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This website is so ass-backwards it's funny (pg. 23)
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| Alex |
| quote: | Originally posted by Lemonad
Religion is just simply stupid! |
Thank you for that enlightening statement.
Sorry Renegade I haven't had time to respond yet, it's coming! Just bogged down with school and more school and ya... school. |
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| Alex |
To: Renegade (all the things I quote are from your post, if it's got " " it's from an outside source)
| quote: | then the complete lack of universal correlation between religious beliefs and predilection towards moral behaviour is something that you might find a little awkward to explain. [/QUOUTE]
Ok, so, this you just simply made up. You mentioned you had C.S. Lewis' book on order or something, I suggest you read it before even trying to defend this argument again because you will quickly realize the number of things wrong with it. I'll point out the obvious one, which is from a culture standpoint that is of course either directly or indirectly affected by religious beliefs worldwide: The fact that there is no notable society on Earth that looks favorably upon thieves, murderers, rapists, cheats etc is evidence enough that while religious practices worldwide may vary, there IS a strong correlation. So if humans simply came up with their own notions, obviously separated by miles and miles of land/seas/mountains etc, of morality then surely there would be more variation? Would we not be seeing to this day a society that freely allowed it's citizens to kill each other at will? I'm sorry but to try and claim that if religion of any kind had not been part of humanity's progression that people would have simply come up with their own morality system is foolish. What would it have been based on? If you want to return to the animal example, fine, but as a well read person you must understand that humans do not have animal instincts surely? And to claim that a worldwide invention of morality is somehow our animal minds triggering a survival mechanism is beyond foolish. You have to look no further than the example of a child and his/her parents: A child needs to be taught EVERYTHING, whereas my pet dog who was taken from it's mother at only 2 or 3 months of age knows how to eat, drink, chase squirrels, bark at strangers, dig holes in my backyard and hide things, clean his own wounds, roll over on his back when he needs to submit (to my epic alpha-male-ness :p) etc etc. Whereas a baby of a proportionate age, if taken from it's mother and then stuck in a room with food, water, exercise equipment and books would not be able to develop. Morality is tradition, and all tradition begins somewhere, I argue that it begins with God and that it has been passed down. The fact of the matter is we have a justice system (moral system) that IS based in religion, to speculate as to the possibility that humanity could have or would have come up with their own system is something else entirely. Our morality is passed down to us and was solidified and originated in one form of belief in God or another.
[QUOTE]For instance, in a Christian context, would stealing someone's TV land me in hell? What if I didn't actually believe in hell? What if I repented after the fact? What if I believed in the Evangelical notion of salvation without works (or, in this case I suppose, deeds)? In any of these cases (which - when added together - would probably amount to the beliefs held by the majority of Christians) there is not even the threat of punitive retribution, so what incentive is there - on the basis of self-interest - for the average Christian to act morally? |
Alright, I'm impressed that you dare travel into more theological waters here, and you seem to have a very basic understanding of Protestant beliefs. I am not a Protestant, however I do understand their theology quite well, so I'll try to clear this up as best I can. Stealing a TV probably would land you in hell if you simply didn't think it was wrong to do so, despite having been taught otherwise. However, as a Catholic I believe that through a GENUINE (emphasis on Genuine) repentance you would be able to return to God's favor. That being said, it isn't an easy task and because I do not believe in faith alone that person would have to work towards their salvation and not just steal more TVs and ask for more forgiveness. Now, an Evangelical (which could mean any number of Protestant denominations by the way) believes that Scripture alone and Faith alone will earn him salvation. This is an idea of the Calvinist train of thought which was actually originated with Luther. I believe that it's a bunch of nonsense and goes against scripture, and there is endless evidence in my favor. The fact that the protestant bible simply omits section after section of things they found were contrary to their new belief system is evidence enough that Faith alone and Scripture alone are concepts that have grown out of an original misconception. So you brought up some ok points, but when you claimed there was no threat of punitive retribution I sort of went "huh?" I don't see how your train of thought lead you there at all. Do you believe that Christians don't respect the laws of THIS world and are only concerned about what the higher power thinks? God always taught that following the law was extremely important in the long run and there is evidence of that in every single book of the bible, you need only open to any page and see that. Additionally though, Christians DO answer to a higher power and of course that is their primary concern when making moral choices. In the Christian mindset, our lives here are merely a test and that our true lives begin upon our deaths, therefore I return to my first point: If I believe in an all knowing, all powerful God that can read me like a book and see through every lie I tell others or to myself, it requires a truly GENUINE act of repentance to return to his good favor, and true repentance requires a complete 180 so to speak in how I go about making moral decisions from that point on, it's not an open system like ours on earth. IE: You break the law, you go to jail. You lie to the parole board and say you're different, 6 months later you're back in jail, you get out, a year later you're back in... Etc etc. When dealing with God's favor, it is not finite while on earth, but upon our deaths it becomes a 100% finite decision as to whether or not you truly lead a good life or whether you truly were sorry for the horrible things you did and asked forgiveness for.
Now, I was going to stop there, but then I read this bunch of nonsense you came up with that didn't really seem all that relevant to what we were originally talking about :
| quote: | When you no longer have to justify actions in the context of human suffering but can rather just point to some "higher" set of principles (pertaining to God or country, usually) as justification for your actions, then no amount of human suffering is relevent to the determination of the morality of said actions. The men behind the September 11th attacks justified their actions on the belief that they were carrying out "God's will" - on what grounds can we then say that they acted wrongly? Fellow Muslims (or believers of any other faith, for that matter) can simply argue that they were "mistaken" in their beliefs, as though the 3,000 deaths they caused were merely the result of faulty exegesis or an overly naive application of theology, but in making these concessions we let them off too lightly.
Their failure was in treating the suffering of human beings as a means to an end, not an end in itself. Theologians may denounce the actions of fringe-dwellers in their respective faiths, but they share that common fallacy: if the favour of God is the ultimate justification for every action, then no action can be reliably denounced to the extent that it can be said to have won the favour of God. This is what Dawkins, Harris, et al. mean when they say that moderate religious belief facilitates fundamentalist religious belief: if theologians propogate the notion that only God may decide what is moral, then - given the absense of any possibility of knowing the mind of God - we have no objective metric upon which to denounce the lunacy of religious fundamentalists. |
Now are we really going to just sit here and assume that the people who instigated the 9/11 attacks were doing so based purely on religion? What a bunch of bollocks. It was a political attack, not a religious one, and any one with any common sense can see that. Now as for the people in the planes, the actual hijackers, I imagine some of them knew as well that the attack was POLITICAL in nature and not simply a matter of Islam vs The USA. The hijackers WERE mistaken, and just because you add the word "merely" before your point about them being mistaken in their exegesis doesn't make that claim at all wrong. Both the Bible and the Qu'ran have been used to justify heinous deeds, and that is because both books suffer from the same condition Jesus Christ did. They are both divine and human. The Bible and the Qu'ran are works inspired by the word of God, an insight into his plan that we can only begin to understand, and they are also written by human beings like ourselves. So I refer you to the point of all this again, a person can interpret the Bible incorrectly and it's moral teachings and do something that the vast majority of Christians think is wrong. Just like a regular member of society can stand up in court and justify why he killed his wife, but the jury, the judge, the media and all those following that said case can reject his reasoning and condemn him anyway. Now, how can we say he is wrong? After all, according to Atheists laws are a man made invention open to the authority of mankind only, so while we all believe he is wrong and we interpret our law in such a way that says he is wrong, he still thinks he's right. That is where the authority of a higher power ultimately comes into play that will, in the end, decide whether the action of our wife killer or those of the 9/11 instigators and hijackers were wrong. The deaths of 3000 innocents is tragic, but as a Christian I believe that those people are probably now in a far better place and it is something I pray for on a frequent basis.
Your point:
| quote: | | no action can be reliably denounced to the extent that it can be said to have won the favour of God |
Does not make any sense. Of course it can, and I disproved this notion in my comparison of the misinterpretation of the bible vs the misinterpretation of the legal system. The vast majority of Christians adhere to a Bible that is more or less the same on the most important issues, yes Sola Scriptura and Faith Alone are issues that have put a wedge in common Christianity but ultimately they do not affect the Christian man or woman's interpretation of the most basic of concepts in the Bible. IE: The 10 commandments, and the commandment Jesus taught "Love thy neighbor as you love yourself". The supporters of the 9/11 attacks used the argument of a "Just war" to defend the actions of the hijackers, saying it was merely an act of war that resulted in the atrocity that was 9/11 and therefore God would not frown upon it. I can argue until I'm blue in the face about this, but both me and countless devout Muslim friends of mine have poured over hundreds of pages of both the Old and New Testament as well as the Qu'ran in search of anything that would indicate that their position was justified and we haven't been able to find anything that (from a religious standpoint) could POSSIBLY have lead them to genuinely believe what they were doing was right. As I said, the 9/11 attacks were political and religious extremism/fundamentalism is something that gets people very fired up about politically.
In regards to your statement about moderates acting as a gateway to fundamentalists without there being any sort of standard to discern whether one is right or wrong is kind of funny to me. The standard is there, and like I said the vast majority of religious people abide by it, just like the vast majority of people abide by the law. But human beings have free will, it is our great gift, and therefore there will always be argument, discussion and debate concerning doctrines we all once thought were very obvious to the reader and sound in principle. To damn all religion because the actions of a few people who claim to be doing what they are doing for God is silly, you would not apply the same standard to ANYTHING else in life and therefore it is unfair and not logical to do so when it comes to religion.
Also, if you're going to regurgitate arguments from the God Delusion, please be warned that while Dawkins has become the Atheist Pope of sorts, he changes his mind about as often as Hollywood does hairstyles. He says what sounds good to him at the time and is possibly the most inconsistent atheist of all time, especially since recently he has admitted in an interview with John Lennox (the guy that he has debated many many times) that "There is a strong case for the existence of God". I'm too lazy to get the article, it's all over the net, just google it. |
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| Dervish |
LOL this thread always had such long long lonnnnnggg posts.
I'm an atheist myself (actually had a 3hr "discussion" on it at 5am a week ago) but heard this recently relating to the defense of religion which did strike a cord with me:
"When you're a drowning man, your head bobbing down for the third time and get thrown a life line, then you don't question the quality of the rope."
Anyone who can name the philosopher who came out with that peach gets a big e-cookie. :D |
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| DrUg_Tit0 |
The biggest problem when arguing with indoctrinated people is that they're incapable of rationally analyzing arguments. Therefore they have the capability of instantly accepting all arguments from other sources that even remotely fit their cause and can throw them at their opponents much faster than the opponents can respond. An average creationist, for example, usually only needs to see a title of a source in order to conclude whether it confirms his beliefs or not. Therefore such a person can instantly provide dozens of youtube videos, blogs, and articles to crush the opposition. On the other hand, a rational person usually takes time to disassemble every such source and to cohesively respond to each point raised. Such detailed responsiveness usually takes tens of minutes per each single opposing article, and is therefore futile against a "creationism truth" Google search that takes a fraction of a second to complete and returns thousands desired supporting arguments.
That being said, with all respect for renegade and Opus in their discussion, I'll just quickly comment on three major issues I haven't seen closely examined already, them being morality, Thomas Aquinas, and monkeys with typewriters.
Morality is not only observed in humans, it is observed in various other species, not all of them even being primates. Dolphins, for example, chase away sharks when they endanger other animals, and even do so when it is not a member of their species that is endangered. There have been numerous occasions when they helped humans lost at sea survive. Vampire bats, which live in huge colonies equal in size to our largest cities, often give some of the blood they collected to their less fortunate comrades who failed to successfully feed that night.
Thomas Aquinas, with all due respect, is plain silly if you read him nowadays. I have a book at home that contains his conclusions on various philosophical questions, and beside the fact most of them are silly (like the question of free will of angels and the like), his main problem is that he takes the bible as a viable source and bases some of his conclusions on that book.
As for the idea of a million monkeys given a million typewriters and a million years writing Hamlet, now, thanks to the internet, we know that is simply not true.
Gosh, this brings back memories. I was wondering where the quality people from this forum disappeared lately, but I suppose that we're all lying around dormant and that it just must take a fundie to reignite the long lost debating passion in all of us... |
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| Alex |
| I don't think Aquinas is silly at all, and where did you get this notion that he constantly uses the bible as a finite source of authority in his philosophy? That's BS mate, you need to read into him a bit more because he often assumes that the Bible doesn't even exist. |
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| DrUg_Tit0 |
| I wonder where he got all those ideas about angels from if it were not from the bible... |
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| Lebezniatnikov |
| quote: | Originally posted by Alex
I don't think Aquinas is silly at all, and where did you get this notion that he constantly uses the bible as a finite source of authority in his philosophy? That's BS mate, you need to read into him a bit more because he often assumes that the Bible doesn't even exist. |
+1
Aquinas is actually quite good as a philosopher, and I can't recall reading anything by him about the Bible. |
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| Sunsnail |
| quote: | Originally posted by DrUg_Tit0
As for the idea of a million monkeys given a million typewriters and a million years writing Hamlet, now, thanks to the internet, we know that is simply not true.
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| Lira |
| quote: | Originally posted by Lemonad
Religion is just simply stupid! |
Please, if you've got nothing substantial to add to the discussion, keep lurking. |
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| Alex |
| quote: | Originally posted by Lebezniatnikov
+1
Aquinas is actually quite good as a philosopher, and I can't recall reading anything by him about the Bible. |
Well he has written about the bible, of course, what made Aquinas so great was his prowess as both a philosopher AND a theologian.
As for his works on angels, yes, clearly this is an example of him working with the bible, however my point was in relation to the arguments going on in the past few pages IE: God's existence/Divinely inspired morality etc. In these instances, Aquinas goes much further than the Bible and relies heavily on philosophy and physics to make his points. |
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| DrUg_Tit0 |
| quote: | Originally posted by Alex
Well he has written about the bible, of course, what made Aquinas so great was his prowess as both a philosopher AND a theologian.
As for his works on angels, yes, clearly this is an example of him working with the bible, however my point was in relation to the arguments going on in the past few pages IE: God's existence/Divinely inspired morality etc. In these instances, Aquinas goes much further than the Bible and relies heavily on philosophy and physics to make his points. |
I do agree with you that Aquinas went further than the bible in his attempts to prove his theological concepts. But from reading his discussions it's pretty obvious that, whether consciously or not, a lot of his work was not really questioning the bible, but was instead aimed at proving the christian doctrine as a legitimate fact. In some of his discussions, like the one on angels I mentioned earlier, he often takes that doctrine for granted and builds up conclusions on that, which why I mentioned earlier that his writings are sometimes silly. |
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| Alex |
| quote: | Originally posted by DrUg_Tit0
I do agree with you that Aquinas went further than the bible in his attempts to prove his theological concepts. But from reading his discussions it's pretty obvious that, whether consciously or not, a lot of his work was not really questioning the bible, but was instead aimed at proving the christian doctrine as a legitimate fact. In some of his discussions, like the one on angels I mentioned earlier, he often takes that doctrine for granted and builds up conclusions on that, which why I mentioned earlier that his writings are sometimes silly. |
What kind of scholar or philosopher doesn't take at least something for granted? It was his belief system, and if he's doing work on angels why wouldn't he use his Christian beliefs?
He was one of the earliest apologists, so of course he will be trying to prove his doctrines... Have you ever read the Summa? Actually that's unfair, since it's a friggen library of sorts, but maybe bits and pieces? Perfect examples in there of both Biblical use and Non-Biblical use to reach conclusions. |
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