe.
Be not caught within that web, O child of Freedom! Be not entangled in the universal lie, O child of Truth!」
Be not caught within that web, O child of Freedom! Be not entangled in the universal lie, O child of Truth!」
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Pinball1970
Valued Senior Member
The universe has never been in equilibrium. The beginning was very different to where we are now and where we will end up.
Pinball1970
Valued Senior Member
We have scripture. Just considering the big three although there are not many Jews compared to Muslims and Christians.
God tells us who he is and what he wants from his people in the OT. Jesus tells us what we need to do to get our house in order in synoptics and tells us who he is in John.
The messenger relays gods final revelation 600 years later in the Koran.
TheVat
Valued Senior Member
This, and your further expansions in your essay, seemed to get at the various ways we humans project the ethos of social animals (and sometimes, ugh, bureaucracy) onto some hypothesized ultimate being. These sorts of hypotheses proliferate because they stand outside science and its Popperian criteria of falsifiability. Popper pointed out how a hypothesis incapable of disproof lies outside the domain of science...off there in the realm of faith leaps, species-centered intuitions, and blind hopes that something like an ultimate authority can make sense of misery and random shit. You can't disprove the god hypotheses, only note that, like Charles Sanders Peirce with his abductive reasoning, the"inference to the best explanation," we are not led to a supreme being as the strongest conclusion from any set of observations. I'm okay with that, there maybe should be epistemologies that don't just dismiss our feelings about some foundation to Being or insist we are chained to sensory data. It's good to leave the door open a crack to awe and mystery, so long as you don't start forcing dogmas on people and killing them when they question that.
Perdurabo does not require that equilibrium is not dynamic.
Pinball1970
Valued Senior Member
I think the statement is too general, the Universe is made up of lots of different objects that are constantly changing, stars, solar systems, galaxies, black holes. However there are a few examples where you can apply it, some stars will be in equilibrium like our own sun.
Also the CMBR.
The heat death will take the universe to thermal equilibrium once all stars have used up their fuel, i think that is current consensus. Atoms will also become radiation as matter also breaks down.
So yes and no!
Moderator note: I have split off the discussion about judging God's morality to a separate thread, since it is technically off-topic for the current thread and it's neater to gather all of the posts on that topic in the one place, away from the clutter of the other parallel discussions in the current thread. Here is the link:
www.sciforums.com
Is it wrong to judge the morality of God's actions?
Moderator note: This thread was split from the following thread: https://www.sciforums.com/threads/updated-what-position-are-you.167046 ---- It doesn't matter. We can judge God by what he does (or is reported to have do). We don't have to know his mind to make a moral judgment about him...
www.sciforums.com
Roosters for ever
Registered Senior Member
Me?? I don't like being labelled anything. I try and follow logic, commonsense. I find science as adherent to both. If other categories that fit other labels need that warm cozy cuddly feeling, rather then the cold hard uncompromising facts of evolution, death, and decay then good luck to them. As an 81 year old who has done some ratbag things, like fallen out of second story windows, hit by a vehicle all while inebriated, plenty of travel, experienced plenty of the good and the bad aspects of life and society through the ages, most all of course which I wasn't here for, (dead) and for the many (hopefully) millions/billions of years of Earth's future wherever that maybe, that I also won't be here for, (dead) I sort of compare it to being under anaesthesia which I was a few months ago for successful radical prostate surgery. I was effectively dead...no recall, no memory, just a complete total blank. Not afraid of its inevitability and being in pretty good heath, still have a couple of decades ahead of me. (hopefully) Might even end up a centenarian!
DaveC426913
Valued Senior Member
Sure, no one likes labels, and of course everyone has nuances to their beliefs, that doesn't mean you don't fall into on of the provided buckets -presuming the buckets are exhaustive (run the gamut of possible views.)
What does your logic and common sense tell you about God's existence, or lack of? In a nutshell. Say, four words or less.
Roosters for ever
Registered Senior Member
Simply put in two words, not needed and no evidence. Ancient man saw God, deities and supernatural in the Sun, stars, Moon, Mountains, Rivers etc etc, until science began explaining these with observable evidenced based science. Science imo, has continued to push the need for the supernatural into near oblivion.
DaveC426913
Valued Senior Member
My stance exactly.
I've been calling myself a "soft" atheist. I do not assert 'there is no God'. since one can't prove a negative, I simply assert its not needed to explain what we see, and if you want to assr it exists, I say "OK, show me some evidence".
Roosters for ever
Registered Senior Member