A world without moral excellence is not necessarily a better world.
k, it’s not necessarily worse either…
Right. Which supports my point that there is no “best of all possible world.” For any possible world, we can imagine improvements.
it doesn’t “support” it, it leaves the possibility open that it could be correct. there’s a difference.
How can any mere mortal discuss God and morality as if we know what we are talking about? And how do you know what the relationship is between God and logic? Instead, we can only presume that if God is all powerful it is within his capacity to create a world without pain.
After all, wasn’t that the point in the Garden of Eden before the fruit from the tree of knowledge was eaten? Adam and Eve dared to think for themselves and now we all pay the price.
Yet how logical is Original Sin? It’s about as logical as you committing a capital crime and both you and your children being executed for it.
What does this have to do with a loving, just and merciful God allowing the pain to be meted out to the innocent? And we live in a world where a tiny fraction of the world’s population own’s 90% of the world’s wealth while over 3,000,000,000 men women and children sturggle to survive literally on less than $2 a day. What is balanced about that?
Well, that’s one way to rationalize it I suppose. But it is also sheer speculation predicated on assumptions that merely seem reasonable to you. They’re not reasonable to me.
What purpose? Again, all you offer us are vague assertions about pain and pleasure, logic and God. That’s all you’ve got in the face of the appalling headlines we read everyday. Twenty thousand children aged five years and younger die from starvation every single day—but at least the Chilean miners were rescued? Does that sort of put things into balance?
Yes, in our imagination perhaps, but not in God’s. He had the capacity to allow us to live as long as He wished. And without pain or suffering.
Instead, as per Bill Shakespeare, he gave us this:
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
In fact, isn’t this why we invent Gods—to make all that go away and, in its place, substitute immortality, salvation and devine justice?
Would that I could believe it…
Yes, Simone de Beauvoir wrote the novel All Men Are Mortal to argue that very thing. But, again, it does not necessarily follow. There are always things we can engage even if we did live to be a million. There is good food, music, love, family, art, sport, sex. And change, of course. Nothing stays the same. The human race evolves with new experiences, new challenges, new distractions. The only thing that makes it “absurd and inconsceivable” is that there is no God and mere mortals are not likely to ever bring it about.
iambiguous wrote:
And yet it is said that we were made in His image. But imagine if one us were to buy some land and bury all sorts of terrible contraptions on it—devices that led to the demise of innocent children who are smothered to death, burned alive, ripped to pieces.
And the infants, the babies?
If an earthquake occurs and you are a child pinned beneath a massive slab of concrete…what relevant information can your intellect provide?
Only this: God works in mysterious ways and soon I will be with Him for eternity! In paradise!!
If the subject is beyond rational discourse than we should be silent about it. That doesn’t justify atheism over theism.
I don’t. I thought your purpose was to have a rational discussion and I have tried to respond in kind. That would include a logical defintion of God. If we abandon logic, all we have is nonsense.
iambiguous wrote:
How can any mere mortal discuss God and morality as if we know what we are talking about?
Yes, that is what Wittgenstein once famously suggested. But few heed the call. These things fascinate us. And we never really know for sure which subjects truly are beyond rational discourse.
And I’m not trying to justify atheism so much as offer arguments why it seem to me that No God is the most reasonable point of view.
Besides, how could I possibly justify something I readily admit may well be beyond the minds of mere mortals. In that context, we are all agnostics.
Still, it is certainly more incumbent upon those who claim something does exist to demonstrate its existence than for those who claim it does not exist to demonstrate it does not.
Logic and God. Yes, we can try to grapple with a logical definition of God. But for some that is like grappling to come up with a logical definintion of Nirvana or Karma…or Fate or Destiny…or Justice or Freedom.
Or, for others still, a Unicorn.
Easy; talk about ourselves in regards to gods and morality.
There is a difference between knowing what we are talking about and thinking that we know what we are talking about. It’s the difference between being omniscient [like God] and merely having a point of view [like mere mortals].
So what?
We can discuss our humanity in relation to the divinity any and every day.
And at the end of it; it’s our choice as to what the end result is up and until some other force of reality beyond our choice shows to us that our collective conjectures are mistaken about the relationship between man and the divinities of man.
This isn’t science.
This is religion.
Empirical fact was tossed into the garbage upon entering the parking lot.
But that does not obviate the distinction I raised above. We can talk about anything. But that is not the same thing as demonstrating that what we think we know about these things reflects the most rational manner in which these things can be talked about.
And?
Well for me, natural disasters occur because “god”(not in the concept of “an old man w/ a beard” but the meaning of being a “god” in general) wants us to remember that we’re just mere mortals, that there are things beyond our control, regardless of what we think or do. In this case I assume that “god” wants to be understood, but he doesn’t want to either.
It’s like grabbing your own shadow…
I know I’m a douche, sorry for my crappy opinion. Peace!!
wow, he might be an idiot, but he sure as hell has one philosophical principle down: know thyself
iambiguous wrote:
But that does not obviate the distinction I raised above. We can talk about anything. But that is not the same thing as demonstrating that what we think we know about these things reflects the most rational manner in which these things can be talked about.
And, therefore, any discussion of the relationship between God, natural disasters and human suffering can only be speculative because there is no way in which to confirm our conjectures in the absense of an actual God.
I merely assumed His existence, that He was loving just and merciful and that [later in the thread] He was both omniscient and omnipotent.
I can’t reconile the abominable suffering with a loving, just and merciful Creator.
Where do our conceptions of what a loving, just and merciful being is like come from? They are based on those individuals who exemplify those attributes in their lives i.e. individuals who have achieved moral excellence. If God exists, the world would be the way it is in order to produce such people. A world without the possibility of natural evils and free will would not produce such people. For example without the real threat of death in the world, real courage could not exist. The providential plan wherein life flourished on this planet the way it does would be evidence of that god’s love, justice and mercy.
Show me someone who is said to embody moral excellence and I will show you others who will adamently insist she does not. Why? Because she doesn’t worship the right God or she doesn’t embrace the right political faction or she doesn’t support the right side in the abortion wars.
And I guess we will never know if corageous heroes would not exist in a world without the horrors of natural disasters because so far God has not seen fit to shut them down yet. We’ll just have take your word for it?
I always encourage people to read Rabbi Harold Kushner’s When Bad Things Happen To Good People. The first part of the book is nothing short of a devastating critique of any God who might be omnipotent. He lost his own son to progeria and he exposes all of the terrible suffering he has seen or known of. He simply concludes [as do I] that no God could be loving, just and merciful and do nothing to stop what the protagonist in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness called simply, “the horror! the horror!”
And allow me please to put to life flourishing on the planet the way it does into perspective.
Here is a snapshot of the world we do live in:
•In the Asian, African and Latin American countries, well over 500 million people are living in what the World Bank has called “absolute poverty”
•Every year 18 million children die of hunger
•For the price of one missile, a school full of hungry children could eat lunch every day for 5 years
•Throughout the 1990’s more than 100 million children died from illness and starvation. Those 100 million deaths could [have been] prevented for the price of ten Stealth bombers, or what the world spends on its military in two days
•The World Health Organization estimates that one-third of the world is well-fed, one-third is under-fed one-third is starving
•Nearly one in four people, 1.3 billion – a majority of humanity – live on less than $1 per day, while the world’s 358 billionaires have assets exceeding the combined annual incomes of countries with 45 percent of the world’s people.
•3 billion people in the world today struggle to survive on less than $2 per day.
•Malnutrition is implicated in more than half of all child deaths worldwide – a proportion unmatched by any infectious disease since the Black Death
•To satisfy the world’s sanitation and food requirements would cost only US$13 billion- what the people of the United States and the European Union spend on perfume each year.
•The assets of the world’s three richest men are more than the combined GNP of all the least developed countries on the planet.
And God [one of them] sees all?
You seem to have me mistaken.
You think talking about gods must be a discussion regarding natural reality, while I’m simply stating that a discussion on gods is a discussion about humanity’s relationship to their gods…not much else.
What is “natural reality”?
What I posited [hypothetically] is the realionship between those parts of humanity who insist that God can be both loving, just and merciful and the author of planet earth.
I see this basically as parents brainwashing their children to believe such things or as folks who believe it because it has become a psychological defense mechanism for them.
Apart from that, it remains a deep mystery to me.
That’s still picking at the torn meet from the bones of a dead animal.
Look at what is wanted, not what is matching.
As I said in another thread (Religion is a Force for Good in the World ), religion is changing in perspective within the minds of the adherents.
Rather than looking at that assertion and seeing how their relationship to their god doesn’t jive with the record of their god, look at it as what it is: their preference of what their god is in value.
Ignore the creation part; who cares?
Just look at how they describe their understanding of their god, because the values placed upon their god are the values upon which are held as the highest esteem in which to achieve; that is why they are attributes of their god.
They are saying they view the highest attributes to achieve are being:
. Loving
. Just
. Merciful
That is hardly worth condemning.
I agree, certainly, that the varying gods of the Torah or Talmud do not readily display this range of attributes in their varying identities of their god therein, but that doesn’t matter either.
Bringing that up only peals away at useless bickering.
You won’t convince them of anything, nor them anything you.
There’s no fruit in it…just shit.
Instead, look at their relationship to their god as it stands today.
Whether they openly accept it or not; they are worshiping a different god than one worshiped thousands of years ago…but again…good!!