A challenge: debate the issue of religion with yours truly

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Lukecash12
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04 May 2012, 5:29 pm

01001011 wrote:
Lukecash12 wrote:
1. We do have something of an idea as to how a tri-omni God would behave, because being tri-omni means He is fully knowledgable, fully capable, and fully benevolent. For Him to be acting in accordance with His nature necessitates this being the best possible scenario. All I assume is that a tri-omni being would act in accordance with it's own nature.

You have not come up with any non-trivial standard of 'good' or 'evil' to begin with. Therefore your 'fully benevolent' god is complete nonsense. Your 'idea' of how such object behaves is nothing but your delusion.

Quote:
2. The "best possible world" that I refer to, is a possible world in which the relationship between good and evil is the most ideal. That is plenty distinct. Of all the possible worlds, this one must have the most good in comparison to evil, if it's creator is indeed a tri-omni deity. As for defining "good' and "evil", in this context, we involve ourselves in theology. Because it's a theological issue, we maybe ought to ask what it is that God deems "good' or "evil".

Even if 'god' deems such world the best possible, it would be as arbitrary (and trivial) as say, Mao deems his nation the best possible. Not to mention there is no way to measure what 'god' deems. At best you are guessing based on your subjective interpretation of the bible. Really, you are just fantasizing there is such a standard. Indeed, by virture of Euthyphro dilemma such objective moral standard is impossible.


1. You seem to have mistaken the context. AG was working from the UOD (universe of discourse) that Christianity may be true, in order to criticize it. In this context, I don't need to substantiate that God is tri-omni, in terms of general epistemics (as opposed to the less existential exercise of working from a UOD), because He defined Himself as tri-omni in the scriptures.

So, my idea of how such an object behaves, is informed by how that object defines itself. Of course, I'd be perfectly willing to debate over whether or not this universe of discourse has any grounding.

2. "Subjective interpretation of the bible"? Interesting assumption... As for the rest of the material, I would say that it is related to the issue of the UOD which I established.


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waltur
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05 May 2012, 7:54 pm

Luke: You're all over the place. I've read this entire thread twice and have come away with very few positive claims on your part. What I've taken as your positive claims amounts to, basically:
1: Supernatural explanations that confirm your worldview are more likely than natural explanations that supplant it.
2: Other people who see more validity in their arguments than yours are arrogant while your own view that your arguments are more valid is dispassionately well reasoned.
3: You're afflicted with the "Tri-omni-god" meme.

This leads me to two relevant conclusions:
1: You don't understand the principle of Special Pleading.
2: You need more Epicurus in your life,

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...you f**k.


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Awesomelyglorious
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05 May 2012, 9:29 pm

Binary, your argument with Lukecash12 is on relatively silly lines.

Going back to this argument, it's really not that good of an argument:

Premise 1- Assume for the UOD that it is necessarily true that God is a tri-omni being, meaning that he is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent.
Premise 2- We live in a possible world where evil is problematic.
Premise 3- Given that it is necessarily true that God is tri-omni, it must be assumed that we live in the possible world wherein God is optimally expressing those traits.
Conclusion- It is not necessarily contradictory, for God to be tri-omni, and for evil to exist at the same time.

It doesn't work against the logical problem of evil, given that the logical problem of evil is going to outright deny premise 1, because something can't be necessary and impossible. If one doesn't put forward a logical problem of evil though, then one isn't arguing a necessary contradiction.

It is irrelevant against the probabilistic problem of evil because the probabilistic problem of evil isn't involving itself with contradictions, only with absurdities. So, while it may be possible given our limited knowledge that Obama struts across the White House lawn every morning and clucks like a chicken, it is implausible given that we are justified to assume that Obama is a rational agent, given that other presumably rational agents would have an incentive to find this out, given that this would not be easily kept secret because it's on the White House lawn, etc.

Given that Lukecash12 is arguing that this is actually the BEST OF ALL POSSIBLE WORLDS, most rational people can quickly dismiss him from the realm of reasonable interlocutors. This is clearly unintuitive, flatly disagrees with one of the sources of knowledge we have to rely on about the world(our ability to construct counterfactuals), and even outright clashes with our emotional experiences where hope, regret, loss, etc, exist partially as a matter of how this world relates to our perception of another logically possible and better world. Simply put, we'd sacrifice so much more to consider Lukecash12 right, than we would to consider him wrong, and anybody who is not already pre-committed to his claims would realize that. Even most of Lukecash12's Christian kin likely consider the idea ridiculous(something I know from experience putting forward the best of all possible worlds forward on similar grounds to Lukecash12).

And it's stuff like that which justifies me avoiding this thread. There is no reason to engage in any discussion with somebody who is willing to go so far in defense of their favored beliefs. I mean, there is no rationality in me engaging someone defending something that can be quickly pointed out as absurd. There is no reason to respect an absurdity. And there is no maturity in me doing other than laughing and stepping away, only a child feels the need to respond to every challenge to his or her ego.

Binary, I know it utterly disagrees with your absurd philosophical framework, but his weak point isn't tritheism or his moral realism, but rather his commitment to the best of all possible worlds. He's committed himself to a claim that can only be defended with a skeptical card so stout that it will inevitably conflict with the need for moral knowledge in other domains, which results in something ridiculously unintuitive, if not contradictory.



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05 May 2012, 9:59 pm

The religious and the non religious can debate with each other about a lot of things but both groups should try to find common ground on things that matter like the economy in their country soical issues and things that matter the point is. Religion will always be their but I believe if both groups could work together politically we could get along with each other a lot better if the religious would keep their faith out of politics but that is just my opinon.



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07 May 2012, 7:34 am

Lukecash12 wrote:
@Mr. Delaney:

I'm very sorry it's taken me this long to get back to you. I've limited access to the internet this week, while I visit with and babysit for a family member this week, out of town. If I had access to my lexicons and translinear text rendering software, as well as my books and online publications, I would answer all of your material. The issues that you raised are issues that I am very interested in.

But, to at least give you some of my opinions for the time being:

1. As regards the Black Sea Deluge hypothesis, I don't find such mental gymnastics necessary. That is because I don't find the notion that the whole world was flooded, to be a notion supported by the text.
It certainly isn't. Also, I think that the text most likely refers to or was inspired by actual events. This actually has a lot more credibility to me than viable alternatives such as:

1) "over the course of 10 thousand years of human history, there have been no major flooding events over large geographic areas."

--Such a long period of uninterrupted good weather is a meteorological and geological impossibility in a world in which there were receding and advancing glaciers, climatic changes and continental drift. Our planet's climate is actually not very stable at all. In reality, we cannot guarantee that our planet will be fit to live on 100 years from now.

2) "our ancestors would have historically ignored actual events in our history and composed imaginative works of fiction for us instead." Most people don't really appreciate how difficult it is to actually create an original idea, especially under circumstances that one has never had the benefit of mass media. In a primitive society, people's ideas and their fodder for story-telling would have been limited to fairy tales and stories passed down from their grandparents, and those tales would have been inspired by stories told by their grandparents, possibly pertaining to their interpretation and understanding (or misunderstanding) of actual events.

Instead, I tend to drift toward the hypothesis that our forbears have not gone so far out of their way to pass down to us thoroughly baseless fiction, and the many stories we are told about a massive flooding event might actually have a basis in reality. I am uncertain as to what that basis is, but there are many working hypotheses pertaining to it that are interesting to study and weigh the strength of.

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2. That there are stories similar to that found in Genesis, does not necessarily suggest syncretism to me. It suggests Semitic thinking, is all. That they share in Semitic thinking, does not mean that their theology is the same. I would assert that all three accounts are different. As for them sharing some common traditional roots, I think that is definitely plausible, even positively indicated.
I was not referring to syncretism, though. I think that the ancestors of the Hebrews adhered to the Sumerian religion. I think that they were faithful to it, and I think they did their best to pass it on to their offspring, even in times during which they were oppressed by other cultures. I give the Hebrews a great deal of credit for diligence and determination in the preservation of their heritage.

However, I think it's nonsense to assume that Genesis is the original account, and it is doubtful that the Hebrews were closer to the original version of it than neighboring cultures who told similar stories.

For that matter, I think that the battle between the Olympians and the Titans was also inspired by events to which the Genesis account pertains. I think they were essentially the same story.

There was actually considerable commerce and cultural diffusion between ancient Greece and ancient Sumer. They were not estranged from each other whatsoever. However, they were two distinct cultures and had their own distinct issues.

Furthermore, I think that, during the break-down of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, amid the rise of the Achaemenid Empire, amid the rise of the Han Dynasty, amid the rise of the Chaldean Empire, a lot of ideas got transmitted Westward amid this period of socio-political instability. It was a traumatic time. Amid the period of political instability that led to the fall of Babylon to the Persians, members of the upper class, like the family of Thales of Miletus, fled Westward, to the fertile shores of Southwestern Anatolia. Because, although the Neo-Babylonian Empire enjoyed a seeming golden age, the Persians were chopping their estwhile rulers to pieces! And the Persians were not very nice or open-minded people.

And the Achaemenid Empire had everything to do with the protection of trade routes. The Persions were situated between Han-dominated Persia and the West. They could not afford to have anything but an absolute monopoly over the transmission of goods to other cultures. The Han Dynasty was a rising dragon, a goliath, a juggernaut! The Han Dynasty built the greatest overland trade route in history, the Silk Road! They built the greatest empire in history.

And the Achaeminids did not squander this. They built some of the earliest true roads. The Royal Road, my friend! The great artery that connected East with West! And the Persians defended their exclusive rights to this artery with jealousy and hatred. They made a point of murdering any rival culture as aptly and efficiently as possible. They did not like freethinkers, and they did not like any idea that could lead to dissent.

And the freethinkers and the believers in intellectual autonomy spread their ideas West! Hellas was afire with democracy. It had the freedom bug because Hellas was the last refuge of the scurrilous freethinker. They became a mighty cauldron of innovation! Out of the smoldering ashes of fallen civilizations and crushed spirits, the tender roots of philosophy were born. And it became the many-headed monster!

Ultimately, it came home to roost for Persia. Alexander and his armies marched on them. They marched East, and the Persians collapsed like a house of cards.

But Alexander was not prepared for one thing. India. No culture has ever truly tamed India. Not even the British. India, where the Devas reign supreme, where wild gods battle in the skies, has been the downfall of many an empire.

Quote:
None of this is problematic for me, in terms of Christian belief. That being because I view Genesis in strictly theological terms. Because yom (Hebrew for a day cycle) appears before there is even a yom to be had, and because of some other such considerations, I don't see anything of a scientific intent in the Creation account. It seems neither natural to the text, nor natural to Semitic thinking, to make a scientific account of creation. I'll be elaborating on Semitic thought and the text in Hebrew, next week.
I probably agree with you, assuming I am understanding your meaning correctly. I think that Levantine peoples seldom ever described things in strictly literal terms, and I think that the utility of this is that the mythological accounts are more culturally transmissible. It's a lot easier to pass along a love story, decorated with fanciful monstrosities and fairy castles, than it is to pass down a dry account of obscure historical events. Their method of transmission is superior in many respects to a more literal method.

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3. I'd be interested in seeing the hypothesis once you've finished it. As for now, I don't know what to think. Not much to go off of there.
The connection between Paul the Apostle's ideas and Tengriist shamanistic beliefs? Pure ill-conceived trash. It's nonsense. Think nothing more of it.

Quote:
4. For starters, that Paul was tormented by a "thorn" is much too vague to support the idea of a recurring migraine ailment. Migraines don't really account for a vision/hallucination either, unless you've seen such a case corroborated in a medical journal.
Actually, I think that it was either a migraine condition or epilepsy. In fact, the aura of an epileptic seizure is occasionally marked by auditory hallucinations of a voice calling out the sufferer's name. Furthermore, temporal lobe epilepsy in particular is often associated with post-ictal religious conversions:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18171635

Also, temporal lobe epilepsy is also associated with hypergraphia. Anyway, the fact that I concentrated around migraines is that, if we take Paul at his word, all that he has described to us in his own words has been possible migraine, which is a lot more common and directly corroborated by the symptoms he attests to us in his writings. The only thing that makes TLE a possibility is the fact that he clearly had strong auditory hallucinations, and I have heard of TLE being associated with hyper-religiosity.

Quote:
I might also ask how this all fits in with the fact that Paul was previously opposed to Christian belief.
I imagine because he was a highly educated man. Tarsus was not some backwater, but they were an important shipyard. They taught engineers, and their leaders were classically educated. Paul went out into the world with a head full of scientific theories, and he found himself in an untenable situation to which they were non-applicable.

Quote:
5. Yes, I would tend to agree with you there, when it comes to which groups were the most dynamic, and culturally promulgating. From the Christian point of view, Israel is extremely important when it comes to theology, and theology being expressed through history. But that's just the Judeo-Christian view of history. When it comes to who the big historical players were, Israel was kind of a blip.
Yes. I find it amazing that most people have trouble grasping this idea.

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6. Right. The people of Israel lived under an actual, working legal system. It wasn't just smoke and mirrors.
Indeed! Again, I don't know why people so often have trouble with this idea. They were a civilization, and they were a fairly successful one. They had a system of law, and they kept records. They had survived living under various different empires. They were not stupid or barbaric people whatsoever. Their upper class especially would have had a very nearly modern lifestyle, most likely.



01001011
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07 May 2012, 11:51 am

Awesomelyglorious wrote:
Given that Lukecash12 is arguing that this is actually the BEST OF ALL POSSIBLE WORLDS, most rational people can quickly dismiss him from the realm of reasonable interlocutors. This is clearly unintuitive, flatly disagrees with one of the sources of knowledge we have to rely on about the world(our ability to construct counterfactuals), and even outright clashes with our emotional experiences where hope, regret, loss, etc, exist partially as a matter of how this world relates to our perception of another logically possible and better world.

It is naive to assume that an apologist will accept your intuitive idea of 'best' possible world or what a 'tri-onmi' object 'should' do. Really, what you and most atheists are doing is to give the apologist ground to play dodgeball. In this sense, both problem of evil and your best possible world fail.

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Binary, I know it utterly disagrees with your absurd philosophical framework, but his weak point isn't tritheism or his moral realism, but rather his commitment to the best of all possible worlds. He's committed himself to a claim that can only be defended with a skeptical card so stout that it will inevitably conflict with the need for moral knowledge in other domains, which results in something ridiculously unintuitive, if not contradictory.

Given the theists simply refuses any intuitive definitions anyways, why do you think is it absurd to examine if these theological jargons mean ANYTHING at all?

Are you just objecting just beacuse my criticism does not develop into lengthy debates you are used to?



Awesomelyglorious
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07 May 2012, 12:07 pm

Binary, it is naive to think anybody will see your effort as anything but a continual application of arbitrary skepticism. The problem is that as an interlocutor, you do have to be willing to fill in the gaps and apply reasonable interpretations if any are possible.

I object simply because your method is utterly stupid, binary. There is nothing more to it. It's most similar to the idiocy of presuppositional apologetics, except your idea is even MORE ridiculous.

In any case, for whatever reason, you are not a useful contributor. I am ignoring you in the future.



01001011
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07 May 2012, 12:11 pm

Lukecash12 wrote:
1. You seem to have mistaken the context. AG was working from the UOD (universe of discourse) that Christianity may be true, in order to criticize it. In this context, I don't need to substantiate that God is tri-omni, in terms of general epistemics (as opposed to the less existential exercise of working from a UOD), because He defined Himself as tri-omni in the scriptures.

And he worked under the assumption that 'best', 'benevolent' as defined by (his) intuition. Since you rejected his standard, you really have no 'UOD'. My objection is precisely that the term 'benevolent', which you used to _define_ 'god', has no meaning at all.

Quote:
2. "Subjective interpretation of the bible"? Interesting assumption... As for the rest of the material, I would say that it is related to the issue of the UOD which I established.


FACT 1) All the letters in NT is about nothing but the SUBJECTIVE interpretation of Paul et. al. on their second hand knowledge on teachings of Jesus.

FACT 2) The 'morality from the bible' changes all the time, and now there are some 30000 dominations of 'Christianity', which disagree with each other on many interpretations of the bible.

Good luck with finding an objective interpretation which knocks out all the rest, once and for all.



xero052
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07 May 2012, 1:22 pm

Lukecash12 wrote:
Consider this an invitation, to criticize theism and Christianity in particular. Give me everything you've got. Ready to step into the big leagues? I anticipate your arguments; why don't we see if you can teach me a thing or two? People with Asperger's syndrome tend to be intelligent folk, right?

But let's go one step further: go ahead and roast theism and Christianity. Roast them and roast me. Care to take the dare?



You misunderstand atheists, it's not that we have positive arguments that theism is wrong, and atheism right. We instead point out that there is no affirmative argument for the theistic worldview, and that an atheistic worldview explains the universe we observe while making the fewest non-provable assumptions. The burden of proof, therefore, is on the theist to convince me that there is valid evidentiary reason to change my mind. Since theists have trouble providing tangible evidence of their gods, the argument usually becomes instead a critique of science, logic, and reason. Evolution, or more precisely the separate scientific theories of common descent, natural selection, and abiogenesis, is ground zero for this critique.
This is a difficult argument for a modern theist to make, because, whether she likes it or not, modern society still places emphasis on logic and reason over received wisdom. (I'm comparing her to a premodern, ie medieval theist). If a theist must argue that logic, reason, and science fail to explain, say, biological diversity, that same indictment should also be leveled at scientific explanations of disease. Theists, in my experience, don't have much issue with the Germ Theory of disease. But it is intellectually dishonest, in my opinion, to select when you support the conclusions of science, and when you do not.
Ultimately, it cannot be known if scientific thinking turns out to be the best mode of inquiry. But at this point in time, it's very difficult to argue against the fruits science has provided over the last two centuries. Yet this is the position the theist frequently finds herself in.

To illustrate, this:
http://www.dustinland.com/archives/archives537.html


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Evinceo
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07 May 2012, 11:35 pm

There are thousands of gods with different names, different attributes and cults and histories out there. How do you know that yours is the best? Why do you argue that the others don't exist?



slave
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22 May 2012, 11:35 pm

xero052 wrote:
Lukecash12 wrote:
Consider this an invitation, to criticize theism and Christianity in particular. Give me everything you've got. Ready to step into the big leagues? I anticipate your arguments; why don't we see if you can teach me a thing or two? People with Asperger's syndrome tend to be intelligent folk, right?

But let's go one step further: go ahead and roast theism and Christianity. Roast them and roast me. Care to take the dare?



You misunderstand atheists, it's not that we have positive arguments that theism is wrong, and atheism right. We instead point out that there is no affirmative argument for the theistic worldview, and that an atheistic worldview explains the universe we observe while making the fewest non-provable assumptions. The burden of proof, therefore, is on the theist to convince me that there is valid evidentiary reason to change my mind. Since theists have trouble providing tangible evidence of their gods, the argument usually becomes instead a critique of science, logic, and reason. Evolution, or more precisely the separate scientific theories of common descent, natural selection, and abiogenesis, is ground zero for this critique.
This is a difficult argument for a modern theist to make, because, whether she likes it or not, modern society still places emphasis on logic and reason over received wisdom. (I'm comparing her to a premodern, ie medieval theist). If a theist must argue that logic, reason, and science fail to explain, say, biological diversity, that same indictment should also be leveled at scientific explanations of disease. Theists, in my experience, don't have much issue with the Germ Theory of disease. But it is intellectually dishonest, in my opinion, to select when you support the conclusions of science, and when you do not.
Ultimately, it cannot be known if scientific thinking turns out to be the best mode of inquiry. But at this point in time, it's very difficult to argue against the fruits science has provided over the last two centuries. Yet this is the position the theist frequently finds herself in.

To illustrate, this:
http://www.dustinland.com/archives/archives537.html



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23 May 2012, 4:28 pm

Okay.
Respond to Epicurus who asked the following:


Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able?

Then he is not omnipotent.


Is he is able but not willing?

Then he is malevolent.


Is he both able and willing?

Then whense cometh evil?


Is he is niether willing nor evil?

Then why call him "God"?



slave
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19 Jun 2012, 7:19 pm

I'm surprised the thread died.......oh well.



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19 Jun 2012, 7:24 pm

Are we subject to falling out of existence into the quantum foam?