Posts by Caedes

102

A couple questions for atheists on Suffering

by little_Socrates in

who told you that the world should be free from suffering?.

do you find any value in suffering?.

do you think it is possible to experience all the beauty and goodness and pleasure the world offers without also experiencing the bad?

Caedes

LS,

Who told you that the world should be free from suffering?

As an empathic human being I wish that it were. As an atheist I know that there is no divine plan and that things just happen, the universe is oblivious to it's effects on us. If an asteroid hit the earth tomorrow and wiped out all life it did not do that on purpose we were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. If I believed in a biblical creator god then that asteroid has to be part of his divine plan and hence the suffering was caused by god.

Do you find any value in suffering?

No, that is not to say that people don't overcome all manner of adversity and emerge stronger. In spite of this it is not something I would inflict on anyone or anything by choice.

Do you think it is possible to experience all the beauty and goodness and pleasure the world offers without also experiencing the bad? Isn't good only good because we know what bad is? If there was only good would it really be "good"?

That is a good question but you really need to define what you mean. Firstly, I would differentiate between the 'bad' that is part of nature and 'bad' that is a result of unnecessary human activity. Could we eliminate human evil and still know what good and bad was? Probably yes, the vast majority of humans do not commit acts of evil, not because of god or hell but because of empathy. Could we stop natural disasters and still know good from bad? Yes, we do it all the time, If you don't live on a hill and are not knee deep in water twice a year it's probably because we have flood prevention engineers mitigating that natural disaster.

If you where God and could eliminate suffering what would the world look like? Or conversely if there was a loving God what should we expect the world to look like?

Much like it does now but without all the natural disasters, starvation and psychopaths and much more empathy for humans. If there were an omnibenevolent god then that would be the only sort of world it could design!

754

Theists, why does God allow suffering..

by The Quiet One in

..specifically, the suffering of animals.

you can talk about free will/sin/people choosing to not listen to god etc to explain human suffering being allowed.. but how can you love a god that allows animals, that haven't sinned or chosen to not have anything to do with god, to have their short lives ended in often long, drawn out, painful ways.

i could list stories i've read that would probably make you feel ill, but i'm not looking to shock anyone or start an emotional debate.

Caedes

Fisherman,

What I mean to say is that the president of the USA or any other sovereign ruler or government entity can define what is good and what is bad not you. The definition of good or bad can mean that he can drop a nuclear bomb destroying animals and people and whatever he wants.

By that definition every despot and tyrant in history is allowed to define that their actions are 'good', that is an astonishingly low bar for your god to reach. Mind you considering the moral turpitude of your god it will be in good company.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocides_in_history

So which one of the genocides listed do you think was the most benevolent? The holocaust? The killing fields of Cambodia perhaps the Srebrenica genocide.

17

Jehovahs Witness Shunning & the Crusades

by freemindfade in

while discussing being mistreated by my own jw family last night with my wife, i wanted to try to make her think critically about what shunning really is, and at its root what how beneficial it is.

earlier in the day i sent her non-apostate scholarly article on religious shunning being tantamount to psychological torture.

and most witnesses don't think into much about why they do things, its more of a "this is the way we do it, don't over think it" process.

Caedes

You could use this when a JW knocks on your door. Act interested at first and then 'explain' that you can't join the JWs as your current religion has a shunning policy for anyone who leaves and you don't want to lose friends and family.

754

Theists, why does God allow suffering..

by The Quiet One in

..specifically, the suffering of animals.

you can talk about free will/sin/people choosing to not listen to god etc to explain human suffering being allowed.. but how can you love a god that allows animals, that haven't sinned or chosen to not have anything to do with god, to have their short lives ended in often long, drawn out, painful ways.

i could list stories i've read that would probably make you feel ill, but i'm not looking to shock anyone or start an emotional debate.

Caedes

I recognized it immediately, Caedes. It's the most basic form of the slope-intercept equation for line equations. son just recently worked on that in school and I helped him with it, hence I've seen it a lot recently. Not sure what it's doing in this thread, however.

Viviane,

I recognised it too, I was hoping that by defining the parameters that it might become clearer what relevance it had to the thread or if it even had some relevance to the post in question. It certainly wasn't obvious to me what It had to do with human growth hormones. I am not an expert on biochemistry but I doubt that any correlation in that field is strictly linear. Perhaps whenindoubt can return and explain it?

754

Theists, why does God allow suffering..

by The Quiet One in

..specifically, the suffering of animals.

you can talk about free will/sin/people choosing to not listen to god etc to explain human suffering being allowed.. but how can you love a god that allows animals, that haven't sinned or chosen to not have anything to do with god, to have their short lives ended in often long, drawn out, painful ways.

i could list stories i've read that would probably make you feel ill, but i'm not looking to shock anyone or start an emotional debate.

Caedes

1That God is evil has not been established.

I completely disagree, for a start I have carefully stated that we are talking about a creator god (such as the one described in the old testament).

This thread is about God allowing evil(animal suffering).

The creator god according to the bible created the world as it is including all the suffering of animals, this has been going on since before humans walked the earth. We have fossils that show predation and injury. This is an indisputable fact.

Concluding that God is evil because he allows it is a big jump caedes.

The bible also claims that the creator god is omnibenevolent, so either the claim that the creator god is omnibenevolent isnt true or the claim that the biblical god is a creator god isn't true. If you wish to be internally logical these two claims cannot both be true.

2But you agree that judging God does not affect his existence.

You are the one that claimed that proving that god is evil proves his non-existence, as an atheist I said that isn't the case I am merely showing you that your position is inconsistant. I would argue further that I am not judging god since this is an argument about the consistancy of theist claims about god.

Since nobody has provided any empirical evidence for the existence of any sort of god I remain unconvinced of the existence of any gods. That doesn't mean I cannot assume you are correct in order to make a point about logic.

Animal suffering is a fact. But that does not prove that God is bad.

No, it proves that your claims that there is a creator god who is omnibenevolent cannot both be true.

A "proper foundation" has not been established as to what is good and bad either.

The proper foundation has been laid out, you just choose to ignore it.

You have your opinion BUT you are not running the USA.

What I have stated are facts not opinion.

No, I do not run the USA. The USA has very sensible rules that foreign nationals cannot run for president. What does this non sequiter have to do with the discussion at hand? You do realise that the internet is available in countries other than the USA?

However, this has nothing to do with evolution.

True, but we are discussing god being evil not evolution.

754

Theists, why does God allow suffering..

by The Quiet One in

..specifically, the suffering of animals.

you can talk about free will/sin/people choosing to not listen to god etc to explain human suffering being allowed.. but how can you love a god that allows animals, that haven't sinned or chosen to not have anything to do with god, to have their short lives ended in often long, drawn out, painful ways.

i could list stories i've read that would probably make you feel ill, but i'm not looking to shock anyone or start an emotional debate.

Caedes

Whenindoubt,

Your chemical compound is interesting but I am unclear how on earth you think it supports your case other than highlighting the fact that humans are chemical factories?

Still I am sure Lance Armstrong or the US postal cycling team might be interested in it.

754

Theists, why does God allow suffering..

by The Quiet One in

..specifically, the suffering of animals.

you can talk about free will/sin/people choosing to not listen to god etc to explain human suffering being allowed.. but how can you love a god that allows animals, that haven't sinned or chosen to not have anything to do with god, to have their short lives ended in often long, drawn out, painful ways.

i could list stories i've read that would probably make you feel ill, but i'm not looking to shock anyone or start an emotional debate.

Caedes

Whenindoubt,

That isn't a factual conclusion, Nobody has claimed that humans know everything. Stating the bloody obvious doesn't mean that we know nothing or that widely proven science is not factual.

That might be a simple calculation but without you defining anything it's pretty meaningless.

BTW I posted a pretty comprehensive reply to your previous post but you have ignored it, that is very rude.

754

Theists, why does God allow suffering..

by The Quiet One in

..specifically, the suffering of animals.

you can talk about free will/sin/people choosing to not listen to god etc to explain human suffering being allowed.. but how can you love a god that allows animals, that haven't sinned or chosen to not have anything to do with god, to have their short lives ended in often long, drawn out, painful ways.

i could list stories i've read that would probably make you feel ill, but i'm not looking to shock anyone or start an emotional debate.

Caedes

When in doubt,

I am unclear if you read through what you posted since half your post seems to say that you don't agree with evolution and then you have a big section that supports it.

1. Evolution is only a theory. It is not a fact or a scientific law.

As your post shows in science a theory is something that has been repeatedly shown to be true. Evolution is a fact, it was proven by Darwin and there has not been a single scientific discovery that has undermined the simple fact that speciation is caused by natural selection.

2. Natural selection is based on circular reasoning: the fittest are those who survive, and those who survive are deemed fittest.

That is exactly how natural selection works, the ones that survive to reproduce are the fittest. What constitutes fittest depends on the environment. There is only one claim here, we can say something is fit if it survives long enough to procreate, that is not circular.

3. Evolution is unscientific, because it is not testable or falsifiable. It makes claims about events that were not observed and can never be re-created.

It is eminently falsifiable, look up Haldane and pre-cambrian rabbits. Every scientific study since in a range of fields backs up natural selection. Actually we have observed natural selection, there are number of scientific studies that show evolution in action. Look up the nylon bug, a bug with a unique ability never before seen (eating a man-made substance) and found in our lifetime.

4. The disagreements among even evolutionary biologists show how little solid science supports evolution.

Like what disagreements? If you include the name Behe in any example I will laugh!

5. If humans descended from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?

Humans and apes descended from a common ancestor, that ancestor is no longer around.

6. Evolution cannot explain how life first appeared on earth.

Evolution is the study of speciation and adaptation of existing life, abiogenesis is the study of how life started. Evolution by definition cannot explain how life started.

7. Mathematically, it is inconceivable that anything as complex as a protein, let alone a living cell or a human, could spring up by chance.

Natural selection is not the same thing as chance. The clue is in the name.

8. The Second Law of Thermodynamics says that systems must become more disordered over time. Living cells therefore could not have evolved from inanimate chemicals, and multicellular life could not have evolved from protozoa.

The second law says systems lose energy, there is nothing to stop you adding anergy to create a more ordered system. The sun in our system adds energy every single day. Think of it like a car, there is a limit to how far you can travel before you have to put more energy back into the car in the form of petrol.

9. Mutations are essential to evolution theory, but mutations can only eliminate traits. They cannot produce new features.

See the nylon bug, a new feature caused by guess what? A mutation!

10. Natural selection might explain microevolution, but it cannot explain the origin of new species and higher orders of life.

That is precisely what evolution and natural selection prove, that time plus selection pressure causes speciation. See ring species if you want an interesting example of how speciation works. The 'higher orders of life' presumably mean humans? I can provide examples if you want to define what you mean.

754

Theists, why does God allow suffering..

by The Quiet One in

..specifically, the suffering of animals.

you can talk about free will/sin/people choosing to not listen to god etc to explain human suffering being allowed.. but how can you love a god that allows animals, that haven't sinned or chosen to not have anything to do with god, to have their short lives ended in often long, drawn out, painful ways.

i could list stories i've read that would probably make you feel ill, but i'm not looking to shock anyone or start an emotional debate.

Caedes

If you do not believe that God exists, you should not even be here. This is not for you.This is for theists. This discussion is moot for you. And if that is the case then the question asked on this thread is a rhetorical one, trying to show that God does not exist because he allows evil.

If you think that you should be able to ask a question without any chance of a dissenting opinion then an internet forum is not for you. Showing that a creator god is evil doesn't prove that it doesn't exist, it shows that your position is not internally logical if you are claiming that a creator god is omnibenevolent.

20

Skills Gap

by M*A*S*H in

the jws have now been discouraging higher education and critical thinking for a long time.

we have all seen the 'dumbing down' of the wt literature.

on a personal level i have seen many of the perceivably intelligent younger members of congregations leave.

Caedes

Certainly the ones that knock on my door don't seem able to defend their beliefs anymore.