A Ha

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Posts by A Ha

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  3

  Evangelist D. Odgaard "The change in America seemed to happen so quickly that it felt like whiplash".

  by James Mixon in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  mr odgarrd refused to rent the quaint site to two gay men for a wedding.

  he told them "i can't take your money, and we don't do anything for free.the men filed a civil rights complaint and won, awarded $5,000.

  the odgaards had built their church over 13 years into an art gallery,bistro,flower shop and a framing service.

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  A Ha

  Well... it was a long time coming, it just felt faster to them because they weren't paying attention. If this is the article I read recently, part of the story is that they feel abandoned by conservatives. They were courted and paraded by Cruz, and named to some evangelical martyr council in his campaign or something. When that faded away they feel abandoned because they're not in the evangelical spotlight anymore. Calling their bistro a "church" is new to me, but I shed no tears for bigots, even if they're only bigots because they hear voices in their heads.
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  Inevitable Life - Video

  by cofty in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  very interesting lecture and q&a session by professor eric smith of the santa fe institute.

  in his discussion of the primacy of energy there is a lot of overlap with the ideas of nick lane of university college london.

  if you still think abiogenesis had something to do with "primordial soup" you should invest half an hour to watch this.. ....

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  A Ha

  The rest of us have to watch it multiple times at half speed and cofty critiques the makeup of early proton pumps as background noise while he braises the lamb.
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  11

  Inevitable Life - Video

  by cofty in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  very interesting lecture and q&a session by professor eric smith of the santa fe institute.

  in his discussion of the primacy of energy there is a lot of overlap with the ideas of nick lane of university college london.

  if you still think abiogenesis had something to do with "primordial soup" you should invest half an hour to watch this.. ....

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  A Ha

  False advertising Cofty, that was over an hour, not a half hour, lol.

  I thought the same thing, then I figured I watch YouTube videos at 1.25x or 1.5x, maybe cofty watches them at 2x. (I'm also ashamed to admit how many years it took me to realize you could watch at different speeds. It was life-changing.)
  
  
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  583

  What is the purpose of life?

  by slimboyfat in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  while reading the magazines the other day it occurred to me that jws never really had a very good answer to that question.

  because it was aimed at young people and it said something along the lines, "if you believe in god you have a purpose, but if you don't believe in god your life has no purpose or meaning".

  i think that is a faulty analysis of the situation.

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  A Ha

  ...that I never, ever, would think about beating or punishing a woman unless she was my wife or daughter.

  40% Poe, 60% mentally ill person (not because of this line, but body of work)

  
  
  
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  583

  What is the purpose of life?

  by slimboyfat in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  while reading the magazines the other day it occurred to me that jws never really had a very good answer to that question.

  because it was aimed at young people and it said something along the lines, "if you believe in god you have a purpose, but if you don't believe in god your life has no purpose or meaning".

  i think that is a faulty analysis of the situation.

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  A Ha

  Mercy is achieved by expense of Justice. In Christianity God's Mercy is achieved through justice. Justice is not put aside to achieve Mercy.
  That's the point of the Ransom view about the Crucifixion. Crucifixion of Christ payed the expense provoked by Mercy

  This defense only works if you redefine "justice" and "mercy" so they don't mean "justice" or "mercy"
  
  
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  583

  What is the purpose of life?

  by slimboyfat in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  while reading the magazines the other day it occurred to me that jws never really had a very good answer to that question.

  because it was aimed at young people and it said something along the lines, "if you believe in god you have a purpose, but if you don't believe in god your life has no purpose or meaning".

  i think that is a faulty analysis of the situation.

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  A Ha

  IMHO the problem if evil must have something related to Infinite Justice. And the Cross of Christ is the needle that seam the entire history of suffering.

  As an aside, I think belief in a god of Infinite Justice and Infinite Mercy is even more of a logical contradiction and probably a stronger argument against such a god than the problem of evil--mostly because it avoids the Mysterious Ways defense. It's like describing God as Perfectly Square and Perfectly Round.
  
  
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  583

  What is the purpose of life?

  by slimboyfat in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  while reading the magazines the other day it occurred to me that jws never really had a very good answer to that question.

  because it was aimed at young people and it said something along the lines, "if you believe in god you have a purpose, but if you don't believe in god your life has no purpose or meaning".

  i think that is a faulty analysis of the situation.

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  A Ha

  Slim, rest assured that any atheist who spends any time discussing religion on the internet is well acquainted with the Dunning-Kruger effect, but you're misapplying it here. A "mastery" of the subject matter is not required here.

  Let me ask you a direct question: If the Most Perfect Mother keeps her children locked in a closet for years, and I say that behavior is incompatible with being the Most Perfect Mother, is that an example of the DKE? If your answer is "no" then you've misapplied the DKE.
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  583

  What is the purpose of life?

  by slimboyfat in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  while reading the magazines the other day it occurred to me that jws never really had a very good answer to that question.

  because it was aimed at young people and it said something along the lines, "if you believe in god you have a purpose, but if you don't believe in god your life has no purpose or meaning".

  i think that is a faulty analysis of the situation.

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  A Ha

  Slim - you are correct the maths problem analogy is not a perfect match.

  I wasn't trying to nit-pick your analogy to death, but I think that specific analogy was approaching the subject from a bad angle. My problem isn't with analogies, it's with the point the analogies are trying to support--that there might be some justification for needless suffering that we humans miss due to imperfect knowledge.

  Your answer seems to make sense if we apply it in a very vague way, as you do in your parenting analogy. But I think you're asking this argument to do wayyyyyyy more work than it is able to do. It's like saying "There exists a woman who is the best mother ever to have lived," but we learn that for years she has kept her children locked in closets with rusty buckets to relieve themselves, and are fed only moldy bread crusts. That is not at all congruent with the title of Most Perfect Mother, and we find it impossible to wave it away by saying, "Maybe she has a good reason that we just can't fathom."

  ... given that we may not know everything about the situation, and given the possibility that a supreme being may have greater understanding of the situation than we do, it is at least possible that God is acting both from a position of power and goodness in creating the world and sustaining the world in the way in which he does.

  I think we know enough. A problem for believers is that God's OmniMax properties are not unimportant or secondary properties. It's not as if we think one of the properties of the Most Perfect Mother is she's right-handed, but we see her writing with her left hand and we think their must be some unknown reason she's doing it this time. God isn't rather smart, sort of powerful, and pretty nice--He's the embodiment of those qualities. They are His basic, defining characteristics. The fact that we don't see these fundamental qualities reflected in His creation cannot be dismissed with "Mysterious Ways."

  Actually I was going out of my way not to proof text. That's why I talk about God's inscrutability as a "dominant theme" of the Bible rather than incontrovertible teaching.

  But I think it's what you've done. We have some verses saying God has revealed Himself to mankind and wants a relationship with us, and other verses saying he's not fully comprehensible. You haven't tried to reconcile these verses, you've just ignored the former in favor of the latter.

  Furthermore, I don't think God's inscrutability is a theme of the Bible at all, let alone a dominant one. It only really comes up when believers are asked about contradictions between God's supposed qualities and evidence to the contrary.

  I can't actually think of any scriptures that claim God is perfectly intelligible to humans, but modesty requires I don't rule out the possibility. Do you know of any? What I do know, and I've shown above, is that many parts of the Bible indicate that humans can't hope to fully understand God and why he does things the way he does. So to say that the God of the Bible doesn't exist because we can't account for his actions in terms of goodness ignores a large part of what the Bible has to say about God's inscrutability.

  I think you've set an unreasonably low bar for yourself. God doesn't need to be "perfectly" intelligible or "fully" comprehensible. Again, we're talking about God's defining characteristics. We're not saying the Most Perfect Mother isn't "perfectly" understood because we don't know why she always wears a striped scarf, we're saying her actions are so obviously bad that we can confidently say she's not the Most Perfect Mother.
  

  Actually I consider myself agnostic, tending toward atheist.

  Apologies, I did not know that. Still, I'm not sure it changes my answer. If you were asked what the Christian God was like, I think you'd answer the same way.
  

  ...The human mind, even in a universe without a divine being, is surely not the perfect judge of all that does or can exist. We are living in an age where human reason has been elevated almost to the level of Godlike status. That's why arguments that involve relying on human reason as the arbiter of what can exist go unchallenged. It's the dominant ideology of our time.

  Now I think you've set the bar unreasonably high. We don't need to be "the perfect judge." Again, we're not talking about some minor attribute, we're talking about the defining characteristics of people's concept of God. When it comes to God's omniscience, omnipotence, or omnibenevolence, believers do not say "I can't commit to that because He's inscrutable." If God is "scrutable" enough to be called Omni-whatever, then he's "scrutable" enough that the obvious contradictions between these claims and what we see in the world cannot be waved away.
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  583

  What is the purpose of life?

  by slimboyfat in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  while reading the magazines the other day it occurred to me that jws never really had a very good answer to that question.

  because it was aimed at young people and it said something along the lines, "if you believe in god you have a purpose, but if you don't believe in god your life has no purpose or meaning".

  i think that is a faulty analysis of the situation.

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  A Ha

  Slim -
  1. No solution exists.
  2. A solution exists but we have not yet, or may never find it.
  It is only husbris, or wishful thinking, that says 1 must be true and 2 cannot be the explanation.
  Unless you know some good reason why 1 must be true and 2 can definitely be discounted.

  A half-dozen reasons jumped out at me while skimming the thread.

  By using analogies like solving a "maths problem," you're mis-characterizing the PoE. PoE isn't "looking for a solution," it's offering an answer. As you say, it's making a claim about a specific conception of God.

  When your response to a logical argument isn't to challenge the validity or soundness of the argument, but to say "there might be a solution that nobody has thought of," you haven't defeated the argument, you've admitted that it's a good argument!

  What is being claimed here is that the inability of humans to find a solution to the problem of evil therefore disproves the existence of the God of the Bible.

  No, this isn't what's being claimed. What's being claimed is that the concept of the omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent God is incompatible with the world we observe. The argument doesn't claim to succeed because of a "lack of a solution;" it is the solution.

  It isn't

  1) no solution exists, or;
  2) maybe there is a solution that we're unaware of.

  It's

  1. The premises of the PoE are both correct and the conclusion follows, or;
  2. One or both of the premises are wrong, or;
  3. The conclusion does not follow from the premises.

  You seem to be attacking the first premise, but to do so you must ignore a main theme of the Bible--that of God's revelation of Himself to mankind.

  If you claim that God is Good then you're admitting that His personality is discernible, at least in part. The PoE proponent also says God's personality is discernible, and that it is either not omniscient, not omnipotent, or not omnibenevolent.

  I no longer believe that the Bible is consistent with itself. So I won't argue that there are parts of the Bible that claim God has revealed himself in various ways, especially Jesus...

  You're proof-texting. If you're going to blatantly ignore scriptures that are inconvenient to you, then the argument is not aimed at you. It's aimed at people who are willing to consider all of the evidence.

  Your position seems blindingly self-serving. I would find it nearly impossible to believe that you are consistent in which scriptures you accept and which you reject. If you were walking down the street and a little child said, "Mister, do you think God is good or evil?" I do not believe you would say, "Dunno. He's inscrutable. Could be Good. Could be Evil." No, I'm certain you would claim God is Good, and would likely use the same scriptures Cofty quoted as evidence.

  
  

  For reference, we can list the PoE as (per wikipedia):

  1. If an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent god exists, then evil does not.
  2. There is evil in the world.
  3. Therefore, an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent God does not exist.
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  Origin of Life

  by cofty in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  in recent years significant progress has been made in solving the question of how life originated on our planet.. how do you think theists will respond when it finally happens?

  as a former christian i know my reaction would have been something like "well that just goes to show that it takes intelligent life to make life", but for two reasons that defense doesn't work.. firstly it would prove that life is not an ethereal force that originates with god.

  there is no 'ghost in the machine', no elan vital.

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  A Ha

  I like how he drops his biggest bombshell--the one that he throws out there like it's self-evident, yet would earn him billions of dollars and uncounted awards if he could demonstrate it--then declares his job is done.