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01-08-2011, 12:47 PM | #642 (permalink) | |
FakingSuicideForApplause
Join Date: Jul 2009
Location: I live in a van down by the river
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Your last two paragraphs also bewilder me a bit. Firstly, your penultimate paragraph. I am going to take a very simplistic approach to this rebuttle. If God were to manifest himself before you, and murder your entire family, what difference would it make it to you whether it was actually God, or whether it was a human? What if, every crime committed was God manifesting himself in human form, simply to test our faith. Would these crimes be just simply because God did it? I completely disagree with that statement, the one that I've bolded. It just seems like blind faith. Secondly, your last paragraph, that approach you took to distinguish between supernatural events and events we cannot understand, once again, seems like a blind argument. An argument, that obviously science cannot justify unless empirical proof is provided. As if to say, God exists, simply because we cannot disprove it. I just can't bring myself to agree with your last two paragraphs.
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01-08-2011, 12:49 PM | #643 (permalink) |
Juicious Maximus III
Join Date: Nov 2008
Location: Scabb Island
Posts: 6,525
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No, the original author of that quotation has obviously not learned anything about optimality criterions and critical thinking.
SATCHMO, thank you for your thorough answer! I wasn't necessarily looking to discuss, but was interested in an honest answer to the questions which you have definetly provided
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01-08-2011, 01:11 PM | #644 (permalink) | |||||
Al Dente
Join Date: Mar 2005
Location: Texas
Posts: 4,708
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Having said that, the foundation of my own faith is greatly informed by the Judeo/Christian/Islamic tradition, as well as other faiths. I'm a believer in all, subscriber to none. And Yes, I do "pick and choose", I do make the discernment between what is a literal account of history, what is didactic, and what is both, and rarely, what is neither. I'm a great believer in story books. I think the scriptures of all faiths have great value to humankind, but the Bible is not uniformly history or His story and I believe it is up to each individual believer to extricate the wisdom inherent in a sacred text from the vehicle which is used to convey it. Quote:
I would be as grief-stricken and outraged as you would be if you were to witness the same events happen to your own family, but God is incapable of committing a crime, especially murder. Crime, in general and, Murder specifically are acts that are motivated by lower vibratory states of human emotion, namely fear, but also greed, jealousy, anger, or a false sense of power, and the effect that these states have upon one's judgment. And although some of these qualities, mainly anger and jealousy are imposed on God in the Bible by some of its authors, they really are exclusive to the human experience, therefor asking, "What if, every crime committed was God manifesting himself in human form, simply to test our faith. Would these crimes be just simply because God did it?" presents me with a conundrum, because every crime committed IS committed by God manifesting Himself in human form, but the crime is being committed by an individual who is, in a sense, acting apart from and perceiving themselves as separate from their own intrinsic divinity. As it regards the individual, the crimes would not be just, because the crimes would be motivated by human emotion and judgment. Quote:
I am in no way saying that "God exists, simply because we cannot disprove it". I am saying, in the words of Lao-tzu: The tao that can be told
is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal Name. The unnameable is the eternally real. Naming is the origin of all particular things. Free from desire, you realize the mystery. Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations. . |
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01-11-2011, 09:20 PM | #645 (permalink) | |
Supernatural anaesthetist
Join Date: Dec 2010
Location: Örebro, Sweden
Posts: 436
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Furthermore, and this is by no means directed particularily to you but rather a general statement, I as an atheist can't help but feel ever so slightly offended by the quite common notion of both theists and agnostics, that 'atheism is a belief as well'. Atheism is by definition the absence of belief in a higher divinity and thus calling it a belief (or even worse, a religion, which happens) is nothing but a cheap trick to try to discredit the 'opponent' (in lack of a better word for the moment) by dragging the discussion onto a field on which the atheist simply cannot win, i.e. where the possibility of a prevalent divinity is assumed. For an atheist no such assumption can be made, by definition. Of course, the reasons for why one is claiming to be an atheist may vary, and some may be less thought over than others and some may even by close examination contradict the definition of atheism. That's a whole different story though, and subject to argumentation on basis of the assumtions behind those reasons.
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01-11-2011, 11:07 PM | #646 (permalink) | ||
Al Dente
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Location: Texas
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01-12-2011, 12:44 AM | #648 (permalink) | |
( ̄ー ̄)
Join Date: Jul 2009
Posts: 3,270
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Saying "atheism is the non-belief in god as well as the active refutation of god's existence" has certain consequences that I think most people find undesirable. I'm sure most of you have heard this point beaten to death. I don't believe in god. But I also don't believe there is a gold teapot orbiting Earth somewhere in space. Does that make me an ateapot-ist? No, it just makes me skeptical of something that certainly could exist but which I find has very little (or none at all_ proof, evidence, or reason to exist. |
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01-12-2011, 12:45 AM | #649 (permalink) | |||
Supernatural anaesthetist
Join Date: Dec 2010
Location: Örebro, Sweden
Posts: 436
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Actually, I suspected that that would come up since the whole issue seems to revolve around this misunderstanding. If you look at what you've written above, you'll notice how you state that "The lack of belief[...]is the belief[...]" which obviously is a contradiction. This in turn, makes all of your following arguments invalid, since you base them all on the assumption that I carry a belief (in the absence of a divinity) and this is exactly the type of argument I implied in my original post: Quote:
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To crank the nitpicking up one notch: I'd claim that science as a method, is about understanding the nature of phenomena in and around us through concepts, whose significance to our experience we as humans must acknowledge in order to gain knowledge about them.
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01-12-2011, 12:47 AM | #650 (permalink) | |
Supernatural anaesthetist
Join Date: Dec 2010
Location: Örebro, Sweden
Posts: 436
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Nyiet. That makes you an ateapotist.
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