Why The Judaeo-Christian God Makes No Sense to Me

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Nihilism - "the rejection of all religious and moral principles, in the belief that life is meaningless."

From this search on Bing: http://www.bing.com/search?q=nihilism&q ... CAFFBFC170

Modern-day Western atheists are people who not only do not believe in the existence of God (or "gods"/supernatural entities in general), they also believe life to be ultimately meaningless and without purpose, that we don't have free will, there is no afterlife, morality is relative, and that the sciences will one day be able to fully account for who we are as human beings and why we are that way (if they cannot already do that).

When I rejected atheism I did not automatically adopt an alternative to it. For most of my life I just wasn't sure, and it's only been recently that I have finally decided in which direction to go. I've examined other religions (ex. Islam, Buddhism) and although I cannot claim to have a comprehensive understanding of these alternatives, I do know enough about them to know that they cannot possibly be true.

Ah yes, I've come across this nonsensical comparison before. Apparently there is practically no physical difference between a parasite and a baby, and this (utterly lame) argument is used to "justify" the destruction of human life.

How low will people go? Have they no shame, no conscience, no SENSE?

Sad but "acceptable"?! Preserving "autonomy" is apparently so sacrosanct, and we can't have anyone being inconvenienced by the presence of an unwanted child, so let's just kill the child. Such a neat solution, one that pleases everyone... except the one being murdered. They don't have a say in any of this.

None of those things logically follow from the rejection of organized religion. To you life is meaningless without religion. To many others life is still meaningful.

Also, even if life is "meaningless", there is nothing I can do about it. Trying to force myself to believe in a religion just because I don't like the fact that I have no idea what will happen to me after I die is not only illogical to me. It's downright impossible. You know I tried really hard to "make myself believe" in my teen years. I gave up when I realized I couldn't fool myself into thinking I was a believer. It was ultimately self-honest that lead to my disbelief.

Also, I've never fully accepted materialist reductionism (or whatever you want to call it). The physical laws of the universe do not explain consciousness as I experience it. Qualia seems rather superfluous to me. I don't believe science will explain the "meaning" of my experience. There is a philosophical wall separating the physical universe of science and measurements from the inner subjective experience. I simply leave it at "I don't know".

Perhaps I will find a semblance of satisfaction in some form of mysticism some day, but I'm almost 90% certain I will always be deeply distrusting of the religions followed by the masses. Actually I'm extremely distrustful of humanity as a whole. The more aggressively people appear to be selling me something, the more skeptical I become. I see through the power games, the attempts to assert control of one group to benefit another. I just don't see much redeeming value in the major world religions, especially the historically violent Abrahamic ones.

Actually it's also a beautifully practical argument for some serious social Darwinism. Babies are parasites on their mother's bodies, poor people on government assistance are parasites on the public weal... hey wait a minute... that's an idea! Euthanize those who can't make a living, raise the average IQ, and also put a dent in that population boom issue! You say a baby isn't conscious but poor people are? Prove it! According to enough researchers none of us our conscious - we're standing in the way of a deep gene-cleaning for the sake of a hallucination!


I think this raises two points:

a) Quite a few people (a large minority if not slight majority) really don't care about what's true, they care about what's convenient to them - now. This argument about babies being parasites, when you think about it, really paints the particular women who propose it in a bad light.

b) What's expedient or convenient to us has no correlation to making a better world, genocide for that matter can be wonderfully convenient and expedient at the right times (our genes seem to know that better than we do), and we should probably snap out of the stupor or malaise that caused us not to seriously challenge that idea, as well as the idea that any friction in life for anyone whose neither not male or caucasian is the product of The Patriarchy TM or vestigial colonialist imperialism.

http://www.liberalamerica.org/2017/10/1 ... oes-knots/

https://www.scientificamerican.com/arti ... ess-arise/

very few people would want to abort a being that could experience pain outside of the most extreme circumstances.

The first link has a pretty interesting thought experiment, but one that doesn't present much of a problem to my position laid out here:

viewtopic.php?f=20&t=215207&start=105#p6852809

Save the child naturally.

Edit: I understand the emotional side of this debate, I feel differently about a crying 5 year old than I do about a ball of cells. It's logic and reason that tells me if one deserves protection, so does the other.

As for the other link: consciousness and pain arguments hold little sway over me. It's not ok to kill someone while they are unconcious or numbed by anasthetic. To know why that is wrong, is coming half way to my position on abortion.

Before a nervous system has developed, there isn't even a "someone" to speak about. Without a nervous system there's no mind, and without a mind there's no person.

You've avoided the question.

God is perfect, holy and divine. God is infinite and his holy word is perfect. Mankind including myself is filled with sin and unrighteousness. My mind is but finite. Plus, I have an autism spectrum as well. How can one who is filled with sin and unrighteousness, who's mind is finite plus being on the autism spectrum hope to comprehend and follow the perfect word of a perfect, infinite, holy and divine God?

Went and read your thought experiment. You're committing the continuum fallacy. The fact that a fully grown adult is a person does not imply that a just conceived zygote is a person. The zygote is of course human, in the sense that it's genetically related to our species, but it's not a person because it has never had psychological functions and subjective experiences.

I don't know where the line should be drawn. I emphatically agree with the approach used in the Netherlands, where a newborn with a severe condition that was not detected during pregnancy can be legally euthanized. How long after birth should it be permissible, I don't know. Becoming a person is a very gradual process; any solid line of demarcation would be arbitrary. But I find it very clear that it's meaningless to speak of harm against anything without neural functions.

Edited to add: Also, you make a false distinction between "natural" and "unnatural" conception. I suggest you use more precise terms, because nothing that happens in this universe is not natural.

Last edited by carturo222 on 19 Oct 2017, 11:22 am, edited 1 time in total.

Why do you trust your imperfect mind when it thinks that a deity is perfect?

the god of the old testament thought that the life of a mother is worth more than the life of a fetus. if you hit a pregnant woman and she died, you were killed. if her fetus died, you were fined.

That's the same god who killed every Egyptian child and who was perfectly fine with slavery and who commanded military campaigns of extermination, so on balance, he's still a monster.

Answer: I don't. I don't understand what the Bible says because it is to perfect for my mind to understand and grasp. It is my sinful and autistic nature that makes it incomprehensible to me. All I can do is just put it and keep it on the book shelf.

I didn't say person, I said human being.



Yep, went through this in the other thread. Personhood means different things to different people (in US law it pretty much everyone under the age of 18), you need a much tighter definition if you are using it to justify ending the lives of human beings.


You know, some might call that absolute innocence. Again I put to you the same implied question, still unanswered. Why is it wrong to kill an unconscious, anaesthetised person?



It's pretty obvious what I mean, no need to get that stuck into that kind of philosophical precision.