But this “no-thing” comes to mean “no-single-thing” much the same as “every-thing”. I think that this sense is far removed from the Parmenides sense in which even existence, being itself, is incompatible with nothing. Nothing is nothing. It does not exist. It is not an a sense of form but a void of all meaning
Out of touch with everything. The Old Testament is essentially a history of the Jews. To me it reveals thinking and preoccupations that we might well expect of a war-like semi-nomadic tribe with no scientific knowledge and only the first inkling of a higher moral sense. Too much of the God of the Jews reads as a caricature of man’s own foibles: He is jealous, vengeful, hot tempered, volatile and in short, so exceedingly human as to preclude the possiblity that this could really be The God. No wonder the Marcionists and many Gnostics rejected the God of the Jews as the real God.
Buffalo
Now it seems you are out to attack the character of the ancient Hebrew tribe. Were the abandoning babies to die in the forest? Were they taking advantage of children?
The religion of the Jews was the religion of Jesus. The high points of Christianity are at the same time Jewish points. It is possible to argue that true barbarity came with the Christian perspective of God rather than the Jewish version, because Yahweh killed you and you simply were no more, but for the Christian God would not kill you but torture you.
Gnostics wanted to answer an old age question as “where comes evil?” but it was an answer hardly accepted outside of the east. For Athens and Rome, for the philosophers and theologians a god waging war against evil was less elegant and less compelling than an absolute god…however incomprehensible.
Gnostics for me always had one question left unanswered: if Yahweh was wrong to think he was god rather than a creature, how could any other god be certain? If I could posit a God above Yahweh, why stop there?
You seem to be “drawn in” by the religion. I am speaking from a perspective of reading the Bible with as few preconceived notions as to what it is about as possible. In this context it comes off not as a work of inspired spiritual guidance, but what it really is, a testament to the ignorance of those tribes of 2000+ years ago. That is my opinion and why I think everyone should read the Bible.
You seem to be “drawn in” by the religion. I am speaking from a perspective of reading the Bible with as few preconceived notions as to what it is about as possible. In this context it comes off not as a work of inspired spiritual guidance, but what it really is, a testament to the ignorance and superstition of those tribes of 2000+ years ago. That is my opinion and why I think everyone should read the Bible.
I can reconcile it. The first person to use the above argument that I'm aware of is Richard Dawkins, who created the above contradiction because he didn't understand (or didn't bother to read) the Cosmological argument, which he was attempting to criticize at the time. I think his misunderstanding has become so popular that Christians as unfamiliar with the argument as he is have actually felt obligated to defend it.
Plus also, most Christians (indeed most humans) aren't much for critical thinking. If you just ask random, uneducated people to defend their views, you'll get all sorts of easy positions to shoot down. Fun, isn't it?
I guess it depends on how you choose to read it. People can often get lost in the finger and totally ignore what the finger was pointing to.
You take a story like the one about Cain and Abel and asks why did god favor Abel and not Cain, but that blinds some of the moral message that we and those that kill us or the ones we kill are all brothers. That it is not the rite alone but the the heart, that it is justice that god wants… In short important messages to humanity today told thousands of years ago. So I don’t see it like you do at all.
Look I can layer any bullshit interpretive message onto any text I pull off the shelf. For Mark David Chapman it was Salinger’s “Catcher in the Rye”. If the Bible is the best that God could do to lay it down for all eternity he’s a bozo and I’d rather worship Thor and Odin.
I’m really not bitter. Certainly I rejected religion long before I ever got around to really reading the Bible. But I am not a failed Christian who now resents his former “indoctrinators”. I was lucky enough to never be indoctrinated.
And I apologize if it “sounds” bitter: polemic is about the only way I can relieve the frustration I develop from hearing people constantly refer to to the Bible in glowing terms. Compared to a number of other religious texts (take the Tao Te Ching for example) the Bible seems to have very little to say of any relevance to the human condition. I still maintain that few people actually sit down and read the Bible and that if they did many would be surprised how little of substance is there.
I think that there are other gems among religious literature. My point is not that the bible is best of all but that it is a gem rather than what you see it as, an ancient record of errors.
I guess it is a matter of taste.
Something must either come from something or from nothing
If it doesn’t come from something, then it came from nothing
If it didn’t come from nothing, then it came from something
If man and the universe didn’t come from nothing, then it came from something
and it follows…
that whatever man and the universe came from is a something, not a nothing
and it follows…
this something which man and the universe came from must have come from either something or from nothing
since the Christians have already posited that you can’t get something from nothing, then God must have come from something. But Christians say God didn’t come from something.
As the set of all “somethings” is not a member of the set, God is not a something. Therefore, your conclusion about God in the category “something” does not apply. In other words, you are making a category error.
Felix, if you want to be sure that I reply to one of your posts, send me a PM alerting me of the post. Since I can’t reply to every post, those who send me a PM will get bumped to the top of the priority list.
Senseless is subjective and can often be measured by whether or not it is understood or makes sense. Whether or not something exists objectively is an entirely separate matter.
This is a poor argument - especially coming from a group of people who maintain that man and the earth are so perfectly designed that they must have had an intelligent designer behind their creation. Thus, the intelligent designer would be even more perfectly designed and would need an even more intelligent designer behind its creation. Why does the intelligent designer rule apply for one set of well designed thing(s), but not for another?