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Prud
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17 Nov 2012, 2:19 am

An new thread following on from http://www.wrongplanet.net/postt214569.html

Gods Existence
You cannot prove or disprove God's existence. We are limited to our natural instruments meant to measure the natural world, and cannot detect, let alone measure the super natural. You can only provide evidence in either way -- proofs are better left to mathematics, or chemistry & physics."
- MarketAndChurch

I'm sorry but I regard the above statement to be special pleading again, because there is no evidance you submit that's because it's magic and it can't be measured. I can disprove the exsistance of a deity in the same way I can disprove the existance of the tooth fairy, no evidence to suggest otherwise. I accept the age of the universe to be 13.75 billion years old because there is evidence to back up the claim. I reject the proposal by creationism that the earth is only 6000 yrs old because there is no evidence to prove this. In all other stands of your life you accept things exist because there is evidance but you suspend that logic to argue for a god.

Which God?
I am arguing for the Jewish God - MarketAndChurch

So you freely accept the existance of all other deities, Thor, Jesus, Allah & the Purple People Eater? Because those can't be measured either.

Theological differences and beliefs are not relevant.

Try explaining that one to the 7 children born in Gaza who were murdered yesterday by the Jews. How anyone can argue for a religion that still commits acts of murder in its name is totally beyond my ethical understanding.

Applied Ethics
"You cannot list what you do not know without any listed examples of when and where it was carried out".

Please don't suggest I have to give evidence, were talking the supernatural here, and you have already suggested that evidance is not needed. You can't have it both ways.

"it was never meant for you, the goyim to follow, you miss the point entirely and ruin many lives in the process"

How dare you cast such a slur, which lives have I ruined? People like me don't kill children in Gaza, shoot a girl in the head for wishing to be educated, fly planes into buildings, enslave people, mutilate children, actively help to spread aids in africa. No! you miss the point, I can cite many examples of religion and it's direct conflict with human morality & ethics carried out in its name. You cite one example where such atrocities have been carried out in the name of atheism?

Interpretation & Authorship
Ethics is anytime the possibility of something being right/wrong arises. Interpretation is not that big a deal for the Jewish faith in 2012 as the ages have picked out the best readings of the text that are most true to it without reading into it. Literalness or the lack thereof is of unimportance if we correctly identify the principle being taught by the text.


The same can be said for any work of fiction, I can do the same with Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings or Instructions of Shuruppak written 1000 years before the Torah and quoting "moral code", the flood myth and commandments.

So tell me where do you get your ethics & morals form? The Torah a non original work copied from Instructions of Shuruppak.

Evolution Is No Great Producer of Ethics
Evolution has no answer as far as stealing is concerned, there is not evolutionary benefit to Evil yet we engage in it routinely


Already covered this one, stealing excludes you from the social group. Those that steal in any form either do it with justification of superiority/religion/psychopathy, therefore not considering themselves part of the social group they steal from.

Human Evil
If ethics in the bible has already been defined from the evolution of morality over thousands of years, WHERE IS IT?

Covered above, Instructions of Shuruppak show morality & ethics already existed before Torah.

The Text Has No Equal

Because you ignore all others, having a blinkered view does not allow you to claim true understanding, and you only repeat what you have been told by one book.

Some of the things people mistaken for progress and modernity, I do not. The destruction of Gender is not progress. The destruction of the institution of the family is not progress. Nor is the complete removal of God from public life. Our not being able to make moral distinctions from superior culture and inferior culture is not progress. Our food culture is not evidence of progress. Our mistreatment of the environment is not progress. Our morally equating the good with the evil as to render morality irrelevant is not progress.

Opinion, that is all, but you cannot claim the above to be yours and only that of your religion or the social & geographical group you belong to. You mistakenly conclude progress should always be positive, that is not the way evolution works, these things are random.

I have no issue with homosexuallity or divorce, I DO have an issue with a deity being part of public live due to the harm it has done and continues to do so. I do not believe any culture to be inferior to mine (thats why I'm not boming Gaza right now), Everyone loves a bacon sandwich, don't they?
We agree on the enviroment but again I have to point out progress does not translate to positive but if you believe in a god, isn't this his doing? I'm sure the bible tells man he has dominion over the land and all that dwell on it....? As you have a connection to this deity why don't you ask him to sort it out, sorry, I forgot he's magic but does not do tricks.
I have never argued that morality is irrelevant, far from it morality is key, I just don't get it from men in robes but the social nature of our society and freedom to be responsible for ones own well being and not imposing it on others to their detriment.



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17 Nov 2012, 2:43 am

In short - you can't prove that you exist as you, let alone that the universe as such is as it appears. There is a reason for the cosmological principle:
"The cosmological principle is usually stated formally as 'Viewed on a sufficiently large scale, the properties of the Universe are the same for all observers.' This amounts to the strongly philosophical statement that the part of the Universe which we can see is a fair sample, and that the same physical laws apply throughout. In essence, this in a sense says that the Universe is knowable and is playing fair with scientists." - William C. Keel (2007). The Road to Galaxy Formation (2nd ed.). Springer-Praxis. ISBN 978-3-540-72534-3.. p. 2.

There is a difference between methodological naturalism and ontological naturalism. The first is something scientist use/assume/do and the second you should leave to the philosophers.



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17 Nov 2012, 4:09 am

Well, I'll post from the beginning


Prud wrote:
I love the way anyone with religion really believes that ethics are derived from their religious texts. What a load of BS.

Ethics are a philosophical evolving process and religion is not, religion does not evolve because it grounds its self in very old and badly written books.
I (an atheist) have ethics, which are probably the same as the vast majority of people on this earth.

A test for anyone who believes their ethics comes from religion. Ethic are effectively a list of rules, which the most important ones can be found in law and these laws help to create a stable society for the vast majority.

Religion has lists of things you cannot/must not do (Ethics?), some are laws (Ethics again?) Yes, those of you with religion are now jumping ahead and saying yes these ethics come from our "good books"!

If you read your "good books" you will find rules, if you believe your ethics come from these texts then you should not disagree with any of these rules because you think they are ethical.

In the Torah, the penalty for a son persistently disobeying his parents is death. Is this ethical?

The Bible (as in the Torah) penalty for cursing your parents, death again. Is this ethical?

The Quran (as in the Bible & Torah) converting to another religion, you guessed it DEATH.

None of the above are ethical, in my opinion and from a civilized modern society. As a modern society we would not stone people for having an affair, working on a Sunday or being homosexual. These "good books" all prescribe such punishments.

If you go to China you will find ethics similar to the rest of the world but they had no real religion and I would argue that their ethics are derived from cultural practices and their use of Confucian philosophy. Similarly you can see the same ethics within tribes from Africa and the Brazilian rain forest and again no religion.

Your religious texts are the twisted uneducated views of a bunch of nomadic Arabs who lived in tents and believed in magic and that the earth was flat, while in China they were drinking tea and talking philosophy.

So for anyone to argue that their religion has defined our ethics is quite simply deluded and has no real grasp of Anthropology.


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17 Nov 2012, 4:09 am

MarketAndChurch wrote:

Human Nature
Judaism and many different religions don't have to evolve because the state of man is still the same. You are not an intrinsically progressive creature, from, say, Stalin, or Moses. If we are speaking to the human condition as it is, it has remained the same, and our instruction manuel for how to live an ethical life will remain relevant until that is not a fact.


An Advancement In Childerns' Rights
That one about the sons cursing their parents is not a good example for your case. It was a liberator of children, and a great advancement for child's rights in the ancient world. To this day in 2012, there are places on earth where the understanding is that you "own" your children. Not only does one own a child, but if that backwater of humanity most likely believes in blood guilt, clanism, and familism, your name is all that exists, and if your child, a nobody, kills your neighbor's child, your neighbor killed your child. Child, Wife, Sister, House, Horse, Sheep, all of lesser value and easily swappable in the ancient world all the way up until maybe 50 years ago, and even then, to this day, much of the world's population still operates under that way of thinking.

A Child who cursed their parent was taken to the court, and the court then ordered the stoning of the child. What it did was genius: Removed The Right To Kill A Child From Parental Authority. It was the father then, and it is the father today, who is always most likely to kill a child, for honor or whatever. The court removed that right from the parents, and if the mother objected, it was over. No children killed. What happened in real life is not only did children honor their parents, but their parents could simply tell them what their punishment for cursing them is and that would be the end of the issue. If a father killed a child for cursing him, that is murder, and he would be stoned. I'll explain further tomorrow.


False Gods
The converting away from God's religion is not applicable to Jews today. And... when it was instituted, it was only for Jews living in the holy land, who tried to take Jews away to false Gods. It was an epic battle to establish monotheism. If you didn't want to be part of that, there millions of local tribes, and entire nations you can leave and go and reside in. But if you live in Israel, as they are establishing a movement that will affect human history forever, a little diversity training here and there will not do the job.


Stoning
Stoning was always used as to show the severity of the crime it was attached to. You can say all the things you want about how bad murder is, but if you let people off easy for committing it, no one will take you seriously.


You can't be serious if you say the bible hasn't defined the ethics of the West for the last 1500 years...


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MarketAndChurch
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17 Nov 2012, 4:10 am

Prud wrote:
A reponse worthy of any regious appologist but I'm affraid you have shown that you're "cherry picking" to fit human nature within a religion.

Judaism is about 3'000 years old, modern Man is about about 50'000 years old, so using your logic that man is not a "intrinsically progressive creature" is a flawed concept. After all man progressed (in it's loosest sense) to inventing Judaism, although he took 47'000 yrs to get round to it.

You akin Stalin (a real person) and an atheist who did bad things in the name of communism (I like your attempt to discredit atheists with that old chesnut) to Moses (not a real person) who you beleive is the author of your Torah. Using pseudohistory to propose our ethics is "special pleading" and beleiving there is an "instruction manual", numbers 31:13-18 from which your teachings are derived are the rablings of a "detestable villain".

"And Moses, and Eleazar the priest, and all the princes of the congregation, went forth to meet them without the camp; and Moses was wroth with the officers of the host, with the captains over thousands, and captains over hundreds, which came from the battle; and Moses said unto them, Have ye saved all the women alive? behold, these caused the children of Israel, through the counsel of Balaam, to commit trespass against the Lord in the matter of Peor, and there was a plague among the congregation of the Lord. Now, therefore, kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known a man by lying with him; but all the women-children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves"

The above does not sound very ethical but this from a "law giver" who punishes 3000 people for idol worshipping with death before he passed that law to his people, again not ethical but religion is full of inaccuraces.

The advancemnet of childrens rights was wholely a northern european concept first seen in the 18th century and has no grounds in any religion. While I would agree that there are still countries that have poor childrens rights, those countries use religion to justify their backward thinking.

I would agree that the bible (religion) for 1500 yrs has played a major part in defining our ethics & morals, but not because they were right and thats why most have been cast aside.

Ethics will continue to evolve as man breaks his chains with religion and comes to realise that all that he has been told by religion is the most unethical & unmoral points any human could have imagined. Mans ethics improve the further you move away from the "promised land" both in the geographical and pyshological sense.

Natural forces created our universe 13.75 billion years ago, life began 3.6 billion years ago, modern rational thinking man appeared 50'000 years ago and religion about 6000 years ago. The universe continues to expand, life continues to grow, man continues to evolve and religion is already on the decline.

The more we understand our beginnings the less we need myths to fill in the blanks.

"The whole thing is so patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that to anyone with a friendly attitude to humanity it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life." — Sigmund Freud

Born a Jew, died an Atheist and contributed more the our ethical understanding than any Rabbi.


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17 Nov 2012, 4:12 am

MarketAndChurch wrote:

"intrinsically progressive creature"
Yes, but that man is not is not intrinsically progressive. Progress is not passed on through your DNA, and if you get mixed up with a different tribe or become totally lost, your offspring may revert to the morality of caveman if you don't pass on those values that took centuries to arrive at… in other words, morally primitive without the values that progress the species. Values and knowledge is transferred from each generation to the next by being taught them, and that is how we are able to, after 47,000 years, get a torah.

If we threw your offspring in a jungle along with the offspring of other people as well, and incubated their growth and development, without them knowing it, it would take 10's of thousands of years for its offspring to construct anything akin to Judaism. The majority of humanity has not even arrived at Judaism's ethics, and we're about to end 2012.


Stalin & Children's Rights
You are reading into this too much. Switch out Stalin with Hitler or beethoven or Mother Teresa if that is troubling you too much (I did not think about Stalin's Atheism). I'm just contrasting two uniquely different people who occupied different time periods and and achieved completely different things while making their mark in history. Moses wasn't a real person?

Northern Europe was in the 18th century. Who protected and advanced children's rights between 3000 B.C.E and 1700 C.E?


Numbers 31:13-18
I have already explained the passage you've selected from Numbers. Feel free to visit it here:


http://www.wrongplanet.net/posts208619-start150.html


Ethics Will Evolve… A Little.
Of course Ethics will evolve, but incrementally, as there is almost nothing new under the sun. For example, when we begin to conquer the cosmos some day, there'll be space ethics, but they won't differ too much from ethics on earth. It's just that the way they are applied will be slightly different. But nothing grand, as the human condition is still the same as it was for Shakespeare, and King David.


"Promised Land"
Utopian totalitarian regimes throughout history have been united in the idea that we can make the world perfect, that we can make the kingdom of heaven on earth, that you can have the thousand year reich, that we can reach a society where each according to his abilities to each according to his needs, that if you just work the economic policies just enough, you can bring the here-after, and make it the here-now.

The Christian has a preoccupation with the next life, the Jew has a preoccupation with this life, acknowledging that there is a life after this one… for the atheist, this is it so you have no choice but to bring the here-after and make it the here-now.


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17 Nov 2012, 4:12 am

Prud wrote:
There is no prove of any existance of a deity, your default position is god did it so all your reasoning is circular. Which god? The Christian one, Allah, Yahweh all are interpreted as having laid the foundation for ethics and morals.

Judaism decribes moses as a law giver, when it suits, you forget that so you can reinterpret meaning and your meanings change to suit the secular, not the religious. You are no different to an atheist, in so much that you have to work out which moral principles you wish to apply because to obey implicitly the will of whichever god you believe in would conflict with current ethics and morality.
For example would you say it is correct that I be stonned to death for working on a particular day, but be seen to be moral for killing my child because I wished to sacrifice her to my god?

If ethics and morals come from the "word of god" why are they open to so much interpretation, he must not be very literate if he can't put his words down in a way that only those who spend their lives interpreting meaning can gain the "true understanding" of the instruction.

"attachment and bonding, cooperation and mutual aid, sympathy and empathy, direct and indirect reciprocity, altruism and reciprocal altruism, conflict resolution and peacemaking, deception and deception detection, community concern and caring about what others think about you, and awareness of and response to the social rules of the group" - Michael Shermer.

All are human traits, not taught but evolved, passed down in genes from one generation to the next. The above quote is not about man but primates and other social animals have similar traits, of cause anyone of religion will state that these traits are "god given" because they fail to understand the concepts involved to conclude anything else.

You are like a child in the playground who braggs about how "my dad can do that" whenever he hears another child giving an account of something previously unknown. This "child like" explaination of the unknown is a trait of the need to be included in the social group and acceptance that their elders know more, rather than wishing to understand the unknown.

A child who does not have these traits can be classed in some cases as autisic/aspergers, were the genetic traits are switched off.

To hold the view that the reasons why you currently don't steal is because you beleive god said so, is idiotic, the vast majority don't steal because of the predifined genetic code in our DNA that is programmed to want to be part of a social group and such actions would be detrimental to this.

The ethics that work in the bible, had already been definded from the evolution of morality over thousands of years and hijacked as with many other natural traits to suggest that an imaginary being was the cause is what I would expect from primative tribes of the middle east. Don't understand so write it in the book "god (my father) did it".

You propose that the Jews are people of study who wish to gain understanding but the only understanding you gain is to reinterpret a badly written book so it sounds good. I am an athiest to all parts of your book but you as a (reforming?) Jew are an atheist to the parts that don't fit with modern understanding and ethics.

Where I would through the book away, you hold on to it like a security blanket. As with a child beleiving that you can't exist without it, children learn to let go once they grow up and so will man.

As I have stated, our evolution will make such fairy stories irrelevant to our progress and the book will be reclassified to sit on the shelves with the other works of fiction like Harry Potter.


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17 Nov 2012, 4:13 am

MarketAndChurch wrote:


Gods Existence
You cannot prove or disprove God's existence. We are limited to our natural instruments meant to measure the natural world, and cannot detect, let alone measure the super natural. You can only provide evidence in either way -- proofs are better left to mathematics, or chemistry & physics.


Which God?
I am arguing for the Jewish God, which Judaism also posits (leading to a great deal of antisemitism) is the God of the World. I share this God with any and every religious person who is not Jewish, but arrives at the same value system and understanding of God. Theological differences and beliefs are not relevant unless they betray one of those things. I can share the same God with a Wiccan if that Wiccan also shares my value system, believes in the same or similar ethical monotheism, and in a god or goddess who makes the same moral demands. Then it doesn't matter the name you apply to it, it is the same entity.


Applied Ethics
Almost all laws of the Torah applies to Jews, and for a certain time period. The stoning of someone is attached as a punishment to show you the severity of the crime. It was rarely enacted, if ever.

You cannot list what you do not know without any listed examples of when and where it was carried out. For example, the burning of a prostitute in ancient Israel for being the daughter of a priest has one listed example in the 2nd century where it was reported that it was carried out. Do you have an example in Jewish history of a man killed for working on the sabbath? And don't list the man who Moses ordered killed for working on the Sabbath, that was a public revolution, he needed to be put down.

Child sacrifice was the norm in many parts of the world. Sacrificing your child to your God is immoral, God does not want or need a human sacrificed. God doesn't even need your prayers, but faith and prayer are great for the human so it is promoted. God doesn't need your animal sacrifice, but you need your animals for your livelihood, and people need to eat so there isn't a single troubling thing about animal sacrifice. You can't gossip behind Gods back, you can't rape God, you can't murder God, you can't make God feel bad about himself by libeling or cursing him, you can't extort God, but you can all of those things to Human beings.

The difference between me and an atheist is that I have a Book I source my values from, and the book I hold dear, the Torah, means "To Teach". It does not mean "LAWS YOU HAVE TO FOLLOW." Where do you source your values from? Because logic, reason, and the heart, absent a God, don't have a stellar track record of producing ethics or fighting evil. So the issue isn't picking and choosing which laws are nice for me to follow. The issue is what principles do we learn from everything we read in the holy book. Those laws were meant to condition an adhoc movement to be God's vehicle on earth for the spread of ethical monotheism. So we in 2012, understanding everything that I've said in this conversation so far, would be stupid if we were to follow every law in that book. We could do it for the hell of it, but it would be an utterly self-defeating exercise… it was never meant for you, the goyim to follow, you miss the point entirely and ruin many lives in the process.


Interpretation & Authorship
Ethics is anytime the possibility of something being right/wrong arises. Interpretation is not that big a deal for the Jewish faith in 2012 as the ages have picked out the best readings of the text that are most true to it without reading into it. Literalness or the lack thereof is of unimportance if we correctly identify the principle being taught by the text.

You are misreading my "If God isn't the author of 'Thou Shall Not Steal,' morality is subjective" argument. You can only fairly assess it it you entertain BOTH the possibility of a God existing, and the possibility that a God does not exist. If a God exists, then morality is objective. If a God does not exist, morality is subjective. If God is not the author of Thou Shall Not Steal, then it is purely opinion. You have yours, I have mine, and if we live in the secular West where morality is relative, my opinion is as good as yours.


Evolution Is No Great Producer of Ethics
Evolution has no answer as far as stealing is concerned, there is not evolutionary benefit to Evil yet we engage in it routinely. Evolution is pointless in assessing morality because none of it is provable with hard science. We can only infer a collection of likely anecdotes to fill gaps in our understanding, but there is not a shred of evidence so far linking notions of morality that the Human holds, to human evolution.

It is possible the human was infected with a virus that altered our chemistry and allowed us the moral reasoning that we have, that is possible. But simply excusing away an action because one wants to be part of a social group is far removed from reality.

    1.) What about those who steal knowing full well they won't be caught?
    2.) What about the robinhoods who steal from the wealthy to give to the poor, even the poor is likely to survive anyways?
    3.) What about the wealthy who steal from the poor though they know full well they don't need to do so since their survival is fully taken cared of?
    4.) What about those who steal the life of other human beings who they are not in competition with for anything?
    5.) What about those who steal the wife of another and wreck a home un-necessarily?
    6.) What about those who steal a child for sexual pleasure?
    7.) What about those who steal sex forcefully through the act of rape, and then kill the women afterwards, losing both the possibility of spreading his seed and stealing a life in the process, knowing full well the damage done to his reputation if he is discovered?
    9.) What about those who steal other people's time knowing full well they won't be buying something from them?


Human Evil
Evolution as it is understood has no satisfactory answer to the existence of human evil. Because there are too many exceptions for every answer given. Even if the collective reasonings that evolutionary psychologists have all come up with are put together to justify the existence of cruelty and causing unjust suffering to our fellow man, you cannot provide the evolutionary benefit of having such traits given that the way it has expressed itself in killing off large swaths of societies is an impediment to our survival. What does evolution have to say about Ego?

If ethics in the bible has already been defined from the evolution of morality over thousands of years, WHERE IS IT? Where in all of the world's theistic religions, political religions, or societies has even half of the Torah's principles and values been replicated? Try a third? Or a quarter? The Torah is exceptional in the human experience. No one has ever been able to replicate it, ever, or come close 1000 years before or after its inception.


The Text Has No Equal
This "Primitive" Text isn't being Lionized, or elevated to fit our modern framework... it is being framed in the light the authors intended you to see it. I honestly have no idea what you are talking about. I not only posit that its ethics are elevated to any text pre-2012, I posit it will remain the champion of ethics so long as man's nature is the same, from Noah to Hitler to Ghandi to Kant to Christopher Hitchens to Hume to Osama Bin Laden to Mother Teresa. The understanding I have of the text is the understanding of the rabbinic tradition, most orthodox Jews agree with me, almost all conservative Jews agree with me, I am articulating a position that most religious Jews everywhere prescribe to. So I am not trying to fit this ancient text into a modern framework. The modern framework is what I am fighting.

Some of the things people mistaken for progress and modernity, I do not. The destruction of Gender is not progress. The destruction of the institution of the family is not progress. Nor is the complete removal of God from public life. Our not being able to make moral distinctions from superior culture and inferior culture is not progress. Our food culture is not evidence of progress. Our mistreatment of the environment is not progress. Our morally equating the good with the evil as to render morality irrelevant is not progress.


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17 Nov 2012, 5:31 am

just keep digging


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17 Nov 2012, 6:36 am

Prud wrote:
An new thread following on from http://www.wrongplanet.net/postt214569.html

Gods Existence
You cannot prove or disprove God's existence. We are limited to our natural instruments meant to measure the natural world, and cannot detect, let alone measure the super natural. You can only provide evidence in either way -- proofs are better left to mathematics, or chemistry & physics."
- MarketAndChurch

I'm sorry but I regard the above statement to be special pleading again, because there is no evidance you submit that's because it's magic and it can't be measured. I can disprove the exsistance of a deity in the same way I can disprove the existance of the tooth fairy, no evidence to suggest otherwise. I accept the age of the universe to be 13.75 billion years old because there is evidence to back up the claim. I reject the proposal by creationism that the earth is only 6000 yrs old because there is no evidence to prove this. In all other stands of your life you accept things exist because there is evidance but you suspend that logic to argue for a god.

Which God?
I am arguing for the Jewish God - MarketAndChurch

So you freely accept the existance of all other deities, Thor, Jesus, Allah & the Purple People Eater? Because those can't be measured either.

Theological differences and beliefs are not relevant.

Try explaining that one to the 7 children born in Gaza who were murdered yesterday by the Jews. How anyone can argue for a religion that still commits acts of murder in its name is totally beyond my ethical understanding.

Applied Ethics
"You cannot list what you do not know without any listed examples of when and where it was carried out".

Please don't suggest I have to give evidence, were talking the supernatural here, and you have already suggested that evidance is not needed. You can't have it both ways.

"it was never meant for you, the goyim to follow, you miss the point entirely and ruin many lives in the process"

How dare you cast such a slur, which lives have I ruined? People like me don't kill children in Gaza, shoot a girl in the head for wishing to be educated, fly planes into buildings, enslave people, mutilate children, actively help to spread aids in africa. No! you miss the point, I can cite many examples of religion and it's direct conflict with human morality & ethics carried out in its name. You cite one example where such atrocities have been carried out in the name of atheism?

Interpretation & Authorship
Ethics is anytime the possibility of something being right/wrong arises. Interpretation is not that big a deal for the Jewish faith in 2012 as the ages have picked out the best readings of the text that are most true to it without reading into it. Literalness or the lack thereof is of unimportance if we correctly identify the principle being taught by the text.


The same can be said for any work of fiction, I can do the same with Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings or Instructions of Shuruppak written 1000 years before the Torah and quoting "moral code", the flood myth and commandments.

So tell me where do you get your ethics & morals form? The Torah a non original work copied from Instructions of Shuruppak.

Evolution Is No Great Producer of Ethics
Evolution has no answer as far as stealing is concerned, there is not evolutionary benefit to Evil yet we engage in it routinely


Already covered this one, stealing excludes you from the social group. Those that steal in any form either do it with justification of superiority/religion/psychopathy, therefore not considering themselves part of the social group they steal from.

Human Evil
If ethics in the bible has already been defined from the evolution of morality over thousands of years, WHERE IS IT?

Covered above, Instructions of Shuruppak show morality & ethics already existed before Torah.

The Text Has No Equal

Because you ignore all others, having a blinkered view does not allow you to claim true understanding, and you only repeat what you have been told by one book.

Some of the things people mistaken for progress and modernity, I do not. The destruction of Gender is not progress. The destruction of the institution of the family is not progress. Nor is the complete removal of God from public life. Our not being able to make moral distinctions from superior culture and inferior culture is not progress. Our food culture is not evidence of progress. Our mistreatment of the environment is not progress. Our morally equating the good with the evil as to render morality irrelevant is not progress.

Opinion, that is all, but you cannot claim the above to be yours and only that of your religion or the social & geographical group you belong to. You mistakenly conclude progress should always be positive, that is not the way evolution works, these things are random.

I have no issue with homosexuallity or divorce, I DO have an issue with a deity being part of public live due to the harm it has done and continues to do so. I do not believe any culture to be inferior to mine (thats why I'm not boming Gaza right now), Everyone loves a bacon sandwich, don't they?
We agree on the enviroment but again I have to point out progress does not translate to positive but if you believe in a god, isn't this his doing? I'm sure the bible tells man he has dominion over the land and all that dwell on it....? As you have a connection to this deity why don't you ask him to sort it out, sorry, I forgot he's magic but does not do tricks.
I have never argued that morality is irrelevant, far from it morality is key, I just don't get it from men in robes but the social nature of our society and freedom to be responsible for ones own well being and not imposing it on others to their detriment.


@MarketAndChurch
I would appreciate a reponse to the above points before I respond. Thanks



ruveyn
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17 Nov 2012, 11:42 am

@Market and Church. You are a good natured fellow and quite intelligent. Perhaps you could use your limited time better than pursuing futile things.

ruveyn



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17 Nov 2012, 5:38 pm

    At The Onset: You have way too many throw away lines. Because you are not debating me, but all of theism and apologetics. I take throw away lines seriously because I try to let as few untruths past me as possible. So forgive me if my posts are rather long at times. It's becoming a back and forth on semantics and phrasing. I beg you, if I misread you in any way, please point it out -- I too will point out where you have misread me as well. You can't read my mind either, so if you try to anyways, please assume the best intentions, as I will of you. And if you resort to 2-3 line brushoffs or dense-empty-calorie paragraphs and do not go into depth on anything I post, I will withdraw from this debate as I have from past debates. If I do not address a greatly constructed sentence or point of yours, please repost it in bold with no further explanations, and I will deconstruct it to the extant that I can.


Make Better Instruments
You have no evidence that God does not exist. You antithesis towards God is emotional. Your instruments have not even touched the tip of the iceberg as far as physics, chemistry and biology goes. If at any point in the history of Science, scientists were prepared, with their barely birthed knowledge, to declare we know all there is to know, think of all that we would be robbed of. What do we really know about any of the Newtonian Laws 300 years later? What do we know about the existence of all the abstract objects that riddle the universe? What do we truly know of fields, or force? Our knowledge of physics is still as elementary as it was 100 years ago.

Only the advancement of the microscope has shown us that perhaps our range of perception are not only limited, but can be increased by instruments that can allow us to measure the natural world. Imagine if the sciences, absent the microscope, were to make the foolish assumption that only what our eyes can see is all there is. We would have no outlet beyond religion or superstition to account for illness, the mind, the nervous system, bacteria, and a whole host of other things that our limited range of perception closed us off from. You can cannot close yourself off to what you do not know. Be prepared to entertain notions that are not within the realm of naturalism or is materially observable. Gravity is a material, what?


How We Approach God
The only thing that can apply to God is philosophical argumentation. That people believe the earth is 6000 years old is of no usefulness to you or I. They will believe that and continue living a normal life… nothing is contingent on their disbelief or dispelling it. Nor should it matter to you or I. Everything, including your statement that God does not exist is an article of faith because you cannot disprove the supernatural. We can only use logic and reason then to defend our positions, but logic and reason on their own have no agenda, proofs, or definitive positions in any direction, or for any principle, belief, or truth.


Make Comparable Comparisons
The tooth fairy serves only as a narrative for children and is here to provide them some solace for losing their teeth. If the tooth fairy, or the flying spaghetti monster took on an even greater role of defining the physical world and keeping its "fixed" laws running in accordance to its will, then the appropriate question is why: Why Spaghetti? Or why is the creator a fairy concerned with teeth? What can we learn about Spaghetti and what is it about starches that can help us deconstruct the cell in all its splendor?

In other words, it is not very helpful one bit to include fairies, unicorns, or any other mythic creation whose only existence serves to be a character in fairy tale. The torah holds that God created the heavens and the earth, willed nature into existence -- if you count that as mythic, so be it, but there is a gulf of difference between a God that willed existence from nothing, and a tooth fairy. At least compare God to Zeus, a Greek God for the Greeks, or Brahma the creator.


Other Gods Exist... sort of.
Judaism has always believed that other Gods exist to other people. We understand that they are Gods... to them... If those people have a form of ethical monotheism that is pretty much identical to our concept, it is in beautiful and dare I say encouraged belief that we support in full. Our sole purpose is to advance ethical monotheism on earth, and destroy most of the unethical pagans in our midst. God can and may have revealed himself to other groups on earth in the same fashion he did us. We have yet to find another example, but we don't think for one moment we have an ownership over the God we've given to the world, or, that our God is Jewish.


Misquoting The Text, No Examples
The Examples I am asking for are examples of when those Jewish Laws were carried out and someone died as a result. I'm sick of people googling passages they have never looked at with any scholarship and wave it around with some sense of authority, but haven't the slightest clue what it is they are waving around. If some moron decided to take a few lines out of context from Othello or King Lear and paint Shakespeare to be a clueless idiot who has no idea what he's talking about, it would be my response, and correctly so, to ask the hell are you to misquote something you have never studied? Where is your advanced studies in Shakespearean literature? The same is perfectly appropriate here where one likes to cite "Stoning" as a punishment. You have no knowledge of stoning in moses time. What are the principles communicated by stoning? Was it used? How frequently was it used? What examples does the rabbinic traditions cite?


Some Quick Points:
    1.) Those palestinians that were killed by religious Jews? DId you know most Jews in the world are not religious? Less then 50% say they are religious, and of those who say that, even a tinier % actually practice the faith… You know nothing of the those Jews who attacked the Palestinians, if it happened at all. You are a Jew, whatever you believe, be it atheism or buddhism, if you are born one, from ethnically Jewish parents. The Jews who serve in the army are not necessarily religious, neither are most people in Government.

    2.) Goyim means Nations, Prud. The Nations that are beyond our Jewish movement are the Goyim. You have Stalin and Mao to account for. You have Kim Jong Ill to account for as well. And every other atheistic Man-God to which humans were sacrificed to.

    3.) You can't do the same with Harry Potter.
      a.) What can harry potter teach you about charity?
      b.) What does harry potter teach you about the human condition?
      c.) What does Harry Potter teach you about male/female relationships?
      d.) What does Harry Potter teach you about respecting animal life?
      e.) What does Harry Potter teach you about stealing another's time, spouse, life, or material possessions?
      f.) What can Harry potter teach you about loans you give to your fellow countryman when they've fallen on hard times?

    4.) What is the point of your inclusion of Shuruppak? Shuruppak, the Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Assyrians, they all contributed to many of the stories in the text. What Judaism did was it took those stories and elevated them to teach people about the human condition and the nature of God.

    5.) I only know what I know from studying all religions. I've said it time and time again, I was raised Christian, flirted with atheism, now definitionally a Jew, but not quite, I am as I define myself a religious humanist, I subscribe to progressive conservative Judaism thought, though I attend a reform synagogue. I am studying Taoism, I've studied in the past Buddhism, Hinduism, and Mormonism, I am a lover of philosophy and the study of all religions. I would not know the true greatness of the text if I did not have something to contrast it with.

    6.) Ethics and morality has existed since the dawn of time. Caveman see another caveman trying to steal away caveman's women, caveman kills thief. That was ethical from a caveman's view. Ethics has existed in every culture at all times. In ancient Israel, the Midianites thought it was ethical to spill the blood of children to the ground they worshipped, because it would then bring harvest that could feed the greater whole, and we can always have more kids.

    7.) Don't bring evolution into this without meaningful examples. You have utterly ignored just about everything I've said on the matter. Random variation = progress, how? Ethics was a process of random variation, how? For every answer you supply on what is truly unknowable, spawns a dozen more questions, trying to understand what is at best: shaky assumptions based on faith.

    8.) Judaism has no problem with Divorce or with the homosexual being born as one, either. If a secular Jewish states bombs a religious group, what is there to be read from that other then a non-religious attacking a religious group. Man is to have dominion over nature, not be submissive to it, but conquer our misunderstandings of why cells metastasize in humans and develop pharmaceutical solutions to conquer it, to not settle for hot weather and build a fan to cool ones self. That is what it means to conquer nature.


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MarketAndChurch
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17 Nov 2012, 5:46 pm

ruveyn wrote:
@Market and Church. You are a good natured fellow and quite intelligent. Perhaps you could use your limited time better than pursuing futile things.

ruveyn


What are you insinuating Ruveyn... I think I've made good points so far, I don't think I've lost this debate...

I may be up against undergrads, graduates and postdocs but I am learning very quickly.


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17 Nov 2012, 6:13 pm

Religion combined with morality and ethics ... great idea!

When does it start?


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17 Nov 2012, 6:22 pm

MarketAndChurch wrote:

I may be up against undergrads, graduates and postdocs but I am learning very quickly.


You have nothing to fear from me then,I'm the dumb-a**on the block,not even a diploma,just a drop-out.



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18 Nov 2012, 2:41 pm

Fnord wrote:
Religion combined with morality and ethics ... great idea!

When does it start?



It starts with "Theistic Satanism" we follow what our book says.


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