Christians: bad for society.

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Post that thread. Seriously, please do it.

Actually, I was messing around with ruveyn. If you've been around the forum a bit, you'd know that he's noted for saying a few things that many people consider pretty uncivil, so I was messing with him.

The mainstream of Christianity promoted anti-semitism for the past two millenia. http://www.religioustolerance.org/jud_pers.htm The modern movement is likely due to the problems of a lack of distance from the holocaust if anti-semitism wasn't condemned.

Inuyasha, why don't you actually start a thread. I really don't care about posters whining about like babies. This is PPR. Let people "call for your head". If you have an argument, then argue it, don't whine.

The problem, I think, is that like many far-right ultraconservatives Inuyasha is perfectly willing to dish it out, but he can't take it when others fight back.

Since there seems to be some weird paranoia developing over Saul Alinsky, a cynically pragmatic social democrat, what are your views on him, AG?

I have no issues with community organization, and to some extent I like it. I dislike a lot of left-wing politics though, as well as grassroots politics, regardless of what those grassroots happen to be. I will admit that I am not as much of an expert in Saul Alinsky as is ideal though, and really I hadn't heard of him until Inuyasha stated the name. (I subsequently looked him up)

Oh, additional note, some of his actions do show real character, such as the march into Oakland. It may be the case that I need to do more research on the man.

A lot of his actions show him to be a rather troubled man putting it mildly. Look up Rulebook for Radicals, it is the Democrats and mainstream media's playbook.

AG

Sounds like your a little sore towards the outcome of the last debate.

This time your argument is even more poorly constructed, since it destroys any objective standard and disproves itself.

Your argument is essentially a moral one based on the claim that 'Christians would have to prove they would behave better if they believed in God'. This is not a reasonable contention, since without God all one is left with is a form of socio-cultural relativism. Without God, I would contend, you have no capacity to say something is bad. So if something cannot be judged as bad, how can you make a value statement that it is bad for society? If you contend that morality is the result of evolution and psychology then there is not transcendent objective standard, from which something could be judged as bad.

For your argument to be true, God would have to exist. Since I would contend that for something to be objectively true it would have to exist in a way that is apart from us. It would need to be the case, regardless of whether we believed it or not.

So if you are going to contend that 'Christianity is bad', you would first need to agree that God exists, otherwise you have no basis for the judgement.

I haven't read the whole book, but I did read the introduction. I don't really see the problem - he chatises idealist Hippies as crybabies and (which is really something considering the Utopianism of the 1960s far-left) made it clear that there is no "final utopia" and that reforms will always create new problems.

And Tea Partisan organizers are using his work.

Last edited by Master_Pedant on 09 Nov 2010, 10:59 pm, edited 2 times in total.

Mainline Protestantism is a better picture of modern mainstream Christianity than the fundie/evangelical crowds, so by the survey posted one could argue that Christianity (when not distorted by evangelical demogogues) contrbutes to a sense of morality, as evidenced by the greater opposition to torture within mainstream Christianity.

On the gay issue mainline Protestants are divided, but then so is the population as a whole.

The intellectual dishonesty issue rests on assumed conclusions about Christian theology that would really have to be demonstrated, and that would be a long and tedious debate.

And it's pretty much BS to claim the Democratic Party playbook has anything to do with the effective strategies of Saul Alinsky. The real official Democratic Party playbook is this:

http://www.dlc.org/ndol_ka.cfm?kaid=139

And just to let people know, I'm a "New Democrat" in the Canadian sense of the word, not the America sense.

What have been [Christianity's] fruits? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the Clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity; in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution.

James Madison






(Religion) With or without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion

Steven Weinberg

Ugh.... no it doesn't.
1) I didn't say Christianity is false. I said it was bad for society.
2) Even if I did say Christianity was false, the moral argument still has to work, and we have intuitions suggesting it doesn't.
3) Even if the moral argument works, it still doesn't mean that Christianity isn't false, it could also just tell us that morality fails.


No, I actually just said "Christianity is bad for society". I didn't even address the existence of God in most places.


1) Ok? Your point? How is this not sufficient for making my claim?
2) Proof? What is it. You can't just assert things and make no argument for them.
3) Is it even relevant? The basis of my point was empirical comparison. This does not refute the outcome of that.


1) You may contend that, but where is your proof?
2) Doesn't this contradict your claim of relativism earlier? Aesthetics and taste are relative, but we can certainly say that art and food are bad.
3) Wouldn't reducing ethics to merely God's will make it arbitrary, as noted with the Euthyphro dilemma, as well as the emptiness objection, that calling God "good" becomes meaningless if good is just defined by God in the first place, thus making all claims about God's goodness arbitrary and philosophically empty, a point pointed out by CS Lewis a really freaking long time ago

"And so what? This, for all practical (and speculative) purposes sponges God off the slate. The word good, as applied to him, becomes meaningless: like abracadabra. We have no motive for obeying Him. Not even fear. It is true that we have His threats and promises. But why should we believe them? If cruelty is from His point of view “good,” telling lies may be “good” too. Even if they are true, what then? If His ideas of good are so very different from ours, what He calls “Heaven” might well be what we should call Hell, and vice versa. Finally, if reality at its very root is so meaningless to us—or, putting it the other way round, if we are such total imbeciles—what is the point of trying to think either about God or about anything else? The knot comes undone when you try to pull it tight."-CS Lewis, A Grief Observed.


1) I already addressed this in pointing out that it conflicted with one of your earlier claims.
2) The term "bad for X" is often substitutable for "bad for maintaining the continued existence of X" as well as similar things, thus often making it not so much a moral claim.
3) You never proved your central contention.


1) If I contend that morality is a result of evolution and psychology, why would I care to appeal to a transcendent standard? I already HAVE a standard, WHY would I want another one?? The rebuttal makes no sense.
2) I assume you want to promote one standard above the other, but why should I consider God's arbitrary whim above nature's? It isn't as if God has to consult some ethic when devising ethics, or that there is a meta-ethical rule you appeal to with God, so what makes it better for God to invent this than nature? Certainly I could use whatever conscience I have to judge.
3) If the objective standard only comes from God, then how is truth about it arrived at? After all, if you appeal to scripture, then the issue is that in your last debate, you still have to contend with the fundamentalism inherent in scripture.(Note: I don't think your debating efforts were consistent last time, in any meaningful sense.) And if you appeal to that, then you'd have to come to the conclusion that most Christians are not real, perhaps even that all of them are not real given the degree of failure by those scriptures, which DO demand a lot, because as Jesus states, the path is narrow. If you appeal to reason though, then why is God's existence necessary to prove what reason already gives to us?


Ok, and if we assume that God exists, and if based upon this assumption, we come across evidence that God does not exist, then what we end up with is that we prove the inconsistency of a belief. It's really quite simple, making this entire effort at the moral argument a waste. I can assume God's existence to prove him false via inconsistency or I can start with non-existence; either way works.


You never proved it, so I don't have to buy it.

Eh.


I'm not so sure about accepting gays within the church body itself. Isn't the division really more in terms of gay marriage? Only a few more liberal denominations allow gay clergymen. Even further, much of the anti-gay sentiments COMES FROM Christianity, so I still think that is relevant.


Well, you know that I could make the effort. Really though, Orwell, very little justifies the Christianity the masses hold to, and even within it, there seem to be blatant contradictions, so, I don't really see what more that needs to be said. Even further, even in your faith, exactly how much rational justification do you have for what you believe?

So you're criticizing Saul Alinsky for acknowledging explicitly what all other leaders, politicians, and political thinkers are too cowardly to admit outright? I must hand it to the conservatives, as they seem very good at applying this "Alinskian" tactic - indeed, Tea Party activists use Alinsky's book in their training session:

http://www.albanyherald.com/home/headli ... 05919.html

How a poltician like Obama - who'd be considered a moderate conservative in any other developed country - becomes a "socialist" is beyond me.

What makes you think that? Has a single child-raping priest been excommunicated?

The only people who get excommunicated these days are nuns who try to be priests and people who help women and girls have abortions.

Timothy McVeigh was a lapsed Catholic who blew up a day care center (along with half of a building and a whole bunch of adults), but the pope didn't excommunicate him.

Are you going to contend that it is true and go against what it says in your signature.



You do know what it says in your signature don't you?



I have made this quite clear. In nature whatever 'is' is right. That without God there is no moral objectivity, so have many atheists for instance the Biological Philosopher Massimo Pigliucci:

‘on atheism there is no such thing as objective morality, morality in human cultures has evolved and what is moral for you, might not be moral for the guy next door and certainly is not moral for the guy across the ocean and what makes you think that your personal morality is right and everybody elses is wrong? What we call homicide and rape is very common among many kinds of animals, lion for example commit infanticide on a regular basis, are any of these kinds of acts to be condoned? I don’t even know what that means; the lion does not understand what morality is.

According to Peliuchi, morality is an invention of human beings; a convention that humans have adopted to live together but that it has no objectivity.

This is reinforced by the ethicist Richard Taylor

'The modern age, more or less repudiating the idea of a divine lawgiver, has nevertheless tried to retain the ideas of moral right and wrong (or in your case good or bad), not noticing that, in casting God aside, they have also abolished the conditions of meaningfulness for moral right and wrong as well. Thus, even educated persons sometimes declare that such things are war, or abortion, or the violation of certain human rights, are ‘morally wrong,’ and they imagine that they have said something true and significant. Educated people do not need to be told, however, that questions such as these have never been answered outside of religion'

"Contemporary writers in ethics, who blithely discourse upon moral right and wrong and moral obligation without any reference to religion, are really just weaving intellectual webs from thin air; which amounts to saying that they discourse without meaning"

How therefor could you argue that something is bad, in the sense of it being a value statement, without reference to objective morality?



Modern Christian philosophers see no such issues. For instance according to Dr William Lane Craig for this dilemma to be valid moral values would have to be contingent on God. Theologically speaking this is not supportable. God 'is' love, God is morality and therefor grounds those values in every possible world, in this sense morality exists as an aspect of God not as a contingent. Though I am not the best person to talk to on this subject, my understanding of the matter is limited. Suffice to say that no atheist or Islamic cleric has ever refuted this successfully in the the 20 years he has been stating it.



This is a textbook case of the logical fallacy of infinite regress. One does not have to explain how that thing came to be in order to explain its existence. If we held this to be the standard of evidence we would spend eternity arguing in circles.

How dare you insinuate this. He was an Atheist! He stated 'Science is my religion'. You cannot insinuate that he was a terrorist of the religious right. Do not take this as an invitation to try and do some sort of loaded balance sheet of sin, that would be pointless.

Why would the Pope need to excommunicate someone who is not a practicing Catholic?