That's not at all what I was saying AwareBeing. I was saying people can't see the difference between a fairy tale deity and a philosophical notion of a necessary being. Worship is what people claim to do towards the former, religion is when you get a handful of them together and they begin to make exclusions as to who is allowed in and on what basis. Simply seperating oneself from religion doesn't make a difference as to whether they believe in the fairy tale god of the hebrews or the ivory tower deistic necessary being, or if they even know the difference.
JonathanH
JoinedPosts by JonathanH
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79
For the board atheists....
by Jack C. inthis is a personal observation and certainly not representative of all atheists.
i enjoy discussions with folks of this persuasion; in general they appear well read and somewhat more educated than many believers.
as a group most atheists cringe and become insensed when discussing the existence of a deity with believers especially fundamentalists.
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79
For the board atheists....
by Jack C. inthis is a personal observation and certainly not representative of all atheists.
i enjoy discussions with folks of this persuasion; in general they appear well read and somewhat more educated than many believers.
as a group most atheists cringe and become insensed when discussing the existence of a deity with believers especially fundamentalists.
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JonathanH
OP: It's two different discussions. Am I arguing against the god that people actually believe in, or am I arguing against philosophical conception that only a tiny fraction of a percentage of educated people believe in? Dawkins argues against the former because it's that belief in god that is damaging to society. The ivory tower version of god is pretty meaningless, it has nothing to do with society and it's only real relevance to religious people is that somewhere out there some guy has a phD and believes in god for intellectual reasons. What those reasons are don't matter in the slightest to the baptist preacher, or pentecostal rolling in the floor.
The problem is alot of people arguing for god can't seem to seperate the two arguments. Arguing for deism is not even remotely the same as arguing for theism. But the average fundementalist will still bring up deistic arguments thinking that it provides evidence for his theistic beliefs. So in a real debate or discussion on the topic, the two sides (the god people actually believe in, and the ivory tower god) end up becoming intwined.
I could be open to deism (but I find it redundant and unnecessary), but the door is closed on religious theistic views. There is nothing to support them other than people that insist they are true because they know it in their heart, which is true of every religion, even though it can't be true for every religion, and if this theistic god required you to hit a single specific target out of thousands blindly, then that god would be a dick (thusly contradicting the conception of this theistic god religions provide.)
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Awake! November 2011 - correct cover
by processor inthere was an error on the latest awake!
cover.
here is the correct version.. .
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JonathanH
"perhaps you know that the bible has been around far longer than any book we have now...."
Lolz
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28
But, isn't it a "Wicked System of Things?"
by PenelopePaige ini am not a jw but one thing that they really get me on is when they call the outside world a "wicked system of things" and say it is run by the devil.
i know the world can be great and people can be wonderful but on the flip side, the bad seems to be getting worse and morals seem to be flying out the window.
i don't know, what do you guys think?
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JonathanH
Criticism of modern times can usually be attributed to an ignorance of history. Mind you ignorance isn't an insult, it just means a "lack of knowledge". Wealth distrubution has been a problem since the beginning of civilization, and despite what some would have you believe, America is not the first country to come up with the idea of laisse fair economics. Capitalism frequently leads to money pooling up at the top, and the shrinking of the middle class. There is a natural and constant dichotomy between government trying to maintain a middle class through regulation and redistribution and, the upper class trying to use it's wealth to manipulate the government and the people to become even wealthier. Ancient greece went through this ebb and flow frequently.
Furthermore morality is just the preference of society at large. Saying it's going out the window is merely to state that is changing as it always does, and mistakenly implies that it used to be better. When was morality better? When women were being minimized in society and told to be ashamed of their bodies, or when blacks were considered second rate citizens and discriminated against? Or was it back during child labor in factories before minimum wage, or perhaps outright slavery and slaughter of indigenous people? To say that morality "used to be better" is a naive statement based on conservative nostalgia. But in modern times there is greater equality, less racism, and more plurality towards the views and lives of people that may be different from us. The world was only a better place in the past if you happen to be a middle class straight white male. Morality ebbs and flows as society changes and grows.
The society was not right in that regard. All they did was define what they wanted to world to be like (which was an oddly puritanical socialistic regime where men were head over women and capital punishment would be used on anyone who disagreed with the omnipotent ruler), and then lamented constantly about how the world wasn't that.
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Awake! November 2011 - correct cover
by processor inthere was an error on the latest awake!
cover.
here is the correct version.. .
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JonathanH
Science can explain the process, not how it came about.
Science comes closer to explaining how it came about than religion does. Theology has no method of explaining anything other than taking scientific facts and then coming up with a made up explanation as to why god totally meant to do it that way. And there is no means of figuring out if the explanation is correct or incorrect. In the end you either accept that the relative consistency of physics is just a salient aspect of reality, or that there is an invisible ambiguous wizard that may or may not want you to do something, that made physics relatively consistent so that everything else in the universe would flow out from those physical actions and reactions naturally. And there is no good reason to believe the second one. If your view of god requires him to do something in our universe then you are either going to be consistently disapointed as science shows that "nope, that occurs naturally, no need for the supernatural afterall" or eternally ignorant insisting science can't explain things that it explained decades ago.
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Wouldn't the predators on the ark have eaten everything by the time the 40 days was over?
by highdose inlet say noah did manage to get all the species into the ark... about half of them would have been predators and the other half natural prey.. are we going to belive that they went without eating for 40 days and nights?
or the ridiculous theory as the wt would have it that noah fed them nice tasty bales of straw which they happily munched on?.
and even if one of these two exhuses were true, when the animals were let out of the ark into a world now deverstated by a flood, then wouldn't they have continued eating eachother???
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JonathanH
The chemistry and biology behind vegetarian carnivores doesn't work either. It's not like lions eat meat because it tastes yummy, and veggies are ick. plants have cell walls made of a tough polysaccharide called cellulose, and most digestive systems can't process it. We call it dietary fiber and it's very good for us, but for the reason that our bodies don't digest it. Grazing mammals and plant eating insects (such as termites) have prokaryotic organisms living in their digestive tracts that break cellulose down, and it's not a fast process. Grazing animals also have additional internal organs (like cows that have multiple stomachs) to aid in this digestive process. To say that lions used to or will one day eat straw is to say that their internal ecosystems, and digestive tracts, and even internal organs were completely different, and the actual chemical make up of their bodies and the trace elements they need to live werecompletely different, and then were redesigned right after the flood (for some reason), and then will be reredesigned again later to accomodate this drastic dietary change.
It's nonsense.
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Started college this week, and I am a happy but busy camper.
by JonathanH intoday was my third day of school, first two days was just meeting teachers, going over class schedules and syllabus, and telling us how to do and find our homework.
now the real fun begins.
i already have alot of homework, and i'm scheduling time into my busy schedule to get it done, it's not too bad....yet.
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JonathanH
Today was my third day of school, first two days was just meeting teachers, going over class schedules and syllabus, and telling us how to do and find our homework. Now the real fun begins. I'm taking Courses in English, Math, Biology (with a lab component), and a computer course. I already have alot of homework, and I'm scheduling time into my busy schedule to get it done, it's not too bad....yet. I haven't actually gotten homework in english or my computer class, and they will probably be pretty time consuming.
My computer course is just stuff like how to use Powerpoint effectively, and make databases and how computers work, nothing too heavy. But making a good powerpoint can be time consuming.
My English class looks to be interesting. Our professor is a youngish guy (probably mid thirties), and one of the first questions he asked the class is "what if my assignment offends me religiously?" The class said "come to you!" and he said "no, I don't care if you're offended. You're an adult now, you don't stand in the hall so you don't hear something you don't like, you defend your position." He said he was raised a pentacostal and that made him very close minded growing up, so now he tries to challenge his students to think for themselves. No wonder the society discourages university education so much.
My Math class is kind of bringing out my competitive streak. I'm not very competitive by nature but being in a class with a bunch of people mostly younger than me (I'm twenty six) and being told that we are going to be doing some rigourous mental excercise and be graded on it really makes me want to show these punks what's up. I really want to be in the top of my class (in every class, but math class especially). Right now it's just math 150 which is a pre-calculus course on analytic geometry and some college algebra stuff.
My biology class with lab is interesting. I live in southern kentucky, and one quarter of my biology book is just evolution, and every chapter has a section on evolution and how it applies to whatever the topic of the chapter is. I was kind of wondering how my professor (this nice also youngish mid thirties lady) was going to handle it. Especially since alot of the people in the class are not biology majors by any stretch of the imagination. A number of people in the class are just there because they have to pick a science elective and biology has less math than physics or chemistry. I figured there would be alot of push back on the evolution topic. So she seems to be handling by saying "we are going to skip the evolution part of the chapter, we will come back to that later in the semester." And looking at the schedule, we are going over a chapter every class, except when we get to the evolution quarter of the book. Then it slows down to a chapter a week, and we only do the first two of the five chapters. Not because "plant evolution" or "microbial evolution" are so contraversial, but because (I am guessing) she knows there is alot of push back on the topic, and so we spend alot of time discussing just the basics of it. Which disapoints me a little, but I understand and I still have access to the chapters and coursework, so I can do it on my own anyway for the fun of it.
And my bio Lab seems like it will be fun as well messing with microscopes and doing studies, and writing papers.
I am really enjoying it so far and I know I will be crazy busy for the next four to five years while I work on getting either my electrical engineering degree or my biochemistry degree (haven't decided for certain, leaning towards engineering), but I like having the intellectual work to do. And I get to meet new people and be challenged.
I never would have done this had I still been on the inside. I would've been obediently washing windows while waiting for the end of the world. This is so much more rewarding. I'll check back in to let you guys know how it's going later in the semester.
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The Polarizing of America: Rep. Michele Bachmann wins Iowa Straw Poll
by darthfader inhttp://news.yahoo.com/bachmann-wins-gop-2012-test-vote-224544660.html.
minnesota rep. michele bachmann won a test vote of iowans on saturday, a show of strength five months before the state's caucuses kick off the gop presidential nominating season.. the result is the first indication of what iowans think of the field of republicans competing for the chance to challenge president barack obama next fall.
but it's hardly predictive of who will win the winter iowa contest, much less the party nod or the white house.. well... there goes the neighborhood....
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JonathanH
Which christian values made America great? Slaughter the indigenous people to get the best land for yourself? Enslave foreigners for cheap labor? Have children in factories work 12 hours a day seven days a week so their families don't starve? Segregating the population based on race? Or the ones of promoting cultural tolerance, fair labor laws, and equality? I have a hard time figuring out which ones are the christian values (they all were in their day) and which ones made the country great (they all served their purpose at the time, and got america to where it is now).
Saying christian values made this country great is at it's best an ambiguous platitude, and at worst an extremely selective remembering of history.
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Curiosity/ Create the universe Stephen Hawking
by jam inif you have not seen it, it,s on the discovery station.
tonite, 8:00 pm west coast, two parts..
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JonathanH
@HBJ
Eintsein was a spinozan deist that found religion childish. He didn't believe in prayer, the soul, a personal god, or anything that religious people think of when they think of "God". To Einstein the universe itself was god, and it had neither intelligence nor intent, nature had no purpose. The fact that einstein spoke poetically about the universe has given the religious a means of claiming that Einstein, one of the most important physicists of the modern age, actually believed similarly to them when nothing could be further from the truth.
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For My Christian, Jewish and Atheist Friends, "Why I am No Longer a Christian."
by Robdar inthis is a rather long yet fascinating documentary from a former ku student about his transformation from a true christian believer to an atheist.
if you have the time to watch it, i would love to hear your comments.
http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/why-i-am-no-longer-a-christian/.
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JonathanH
Farkel, your deist argument is essentially the same as Aquinas' first three of his five ways, or the slightly reworded kalam cosmological argument. Both of these arguments are rife with logical problems. To paraphrase and combine essentially what the arguments are, they are essentially what you stated. Contingent things have to have a necessary cause, if the universe began (and the big bang says it did) then it had tohave had a cause, and this cause we call god.
One problem is that this assumes that an infinite sequence stretching forever backwards is nonsensical, followed by assuming a being that exists infinitily. It assumes the universe had to begin, it couldn't just exist infinitely. Even if the universe simply expands and contracts and the big bang was the expansion after the contraction, even if you accept that as a possibility, the argument suggests that stretching infinitely backwards cannot be true because it's nonsensical, there had to be a beginning at some point. But then it turns around and labels god as being infinite and having no beginning. It also provides no reason as to why there couldn't be an infinite regression of gods creating gods and eventually a god creates the universe, it is simply assumed that such infinite regressions makes no sense, and then suggesting that a single infinite being makes more sense. Some theologians tried to get around this by labeling everything in the universe as "contingent" which requires a "necessary" being, and that being we call god.
Even accepting the premise that everything is contingent (which quantum mechanics throws that notion under the bus, but just to assume for a second), and the universe itself is contingent, why is the necessary start to all contingent things an "agent"? Why does that require a human-esque intelligence that desires to create and design? Why couldn't this "necessity" simply be energy? Quantum mechanics once again shows that energy is always popping in and out of existence without "cause", energy is not strictly a "contingent being".
And that gets to the heart of the matter. None of the arguments that are made for god actually require a god, merely a beginning, and then they label the beginning god and claim that it is an intelligent agency, which is not a logical assumption, just a cultural assumption. And even the arguments requiring a beginning aren't particularly convincing because they argue that everything requires a beginning except for this special class of being that doesn't begin because we say so, and we need something to begin the other stuff that needs a beginning....which is not exactly the most parsimonious way to a universe.
Stephen Hawking is going to be on...I think the discovery channel sunday talking about the existence of god(s) in creating the universe. His position is that physics have progressed enough that god is redundant. On the sub atomic level particles are non contingent, they "bring themselves" into existence, or rather (so as not to anthropomorphise them), they exist without cause, and prior to the mass expansion in the big bang, the universe was sub atomic, thus the universe simply existing in a non contingent way does not contradict any physical laws.
The interesting question isn't "why is there a universe", the interesting question is "why do matter and energy behave the way they do?", and even in that field of understanding why the physical laws are the way they are, physicists have made great strides. Either way simply saying "we don't or can't know what existed before the big bang, so there must have been an intelligent super being (or beings) is neither logical nor necessary in understanding the universe or existence.