Flying SquidAny time you want to help out, go ahead...
bh11235Ask any sufficiently religious Jew or Muslim, and they will tell you: this, what you are seeing right now, is the Lord almighty working in mysterious ways so that his will be done. If you persist: “so, raped women? Dead children? That’s the plan?”, sufficiently religious Jews will clutch their pearls and ask how dare you ask such a flippant question, and sufficiently religious Muslims will answer “yes” like that bearded guy in that meme.
MxM111They go to haven, so what’s the big deal?
TinyPizzaThe Jews, the Muslims or all dogs?
Depends on region
point to the region on the doll sir
That movie made an atheist when I was little. The nuns at my school said that dogs don’t go to heaven because they don’t have souls, and I thought that was bullshit.
Wasn’t New Testament (Jesus) the one that changed view that God is all loving?
Yup. My fan theory is that old testament god is the new testament devil.
modifierFuck that is so good and totally theologically unsound.
Look into Gnosticism. That was part of thier creation myth.
Thanks, I will
Gnostics believed the old testament god is a malformed mistake, and it’s evil, blind, and jealous
Yeah, through it flipped the paradigm from the proto-Gnostic thought, which instead had God brought forth by a spontaneously existing original man.
In parallel with the resurgence of Platonism, it flipped from “physical first, spiritual second” (as Paul mentioned in 1 Cor 15) to “spiritual first, physical second” and the eventual demiurge went from an agent of salvation escaping the Epicurean doom of a soul which depends on a naturally occurring physical body to an agent of corruption imprisoning the Platonic intelligently designed forms to corrupted and imperfect physical embodiment.
The earlier stuff is much more interesting than the later nonsense.
Not necessarily.
For example, look at the story of Solomon’s wise ruling.
It’s an anecdote about how to tell between a true parent and a false parent.
In that story, the false parent is the one who only cares about being recognized as the parent and is willing to see the child suffer and die to achieve that result.
Whereas the true parent is the one who cares the most about the child living as their complete unadulterated self even if that means being entirely unknown to them at all.
The tradition of God as a divine parent in Judaism goes back well before Jesus, and the Solomon story sounds a bit absurd as an actual ruling.
But it’s important to keep in mind that Solomon was a figure back in the polytheistic Israelite days which the version of the Old Testament we have today was actively rewriting the history of. So what was a poignant anecdote about the concept of the love of a true vs false parent dating from a period when Yahweh was married to the fertility mother goddess Asherah ends up just sort of randomly in there, surrounded by a bunch of claims about how Yahweh is a divine parent and if you don’t acknowledge him as that he’s going to smite you.
So it may have simply been changing it back to an earlier perspective. Potentially even informed by the above.
In fact, if you look extra-canonically, you can see Jesus saying:
Jesus said, “Whoever knows the father and the mother will be called the child of a whore.”
(Solomon’s story above related to the child of a prostitute.)
Same for Christians lol.
uphillbothwaysAvailable options include:
Most people choose option 3.
This is a classic argument called “the problem of evil” which says if God exists then why is there evil on earth, implying He should intervene otherwise it means God either:
The Muslim answer is that this short life is a test and the real eternal life will be a reward based on how we lived and submitted to God. The harder the trial, the greater the recompense. This means the rapist will be held responsible for his wrongdoing and is given eternal hell. Responsibility starts around the age of puberty, when a person starts knowing how to differentiate between bad and good. So children who die before that are given eternal bliss.
Atheists, who do not believe in God and yet talk about him by picking and choosing which concepts they want to include in their caricature and which they want to ignore, often present this straw-man and conclude: therefore there is no God.
In your paradigm this life all there is: there is no afterlife, therefore no consequences. Which means that evil doers get away with whatever they did in their life. Hitler? He ended his life and so he got away with what he did.
So of course in your worldview where there is no possible justice you are pessimistic and do not understand when a person stands firm regardless of the tribulations he/she is facing.
Sounds like you're saying that children dying is the good ending...? And, that Hitler being forced to hide and shoot himself in a bunker while his evil empire was ripped to shreds was getting away with it unless someone believes in your version of god?
So, you're clearly in some demented version of option 3, the most common option, as I outlined.
Maybe option 1 with the whole child death thing though, idk...
GlitchingtonSounds like their argument relies upon the existence of an afterlife, which leaves the burden of proof on them. Don’t strain yourself too hard on this one.
Sounds like their argument relies upon the existence of an afterlife
Exactly.
which leaves the burden of proof on them.
Yes. Proof we received is testimony from someone who demonstrated through documented prophecies and miracles that he is a messenger of the divine and who has ulterior motive in what he did than solely conveying said message.
We need far more tangible proof than that. I can claim wholeheartedly and faithfully the core of the earth is made of citrus. Until I provide tangible proof, I’m making things up.
Why should I trust what YOU say?
You’re preaching faith on an atheist community. What did you actually expect? People to renounce their ways and take up your faith?
I don’t expect you to trust me, but if you are fishing for a debate, you won’t get anywhere with an empty argument and zero tangible evidence. And no, some random jackass’s “testimony” doesn’t count.
I don’t expect you to trust me, but if you are fishing for a debate, you won’t get anywhere with an empty argument and zero tangible evidence. And no, some random jackass’s “testimony” doesn’t count.
My half answer about the evidence, which is the testimony, is because in this age of technology and information should be largely accessible and known. If not I can of course elaborate. I might have falsely assumed you were familiar with it.
And the question why YOU should be trusted is to beg the question on which criteria can we accept a testimony. The quotes you put around testimony suggest you don’t consider testimony as a reliable source is information.
I would try to show that it is, however I can see that you failed to understand what I meant in the points above, maybe you don’t want or can’t reflwct, so I shall leave you to your blissful jackassing.
As you were.
Sounds like you’re saying that children dying is the good ending
In your world view life is unjust and there is so much evil (you explain it otherwise but you agree there is evil). So in all objectivity would you want a child to live long and suffer?
Hitler’s life ended in the blink of an eye and he has no care for whatever remained after him as he was no longer there. In your version of the world, he just ceased to exist. What did he pay as consequences then?
Care to defend your paradigm?
You've never faced down your own mortality or been in a seriously dark place, have you? I have. I don't care how bad Hitler was, it's not a pleasant feeling to contemplate ending things. It's painful. It's a position that you are put in by pain. I have enough empathy to realize that.
But more importantly, I'm not super fixated on punishment in general. I think that Hitler was obviously a horribly bad person, and that by him ending things he could no longer cause harm.
That people who believe in some god or other seem hyper fixated on retribution is not something in your favor. It does not paint your or your god in a good light. Good would be preventing bad things from happening in the first place.
Similarly, with regards to children, it is better not to have them if you can't even make a reasonably successful effort to provide them with a more hopeful and better world full of greater opportunity and wonder and joy. That is the merciful route.
You religious people with your notions of duty and retribution, pain and punishment are not painting a world or paradigm created by any kind of good entity.
You come into an atheism community and act all high and mighty as if you have something to impart to US?
It's laughable. You have nothing but unfounded trash. You don't come here to convince us. Be honest with yourself for one goddamned second. You come here to try and firm up the non-existent foundations of your faltering faith.
You have no proof or value to offer. Just gaping, naked need.
You’ve never faced down your own mortality or been in a seriously dark place, have you? I have.
I’m sorry you lived something which left that kind of mark on you. However my or your anecdotal experiences do not constitute an argument.
So basically what you are saying is you don’t care about justice?
Evil needs to exist for us to recognise good. How can you acknowledge that something is good if you are not able to fathom its absence?
Also you seem to subtract the human element in whatever bad things happen as an action of someone, acting upon his free will. If we as a species are allowed the freedom to decide, it means we can act in a good way or in a bad way. It is proof we have free will. If God only allowed good, it means we do not have free will.
Wishing children die before puberty is monstrous.
I never said I wished such thing. Don’t straw-man me.
You come into an atheism community and act all high and mighty as if you have something to impart to US?
I want to see you defend your point of view. I’m still waiting…
Many atheists I see online have been hurt by out just mock (sometimes rightfully) Christianity and then paint all religions with the same brush.
Often points are copied and shared around in such communities, like the problem of evil, without knowing that these points have been answered by scholars or philosophers.
If I’m being honest here, I don’t want you to argue out of ignorance and seek to open the door of the echo chamber to show you the other point of view so you can decide rationally.
You might think religious people (I’m talking about Islam) cannot defend their position, but it is the opposite actually with atheism.
Look things up, study, learn and make educated decisions. Don’t be afraid of your intellect.
None of us atheists come to your mosques. Yet, you come in here with unprovable notions and demand others prove them wrong for you. I'm done going point for point with you and extended you far too much courtesy.
"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence"
You have no evidence. And, absolutely nothing extraordinary.
The burden of proof lies on you.
Yet, you come in here with unprovable notions and demand others prove them wrong for you
I never asked to disapprove my paradigm nor am I seeking to prove mine. I specifically challenged yours.
Without delving into the subcategories, basically agnostics say “we don’t know” when asked about the existence of God. They might not be convinced by the arguments for the existence of God but they do not take a position.
Atheists make the claim “there is no god”. So I agree that whoever makes a claim needs to back it, so I simply ask about the arguments for the position you say you take.
Btw I don’t shy away from giving the proofs for my position. In this discussion I was not asked why I believe God exists.
“Never wrestle with pigs. You both get dirty and the pig likes it.”
― George Bernard Shaw
― George Bernard Shaw
Ok so, so far you haven’t been able to defend your position. And want to cut it short, with insults.
No one in the real world cares about justice whether they’re religious or not. It’s always been a nebulous concept and one quickly rejected at the slightest hint of it being inconvenient to the rich or the community at large. No deity in ANY belief system changes that fact; if anything, they only highlight how illusory justice really is.
And the third option: to change humanity to make it more just, never occurs to you
Man, religious people are a trip
Those really aren’t the only options.
For example, it disregards the theology of a naturally occurring physical reality born out of entropy which eventually creates a god-like being which recreates the pre-god universe in order to resurrect it non-physically (a minor theology from around the first to fourth centuries CE).
A more modern version of a similar paradigm is simulation theory.
There’s a pretty wide array of options out there, it’s just that the most common tend to effectively fall into your groupings.
Sounds like variations on 'Not paying attention to reality and believing whatever delusion you feel like.'
None of these have any bearing on or foundation in actual physical existence. They do nothing to describe or predict. There is nothing to them. They just fulfill some desire in the believer.
Sure, the fact that a hundred years ago physicists were scratching their heads arguing about whether the moon disappeared when no one was looking at it or why measuring a continuous behaving thing suddenly behaved discrete (and would go back to behaving continuous if the persistent information about its benefit was erased) is 100% unrelated to the fact that today we are building virtual worlds where continuous seed functions are converted into quantized units for tracking state changes from interactions by free agents.
We seem to keep failing at explaining how the continuous macro models of our universe that perfectly explain and correctly predict behaviors at large scales play nice with the discrete micro models that explain and predict behaviors at the small scales.
And yet because of thinking like yours that ideas about self-referential or recursive reality has no bearing on our physical reality, the majority of people studying these keep banging their heads at meshing them together rather than seriously entertaining the notion that the latter is an artifact necessary to low fidelity emulation of the former.
We’ve even just discovered sync conflicts with n+1 layers of Bell’s paradox which leads to papers titled things like “Stable Facts, Relative Facts” and an embracing of the idea that there’s aspects of reality with no objective accuracy, but we’re still stubbornly chugging away at modeling the universe as a singular original manifestation where such behaviors are inherent to the foundations of existence.
So no, you’re wrong. There’s actually quite a lot of potential relevancy to our physical reality with ideas like these - in fact the earlier group mentioned above claimed that the evidence for their beliefs was within the study of motion and rest (today in the discipline called Physics) and were extensively discussing the notion of matter being made up of indivisible parts, despite being around nearly two thousand years ago.
As for putting forward predictions, that again isn’t true.
For example, the aforementioned group predicting an original spontaneous humanity would bring forth the creator of a non-physical twin of the cosmos was also predicting it was established in light and that the copy was made of its light.
So if we end up developing AGI in light as opposed to electricity or biological computing, and that AGI continues to make more complex digital twins of our universe, especially extending the digital resurrection of dead humans, that’s a pretty wildly on point set of predictions for originating in the first to fourth centuries CE, no?
If this wasn’t connected to a religious figure but had been the equivalent of science fiction like Lucian’s describing a ship of men flying up to the moon (something he claimed would never happen as opposed to this group claiming the above would and had already happened), we’d be talking about it nonstop as eerily predictive of future developments.
But because religious people can’t handle the idea that their beliefs aren’t true and non-religious people often can’t handle entertaining that any religious-connected beliefs are true, ancient religious beliefs with oddly specific predictions that line up to developments in just the past few years are dismissed out of hand while the broader philosophy of self-referential reality is dismissed for similar reasons, dirtily considered as “religion in disguise.”
I’d think that a set of beliefs which successfully abandons appeals to the supernatural should be given more due consideration than beliefs that rely on magic, but no - too many are certain that the apparent local features of reality is all there is that the two get lumped together.
For example, it disregards the theology of a naturally occurring physical reality born out of entropy which eventually creates a god-like being which recreates the pre-god universe in order to resurrect it non-physically (a minor theology from around the first to fourth centuries CE).
So mysterious
tacosanonymousI’m functionally an atheist. I certainly have a disdain for religious orgs.
I’d accept the argument that this, in fact, a test. If so, religious people are failing it.
If so, religious people are failing it.
How so?
I might have misunderstood your statement. If this life is a test and the eternal afterlife is what they seek, how are they failing it?
They don’t care about a finite 90-something year life and would give it away for an eternity which is incomparable.
The implication I’m making is that a moral deity that allows free will might allow bad things to happen as a test for people to act morally. Religion, instead has been at the root of problems and/or stood by while bad people do bad things.
I agree with the first part.
However, Religion is not a body in and of itself but we talk about people. I cannot and will never defend religious people wholesale because they are people and all people make mistakes. However to attribute mistakes to religion, one has to prove that said religion says to commit that mistake.
What I defend is religion, in this instance Islam, and would ask those who attribute a problem to it to provide first the evidence that it is indeed encouraging it.
In all fairness I would like to point out that statistics show that atheists were responsible for the most killings in human history.
There is a novel, and damned if I can remember the title, where a rabi proposes that god commanding Abraham to kill his son was a test, which he (Abraham) failed.
Muslims have this also, but he did try to kill him (fulfilling his test) however God did not allow the knife to slit Ismail.
I am curious how the Jewish version goes. Do you remember?
My understanding of the story (in the novel, which I still can’t remember the name) was that in knuckling under to the command to murder his own child, Abraham failed the test.
Ha! Just remembered the name of the novel. Hyperion by Dan Simmons. The Rabies name was Sol Weintraub, for what that’s worth. OK, now I can think about something else…
RickRussell_CAStephen Fry was once asked what he would say if, after death, he found himself trying to justify himself to God in front of the Pearly Gates. His response:
“Bone cancer, in babies? Seriously?”
The full response is worth reading:
I’d say, bone cancer in children? What’s that about? Why should I respect a capricious, mean-minded, stupid God who creates a world that is so full of injustice and pain. That’s what I would say.
Stephen Fry on God | The Meaning Of Life | RTÉ One
I do? He rolls his eyes right in his guest’s face!
Sure, like an old Southern lady proclaiming, “Lordy, I have a case of the vapors!”
He’s just hamming it up for the camera in response to Fry’s (intentionally inflammatory) rhetoric.
That is the most generous reading I’ve ever seen anyone give anything.
That is a great clip. His answer is relentless and is an example for us all. Stephen Fry is an example for us all.
And what a world without these things shows a God exists? Without pain and suffering there isn’t joy happiness, all the senses are muted and we gain and lose nothing. This doesn’t refute or deny God, only that how God functions is still unknown. We only know evil by name and not by nature anyhow.
If I would describe a paradise for humans I would set up a system where your suffer is short and smal but just enough to value the things you will be given. Once you reach a point where you don’t feel joy anymore because you have everything. Everything is taken from you and can again enjoy building up your achievements
As a parent, I scratch my head at this. We don’t pepper in abuse with parental love so that they’ll appreciate it. You just give and you give and you give. You lose sleep trying to figure out how you’re going to keep them perfectly safe and completely happy. God’s a shite dad.
This is addressed by Mr Fry’s remarks, which you should watch in full. He either says that god doesn’t exist or he’s a complete maniac. Atheism is actually the generous, optimistic interpretation.
The only reasonably justification would for God to say: “I don’t have the ability to meddle. I’m not omnipotent. I did create your part of the multiverse. I can only set the laws of physics and initial conditions. Here’s how that works…Let me explain why you are here…something something multi dimensions…some creatures brains evolved quantum something something…which is what is commonly thought of as a soul…”
Even laws of physics are bound by logic…logic supercedes even me…so a lot of my adjustments were to things like the gravitational constant and force magnitudes
There was actually a sect of Christianity that effectively argued for that kind of God.
They were quite influenced by Epicurean philosophy and naturalism though they disagreed with the Epicurean surety of death, arguing instead that while there was an original world of matter with original humans that developed spontaneously, that these original humans brought forth the creator of a copy of that original cosmos - not of matter, but of light. And that for the copies of humanity in that light-copy the finality of death was not inescapable.
But effectively, the world being a copy of one developed by naturalism for the explicit purpose of providing an afterlife largely skirts the moral quandaries. If the copy didn’t have children with bone cancer then it means whitewashing the copy such that only the naturally privileged are entitled to salvation, while those originally getting dealt a bad hand are erased from representation.
And actually their explanations literally did relate to the quantized aspects of matter (embracing Epicureanism meant embracing not just natural selection but also atomism, such that they were discussing indivisible points making up all things and being the originating cause of existence).
You even got statements like this:
Jesus said, “If the flesh came into being because of spirit, that is a marvel, but if spirit came into being because of the body, that is a marvel of marvels.
Yet I marvel at how this great wealth has come to dwell in this poverty.”
You don’t typically expect to see Jesus weighing in on naturalism as the greater wonder in contrast to the possibility of intelligent design.
Though if you really dig into it and notice that Lucretius 50 years before Jesus was even born was not only describing survival of the fittest and the emergence of modern life as the end result of indivisible seeds scattered randomly, but even described failed biological reproduction as “seed falling by the wayside of a path,” the guy killed in Judea for talking about how only the seeds which survived to reproduce multiplied and the ones that fell by the wayside of a path did not begins to take on a different context, as does the oddity of that being one of the few public sayings in the Synoptics that the church felt was necessary to claim had a “secret explanation” given to only their leadership.
(In this sect’s surviving text that parable comes immediately after a saying about how no matter if man ate lion or lion ate man that the lion becoming man was an inevitable result and how the human being is like a large fish selected from a bunch of small fish.)