A challenge: debate the issue of religion with yours truly

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It would seem that Paul was not trained in greek philosophy to understand Senaca's finer points.

Vining on Paul and Senaca

It goes back to the question how do you define tri-omni. Base on what do you claim or judge if anything is tri-omni or not? In particular, when talking about about 'good' or 'bad', you need a standard of 'good' to begin with (and I don't believe any such non-trivial objective standard exists).

Without proper definition, your 'tri-onmi being creates 'best' possible world' is just as vague as a 'perfection', as you admitted. In this sense I agree with your objection to AG, but the same objection comes back to you to a even greater degree, because we have NO idea how a 'tri-onmi' being ought to behave.

Last edited by 01001011 on 03 May 2012, 9:55 am, edited 1 time in total.

Well, it's very tenuous, but I understand that followers of Gok Tanri hold the belief that being stricken with an illness, particularly one such as "the sacred disease" (epilepsy), is a sign that one has been called upon to live a spiritual life, particularly to become a shaman. Now, because of Paul was educated in Anatolia, he might have been exposed to this idea, either in his studies or in his observations of local tribespeople.

However, I don't know a damn thing about how intellectuals in Tarsus actually interacted with the followers of these shamanistic religions. I don't know whether relations were generally hostile, peaceful or simply tolerant. It's something that I haven't had the time or resources to delve into.

And refer to the Conversion of Paul in Acts, for one instance. Also, refer to Paul's "thorn" in 2 Corinthians 12. It sounds like he suffered from severe migraines, epilepsy or both.

The thing is, if I could support the idea that Paul might have been influenced by the method shamanistic religions had for choosing shamans, that would help explain why Paul felt that his illness meant that he was being called upon to live a spiritual life.

Also, there is a strong association between temporal lobe epilepsy and tending to write compulsively and at great length.

And it's a rare symptom of an epileptic attack to actually hear a voice calling out your name, as Paul did.

William, it would be interesting to know if epilepsy can connect with spiritual experience. I can well imagine that various ilnesses were seen in a far different light in those days. However, it is not a thing I know about. However, compulsive writing could apply to people with Asperger's. Well, I mean what are we all doing here for a start.

Oh, the "sacred disease" was the bane of the Hippocratic writers' existence. They hated it. They associated it with medicine men, quack doctors and heaven knows what else. There was a time when legitimate medicine barely even got any respect, and it made the doctors...the real doctors...of the time period furious. But, anyway, they knew of epilepsy, and there was so much nonsense claptrap about it, it served as a persistent headache.

http://classics.mit.edu/Hippocrates/sacred.html

"It is thus with regard to the disease called Sacred: it appears to me to be nowise more divine nor more sacred than other diseases, but has a natural cause from the originates like other affections. Men regard its nature and cause as divine from ignorance and wonder, because it is not at all like to other diseases. And this notion of its divinity is kept up by their inability to comprehend it, and the simplicity of the mode by which it is cured, for men are freed from it by purifications and incantations. But if it is reckoned divine because it is wonderful, instead of one there are many diseases which would be sacred; for, as I will show, there are others no less wonderful and prodigious, which nobody imagines to be sacred. The quotidian, tertian, and quartan fevers, seem to me no less sacred and divine in their origin than this disease, although they are not reckoned so wonderful. And I see men become mad and demented from no manifest cause, and at the same time doing many things out of place; and I have known many persons in sleep groaning and crying out, some in a state of suffocation, some jumping up and fleeing out of doors, and deprived of their reason until they awaken, and afterward becoming well and rational as before, although they be pale and weak; and this will happen not once but frequently. And there are many and various things of the like kind, which it would be tedious to state particularly.

They who first referred this malady to the gods appear to me to have been just such persons as the conjurors, purificators, mountebanks, and charlatans now are, who give themselves out for being excessively religious, and as knowing more than other people. Such persons, then, using the divinity as a pretext and screen of their own inability to of their own inability to afford any assistance, have given out that the disease is sacred, adding suitable reasons for this opinion, they have instituted a mode of treatment which is safe for themselves, namely, by applying purifications and incantations, and enforcing abstinence from baths and many articles of food which are unwholesome to men in diseases. Of sea substances, the surmullet, the blacktail, the mullet, and the eel; for these are the fishes most to be guarded against. And of fleshes, those of the goat, the stag, the sow, and the dog: for these are the kinds of flesh which are aptest to disorder the bowels. Of fowls, the cock, the turtle, and the bustard, and such others as are reckoned to be particularly strong. And of potherbs, mint, garlic, and onions; for what is acrid does not agree with a weak person. And they forbid to have a black robe, because black is expressive of death; and to sleep on a goat's skin, or to wear it, and to put one foot upon another, or one hand upon another; for all these things are held to be hindrances to the cure. All these they enjoin with reference to its divinity, as if possessed of more knowledge, and announcing beforehand other causes so that if the person should recover, theirs would be the honor and credit; and if he should die, they would have a certain defense, as if the gods, and not they, were to blame, seeing they had administered nothing either to eat or drink as medicines, nor had overheated him with baths, so as to prove the cause of what had happened. But I am of opinion that (if this were true) none of the Libyans, who live in the interior, would be free from this disease, since they all sleep on goats' skins, and live upon goats' flesh; neither have they couch, robe, nor shoe that is not made of goat's skin, for they have no other herds but goats and oxen. But if these things, when administered in food, aggravate the disease, and if it be cured by abstinence from them, godhead is not the cause at all; nor will purifications be of any avail, but it is the food which is beneficial and prejudicial, and the influence of the divinity vanishes."

The Hippocratic writers created their works specifically and overtly to protect against quack medicine, which pissed them off to no end. They absolutely hated it. They busted their balls to try to put together an adequate system of medicine, yet they kept losing business to charismatic witch doctors.

And they really were serious about what they did. Read their writings, here, on epidemics:

http://classics.mit.edu/Hippocrates/epidemics.1.i.html

These were smart, educated guys. They knew what they were doing, and they slaved to perfect their art. Therefore, you can imagine how much it enraged them to have their art co-opted by charlatans and rambling madmen. It would drive a nun to murder.

But, anyway, the idea that certain illnesses are of a divine nature is a really really old idea. Therefore, it doesn't necessarily have to have come from the followers of Gok Tanri. The reason I think it might is that Tengriism was very popular among the Huns and other Turkic people's, so it would stand to reason if there were evidence of Tengriist influences in Paul's ideas.

Tarsus wasn't just some ancient city that lived isolated from other cultures and held a lot of superstitious beliefs and had politics centered around temple intrigues, but they were actually very much a cosmopolitan culture. They were a center of learning and commerce. They were in many ways a lot like a modern city, in how people lived and cooperated with each other. These were extremely educated people, especially for their day.

However, the biggest hole in the theory of Tengriist influences is that the city of Tarsus had been practicing Olympianism for centuries. Therefore, although I once felt very strongly about my hypothesis, it is looking increasingly shaky, the more I learn about the history of that particular region.

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.

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".

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.


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.

Is OP having a manic episode? All the replies are a bit off. o.O

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.

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,

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The connection between Paul the Apostle's ideas and Tengriist shamanistic beliefs? Pure ill-conceived trash. It's nonsense. Think nothing more of it.

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.

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.

Yes. I find it amazing that most people have trouble grasping this idea.

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.

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.


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?

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.

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.



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.