ISIS bulldozes ruins of ancient Assyrian city of Nimrud, Ira

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True, I just prefer to hold them accountable to their own 'logic'.

That's sad. Giorgio tweeted about it.

The difference between what I said and what you seem to think I said:
'If I were an atheist' - hypothetically putting myself in someone else's shoes.
'If I were an atheist again' - reaching back to how I weighed and measured the world when I had that perspective.

If you have no free will, regardless of whether or not the universe is an accident, everything you'll ever think, say, or do, is the result of internal forces that don't start with you and really start from a pre-conscious position, that is they're fed into you by multiple factors.

As it stands I still don't understand libertarian free will, on a lot of levels I still don't accept its existence, but I do understand this - the more intelligent and free to think and choose that a person is (ie. having a wider array of available options) the more they're able to build metanarratives that rise farther above direct reaction to unconditioned internal forces. When a person's either dumb or under heavy coercion to be dumb they're one with those forces. To be one with those forces is a bit like being as elemental as a storm cloud or a dust devil. To even see the less intellectually endowed in our country, even with freedom, behave at times as uniformly as a flock of birds making a breathtaking amoeba form in the sky, it looks more like you're watching a map coming to life of what's coming up through them rather than a cluster of individual decisions. To me that's elemental behavior.

I had no shot to crowbar in at atheism - my joke was that it would be a lot more comforting at times like these to believe in a braindead universe than having to accept a universe that's morally culpable.

That is an interesting discussion. Isn't it religion that has posited both free will, yet at the same time determinism? The Christian God gave free will to humans to test them, yes someone how God is deterministic in his actions, and this includes humans when it suits.

I don't believe with "free will" in the pure sense and I do in some part associate with economic liberalism (more competitionism with trade liberalism). I believe in neither free will nor determinism. I believe in relativism, which is apt becuase that is how nature works.

There does appear to be fluctuations in awareness and we face limitations on our will by mankind's laws. I notice while ISIS and ISIL attempts to dominate the middle east, our own fundies are busy trying to dominate this country.

I tend to see three limits to people's choice of options:
1) Clemency of environment
2) Intelligence to comprehend choices and outcomes
3) Challenges to complaisance.

If you're in a place where you'll be shot if you disagree with people you generally won't know how to as there's nowhere to practice disagreement and nowhere to figure out what that means in any good or useful sense. If the best options available are lost to a person in clouds of mental abstraction beyond their reach then they aren't real options. If a person's fat and happy with their life there's not much to drive them toward being a seeker (either of absolute truth or even of higher level options).

If a person is aware of four options they'll take the best of four, if they're aware of eight options they'll take the best of eight. Variable difficulty is already factored into those options and their choice to take a harder road for more long term reward or not has more to do with other factors either lending the motivation or skewing it to be an easier choice than it otherwise would. That might not be free will but it's a more optimal flow of something that seems to be ingrained in much of humanity which is the search for better living and insuring better living for their offspring. If barbarism defeats civilization at any time - the great stumble backward in human progress is the stubbing and stunting of options; it's creating a gruesome unreality by the obstruction of information.

People will fool themselves by clinging to justifications and convictions. For instance, ISIS destroys and kills yet it's okay because it's in a holy book and that's how they did it long ago. We are living as infidels now because we are not doing it the same way therefore it is okay, in the mind of ISIS, to be destructive and murderous. Some of the fundies around here think we should get back to what's in the Bible and have the same penalties, it's the only way to get right with God. It's the same thinking as ISIS or any other extreme group, but it's okay because it's here in the US. There's a belief in it's okayness because it comes from God. I don't believe this comes from God, but from an evil false prophet guided by a force that wishes to destroy life. I have no idea what the motivations would be but if you look at human history, the same pattern emerges again and again, like some weird force is intentionally misguiding humans even though history is right there, in their face, as plain as day. Humans are not ignorant.

Some of the extremes are tolerable but killing and destroying tend to be viewed in a bad light which, ironically, can cause even more destruction and killing. The cycle manifests and the false prophecy is fulfilled.

What of these beings of light? Seems to be a theme of goodness. Why does goodness and salvation seem so out of reach when you take everyone into account? So much is unexplained about why humans are so funny. One explanation could be simply power and money corrupts most who have it.

That was my point:that what you said had nothing to do with their 'logic'.

Either fortunately for the west or unfortunately for the middle-east, the Bible is a lot tougher to twist into endorsing killing of nonbelievers. Most of that sort of behavior in Christianity was done in an age of mass illiteracy and the only place where it seems like such things might be forced is in a literal read of Revelations.

You can get both some Christians and some Muslims to kill in the name of God, just that it takes a lower common denominator in Christianity and a much more high-brow and abstract interpretation in Islam to get out of some of the suggestions as to what needs to be done with the infidel (ie. Jungian internalizing of holy war isn't an accessible way of thinking for most people).

I was watching this guy earlier and he had a lot of interesting things to say about the Middle East conflict and the religious issues:

^^^ From the guy in that video: http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news ... 366f7af920

As far as Dominionism in the US is concerned - lets hope it never becomes a noteworthy force. They understand the bible about as well as a bunch of island animists worshiping a washer or dryer that washed ashore understand the factory warranty that came with it.

Incredible as it seems, educated, middle class Americans will follow something likely inspired by the illiterate masses thousands of years ago without seeing the differences between the two. They fail to see they have the luxury of education and access to reason and opportunity unheard of back then when people pretty much struggled within a system of hard manual labor, slavery, and severe classism. When you are that hopeless, you might quickly find yourself connecting to that altered state on a daily basis just to survive. Still, their endurance and steadfastness is admirable. You do what you can to strive, to thrive and to carry on, even if life seems downright unbearable at times, which I am sure, it did.

American fundies seem oblivious to this great divide.

It's scraps of high pagan philosophy - something with a lot of valuable mileage - thrown together haphazardly to which they're in conflict with an ideal of the world burning down in end times. Neoplatonism and Manichaeism mix like oil and water yet they're both in the New Testament. The result is that people have decided it's an inscrutable book and that they just have to take literalism in faith - something that anyone with more background would be trying to direct them away from but you become just another voice with another opinion if you're bringing in more exotic information than what they can test in a few minutes.

That's another thing I don't understand. People who access to such opportunity entertain the notion of "end times" and actually wish for it and hope it will occur in their lifetime. Even with the best of everything, they still would like to see it all end only because of a book written, for the most part, thousands of years ago. It's amazing all that was required to entrance and entrap some is to say something came from God but it has to be the God who existed thousands years back. It can't be a modern God. God is deaf and blind to modern man and we regard ourselves as evil and faulty on a regular basis, only worthy of an apocalypse and being saved by Jesus.

I really do feel sad for kids who are brainwashed by what's in the Bible because their parents are terrified of going to hell and a lot of these fundies are literally scared to death God will damn them to hell and this is what motivates their desire to mold America into a theocracy.

They call anyone who disagrees with them an apostate. That's their automatic dismissal if you dare go against what the Bible says in any way. You are considered an apostate, not taken seriously or welcome by them. Once they have determined you are one, they will close themselves off to what you say and the only way to win them back is by "repenting" which means you pretty much do what they do and believe what they believe exactly.

Exactly. And as always, other Islamic countries say and do little or nothing against people like IS.

What's mystifying to me - to read the bible from cover to cover, even without external reference to what the Ptolemaic astrology references mean or what kind of philosophic influences that the writings of John were under, it turns out that Jesus was right. When Jesus spoke of an abomination of desolation coming to Jerusalem and not to go back to your house for anything, and very specifically that this generation would not pass away before these things came to pass; he said these thing supposedly somewhere between 27 and 30 CE, and in 66 to 70 CE you had just such an event. Similarly so much of the Revelation of John, if written by 96 CE, is about past tense events. The beast that had three horns defeated and replaced by one - that was a rapid succession of three assassinated Roman emperors before Vespasian took office. Jerusalem, after 3 1/2 years of siege, fell on Vespasian's watch.

When I look at people who keep bringing up a seven year tribulation in the offing I find out that they've done something remarkable with the 70 weeks of Daniel. Yes, they're weeks of years, they thought perhaps that sixty-nine of the weeks were fine to be placed somewhere between the end of the Babylonian Captivity and the coming of Jesus, and they cut that extra week to float out indefinitely into the future - for whenever the Father decides to pull the trigger.

If Christ took the entire bowl of wrath for the sins of the world and at the same time God played 'gotcha!' games such as making sure it's nigh impossible to find a subform of Christianity without at least some of the problems the others have, who's made it impossible for bible literalism to compete with modern scientific findings and historical/archaeological research, and to then make exploration of the spiritual something where - like in Deuteronomy - anyone out there having commerce with spirits is to be stoned - that's making sure that most of Christ's suffering on the cross was in vain. That's gutting the promise for what, making access to heaven be restricted to a chosen few who by sheer luck got all the answers right and just so happened to land in and stay with the one subsect of Christianity that wasn't heretical or ultimately a Satanic deception? That's a 'God' acting like that whose supposedly love itself?

The thing falls apart under critical analysis. Similarly if God cares about all nations and salvation was exclusive to a doctrine, Christianity would have been on simultaneous broadcast everywhere. Previously also if all non-Judaic people really didn't matter and it was a thing of blood - why should he send Johan to Ninevah?

The problem of course - all of this is a lot of information. Most people don't actually read the book, they catch a few choice snippets and some rationalizations from people supposedly in authority but that's it.