Originally Posted by AwwSugar (Post 688521)

Hesher, shut the fuck up.

Originally Posted by JayJamJah (Post 688522)

Ut-oh

http://www.lifeinthefreshlane.com/wp...ettios-can.jpg

Originally Posted by Hesher (Post 688525)

I'm sorry, where did that come from? I thought we were on the same team here. I must have confused you with a normal, rational person instead of a fucking tweak bitch.

Originally Posted by sleepy jack (Post 688531)

JKSmith is trolling. Arguing rationally with him is kind of pointless. That's what she's getting at.

Originally Posted by sleepy jack (Post 688531)

JKSmith is trolling. Arguing rationally with him is kind of pointless. That's what she's getting at.

Originally Posted by Veridical Fiction (Post 688533)

I just realized something.
My mom is a troll. I got in an argument with her about Christianity and I'm really sorry to say it, but she's a pretty dumb bitch.
She's coughing her lungs out but doesn't want to go to the hospital because she says she has enough faith in Jesus that she knows he'll keep her from getting lung cancer... while she smokes 2 packs a day.

Is there any limit to the stupidity of faith?

Originally Posted by sleepy jack (Post 688537)

Sadly there isn't my son.

Originally Posted by AwwSugar (Post 688435)

So it doesn't seem stupid to you that one being made the entire universe?

Originally Posted by AwwSugar (Post 688435)

And that his son was sent to die for sins? He sent his son... his actual child... who he apparently loves uncondiationally... to get tortured. Does that make sense?

Originally Posted by Neapolitan (Post 688566)

I doesn't sound stupid that One God create heaven and Earth. When one studies cosmology everything Universe is traced back goes back to one point in space/time.

"God is One," is not just a rejection of Polytheism, it's from a ontological argument of a Supreme Being as well. :yeah:



If you mean, Jesus, by the son of God, God didn't just send His Son to get torture and that was not the only reason for the Son to exist. He had a life as well.

The suffering and death of Jesus is at the nexus for the effects of sin that people commit which caused His pain and suffereing, and His love & redemption of the human race and His love for God. Jesus follows the Will of God even to death, but is also resurrected, He does it to conquer sin and death. It is not all about physical pain. Human beings have two natures a body and a soul. So the part we don't see is just as important, the passion of Jesus was also about his interior life as well, the perfection of the four Cardinal virtues - Temperence, Prudence, Fortitude and Justice, along with perfection of the Theological virtues of Faith Hope and Love.

Originally Posted by AwwSugar (Post 688829)

Hahaha, yeah man. Getwith it. xD

Originally Posted by Blue (Post 688834)

:laughing: Yes sir/ma'am.

Originally Posted by AwwSugar (Post 688836)

xD Miss*

Hehe

Originally Posted by Wayfarer (Post 688833)

Wrong.

How often do you hear in the news, "Two hundred killed today when the agnostic rebels took heavy shelling from the snobby atheist stronghold in the North"?

Originally Posted by cardboard adolescent (Post 689140)

of course they're not, they're too busy cashing in on the new wave of pseudo-intellectual atheism to actually be pissed off. but if you're implying that atheists all just sit around and muse about how clever they are, i can guarantee that there have been millions of people with a "nothing is true, everything is permitted" attitude that have committed countless atrocities that haunt us today. the real difference is the religious commit atrocities for some half-thought out semi-coherent reason, whereas the areligious commit atrocities just for the hell of it.

Originally Posted by JayJamJah (Post 689144)

What I enjoy about atheists compared to Christians is that I usually don't know who the devout Atheists are, the devout Christians make sure to fill in any gray area.

Originally Posted by sleepy jack (Post 689146)

What "areligious atrocities?"

Originally Posted by sleepy jack (Post 689150)

I think in many of those cases, bar serial killers or killing sprees which are senseless, there were other motivations there. In the case of Stalin they were political and as for political assassinations they were obviously political and had more to do with a specific ideology then Atheism. You can't be motivated by non-belief to act.

Originally Posted by cardboard adolescent (Post 689147)

a 'devout atheist' would basically have to say that there is no way that god could possibly exist given the world we know, which really just means they are pissed off at God/want to indict him for suffering. it doesn't really make sense. if there is no God, what is there to be devout about?

Originally Posted by sleepy jack (Post 689155)

I think that's more what any passionate Atheist does though. They argue against religious institution from an intellectual stand point. Look at Marx, or Nietzsche, or Freud. They didn't blow up any Churches to my knowledge but rather pointed out what was psychologically wrong with religious people in the case of Freud or pointed out that religious institutions were a means to control sheep or oppress the proletariat, in the case of the formers.

I think Atheists, because there's no religion there, have to form their own morality and in many cases (e.g. Camus, Sartre) they appear to be much more humanistic and moral then most theologians. People who senselessly kill are depraved and sick, but they can be of all religious or non-religious kinds and still be disturbed.

Originally Posted by JayJamJah (Post 689159)

devout is a poor choice of word. However your presumption of atheists is incorrect. The majority of atheists I;ve been in contact with believe in the idea of "God" as a human construct and only oppose any religious based perception of God. For those Atheists, it's not so much a matter of "we know we're right" as it is "we know you're wrong "

Originally Posted by cardboard adolescent (Post 689161)

Nietzsche basically supports slavery, as long as the master is intellectually superior. Camus and Sartre seem like nice enough guys, but they were French intellectuals who were in the right place at the right time, could say what heretics had been saying for ages and finally not get stoned for it. If there's no basis on which to base moral judgments, you probably will just conform to your society since that seems to take the least work. You could flip out and decide to kill as many sleep-walkers as possible, though. You only need one pissed off VT student for every thousand apathetic existentialists for non-belief to show its destructive side.

Still, I think everyone believes in God on a deep enough level, I don't think things could make sense otherwise. As such I believe every destructive act is a futile 'f you' to God.



the word 'God' is just a human construct, but the 'idea of God,' namely, the idea of a creator and intelligent purpose to reality, can't really be something we 'create,' it's something we 'discover,' though this discovery may just be a projection for our self-awareness onto external reality. to say 'i know you are wrong' means 'i know i am right,' because if you didn't have personal beliefs to contrast the incorrect ones to, how could you say they are wrong? atheism is a belief, which is why it's not agnosticism, but it's a belief which relies entirely on the religious system it is thrown at.

Originally Posted by Wayfarer (Post 689194)

This makes no sense whatsoever. If there is no God, you can't blame God for religious deaths; you can blame religion for them. This is why they're "religious deaths". They'd not have occurred if not for religion, or if they did, they'd have occurred for reasons outside of religion. Religion is absolutely to blame, whether or not God exists.

Originally Posted by JayJamJah (Post 689203)

Atheism is not a belief it is non-belief. I've never identified my self as someone positive there is no "God" discovered or created.

As for the notion that saying you're mean implys, I'm right, no.

The simplest example is this: If you say 6754 x 3244 = 21 I know you're wrong, I may not know the right answer, but I can still spot a wrong one.

Not trying to make a semantically charged argument here, do you see my point?

Originally Posted by cardboard adolescent (Post 689218)

not to sound elitist, but try to read my posts until they make sense.



what are you blaming when you blame religion? if there is no god, religion is just a front for other human drives to express themselves, and as such it is those drives you should blame for being destructive rather than 'the religion,' which is just words. words, in themselves, mean nothing.



the only reason you can identify an answer as wrong is because you know how to do the calculation, and you know that since you're multiplying two four digit numbers you're probably going to get a number that's at least 8 digits, etc. you have experience with math. if you have no experience with God, you are not qualified to say anything about his existence or non-existence.

Originally Posted by Inuzuka Skysword (Post 689219)

This is what I don't understand though. If you love everyone that way then can it really be called "love." I agree with your idea on a fundamental level, and I may be just picky about this, but the term "love" is not how I would describe such a thing. I guess we wold have to look at what it means to "love" in any way and generalize it into a sort of definition that encompasses all types of "love." The way I see it, to love something means to like something more than something else. If you love all humans, there are no humans which you cannot like. I cannot honestly say I know how the brain works, so I will just put this out there. Do we not have a measurement system in our mind which operates between the most minimum form of love that can be offered and the maximum?

What I want to know is what you would say about self-defense. If one loves others the same as himself then what justifies self-defense?


If there was a rep system on this forum I would give you green for that post. I totally agree with it. However, I disagree with this:


Does one necessarily need to make sense of things such as the origin of creation? One can simply deny the question any merit, could they not? One could basically say that even if there was a god, "How am I to live in order to live in the best way?" Does god really help in answering that question?

Originally Posted by JayJamJah (Post 689221)

I have experience with "God " as a concept, and that's the only way I know of "God"

So I can safely say through my expereince that no two "Gods" or groups of "Gods" are the same within the construct of religion. Therefore I can safely deduce that at least all but one are wrong.

Knowing this I feel comfortable saying that they are all wrong or at the very least they don't know if they are right.

There is nothing I can find hypocritical, contradictory or illogicla about that reasoning.

And I read your posts several times and still rarely fully understand them. Communication is a two way street CA.

Originally Posted by cardboard adolescent (Post 689228)

Basically I can only use philosophy in two ways; I can use it critically to show where others' logic has gaps or show what they're ignoring or glossing over, or to trace out their ideas to show the discomforting conclusions they lead to. This is using philosophy as a tool, and I am completely comfortable with it. However when I use philosophy to actually answer ethical, ontological or metaphysical issues, I betray a personal prejudice that it is not within my ability to trace to its origin, since its origin is the content of the prejudice (circular, but it makes sense, trust me). Hence, to answer the question "does God give you ethical guidance" I have to betray my mystical beliefs which I can't really convince anyone of unless they have had similar experiences to mine. So basically I can answer, but as long as you don't 'peel back the veil of reality,' so to speak, it doesn't really mean much one way or the other. That said, I believe that we all share one soul and repeat the same situations eternally with only the surface details changing. As such, my ethics are basically completely narcissistic, but aim for the survival/growth of the whole, rather than the individual. That also means that I don't really associate with my individual self (hello insanity) because I see it as being mostly arbitrary and the product of chance. Rather I identify with my thought trains, since I see them reflected throughout history in art and philosophy.

As soon as someone betrays certain mystical prejudices, people tend to take them less seriously as philosophers. However, most of the argumentation I do on the boards assume a certain degree of ontological uncertainty and aim more for logical coherence. This ties in to why I believe that without God, there is no purpose, hence no meaning, hence no ground for ethics or aesthetics, and nothing could really make much sense on any level.



And that is precisely the problem, you only know God insofar as it is a word, which is to say not at all. Maybe if you had had an experience of God, you would realize all religions are talking about the same thing, but that since it's something that can't be spoken of they just speak around it in erratic circles. Also, there are priests and there are mystics. Priests basically play telephone (and monopoly) with the ecstatic babble that mystics emit after taking the magic mushroom.

I apologize for that comment, my posts tend to be pretty dense because I know I would just end up going in circles and losing people if I developed every point as much as thinkers in the past have.

Originally Posted by cardboard adolescent (Post 689240)

i think that every living being experiences two drives, self-affirmation and self-destruction. I think both of these drives express themselves through everything we create, be it art, religion, economics, politics, etc. I don't think there's much hope of getting rid of either one.

On a more mystical level, i think the self-affirmative drive is a pull towards god, to become whole and embrace life and death, bliss and suffering. The self-destructive drive on the other hand denies bliss and focuses on suffering, and pulls us towards the abyss. I see the logic of christianity as an attempt to ignore the balance of good and evil, and essentially unbalance the universe towards self-affirmation, which i see as a metaphysical mistake that many other religions have managed to avoid. At the same time, though, by giving us a christ figure who basically embodies self-affirmation, christianity gives us a very sound and stable moral template. However, with every christ comes an anti-christ... So it goes.

Originally Posted by JayJamJah (Post 689253)

No need to apologize, I wouldn't read and respond if I didn't find the deciphering worth the work.

Your point, an eloquent extremley thoughtful one. is very well taken and my only defense is that to me "God" is just a word. I have no experience with it in any other form nor do I feel anyone who says they have is sincere so I have no reason to think of it as anything but. So I feel more then qualified to assert I feeling of absolute doubt without proof. It's really no more ridiculous then believing in the first place.

I don't care for the flying spaghetti+ monster argument but I think the spirit of it applies here. Does the absence of disproof equal proof. Obviously I don't think so.

Originally Posted by JayJamJah (Post 689295)

...I love you too?

Why did your viewpoint change?

Did you have an experience with "God"?