by Jesse Galef
Language is a wonderful tool, but all too often it’s misused and consequently misunderstood. So many seemingly difficult disagreements in philosophy and religion are the result of poorly defined words. I remember a particular exchange I had with a nontheistic author who wanted everyone to embrace “God” — which, according to him, could be defined as “the ceaseless creativity of the universe and the objective validity of human rights.” Clearly the confusion was because I didn’t know what he meant when he used the word.
Ok, the meaning of words is just shared convention, and he decided to use the word “God” in a way that was unexpected, no big deal. After some initial issues, we sorted out what he meant and were able to move on with the conversation.
But sometimes even the speaker doesn’t know what idea the word is referring to. And that’s a real problem. It’s so important to know what you’re talking about before you, well, talk. If you have the stomach for it, go read this article by Mark Vernon entitled “God is the Question“:
First you’ve got to ask what you mean by the word ‘God’. And there is a quick answer: we don’t know what we mean by the word ‘God’. God is a mystery. ‘The word “God” is a label for something we do not know,’ McCabe writes. Now this already reads like as much obfuscation to the sceptic. But bear with it and ask a second question too: what is a mystery?
A mystery is not a problem. A problem is a puzzle to which techniques can be applied, intuition brought to bear, and a solution found. Science tackles problems. It’s brilliant at it. But a mystery is not amenable to that strategy. And life is littered with them.
In a quick aside, what we see in the third sentence is an attempt to mislead us through a failure to recognize the Use-mention Distinction. The word “God” is poorly defined, but that fact doesn’t mean that the entity God is mysterious — only that our culture has no fixed meaning tied to that combination of letters.
It was difficult to know where to begin with this article. Terms are left gleefully undefined, contradictions abound, and I’m left scratching my head as to whether the author knows what he’s saying. Then, on what must be at least the fourth read-through, I saw this and it all fell into place:
Similarly, the often forgotten motivation for the formulation of doctrine is the aim of not dissolving the mystery of God. When Christians say God is three in one, they assert what they take as a meaningful contradiction. And that’s the point. If you accept it, you accept a mystery.
…
Zen Buddhism tends not to talk of God, but it does talk of the mystery of existence in its koans and meditation on questions like “What is it?” Enlightenment comes when the monk sees that there is no answer, or rather that the answer is only the question: “what?” The mystery of life is revealed as an interrogative. So too God.
It’s all clear now — he’s not even trying to make sense; the entire article is a koan! You know, the “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” nonsense that seems deep until you realize that it’s a contradiction in terms. Suddenly I see that koans are not unique to Eastern mysticism. When Zen masters Christian theologians tell us “God is three persons and one”, “God is no being at all, God is being itself”, and “God is the question”, how is it different? (I’m looking at you, Karen Armstrong…)
Just because the words can be put together into a grammatically correct sentence doesn’t mean that it makes sense. Congratulations theologians: you can baffle people by intentionally misusing language.
The alt-text of this old XKCD comic reads “The fifth panel also applies to postmodernists.”
Speaking of postmodern nonsense, my sister, Julia Galef, has been writing blog posts (Part One and Part Two) about the subject at Rationally Speaking. She’s now a co-blogger with Massimo Pigliucci and will be co-hosting a podcast with him for the NYC Skeptics (I love my family). Her question is how to distinguish meaningful complex text from meaningless word salad. I hope to write more about it later, but you should check it out yourself!
“God is the question” and the answer is “no”.
God is a question? God is an outdated explanation people made up to explain the unexplained.
As I normally pose any questions I ask with an inflection (raise the pitch of my voice toward the end of the sentence), that is how I will treat the word “God?” from now on.
Regarding the meaning of words like “god” and “mystery”, perhaps the author should figure out what it means to ask a question first.
I thought mysteries were problems, usually solved by plump Belgians or nosy old ladies. Mr. Vernon needs to tidy up his understanding of what Zen is, and is not. He might start with Alan Watts’ books.
One of my favorite quotes from Sam Harris:
Theology is ignorance with wings.
Sort of like ignorance on Red Bull, then?
Congratulations theologians: you can baffle people by intentionally misusing language.
Um, yeah, that’s exactly what we’re doing.
Quite often, yes.
Those goalposts are gonna move themselves.
I’m sorry Ty, but describing God isn’t a goal, it’s a journey. A journey in which we can come to have a better understanding of ourselves.
If by that you mean “God is an abstract concept but has no actual substance of influence beyond the actions of people who mistakenly think that he is real”, then yes.
Yep. I did the describing god journey, and the better understanding of myself I came to is that I’m an atheist.
You’re right! It works!
Now, that sounds really platonic
Irony only works when the likeliest alternative is obvious.
Good to see that you understand that.
Oh darn. That was supposed to appear under brgulker above.
It did, just not in a way that’s readily visible.
This is a use-mention error. You see how he’s talking about the word ‘God,’ and then does a bait and switch to talk about the referent of the word? Theologians love little tricks like this, even though they don’t know they’re using them. Daniel Dennett has a lot to say about it.
1. ‘God’ is three letters and one syllable.
2. Therefore God exists.
On a similar note,
1. Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
2. (neener neener boo boo, this sentence is grammatical yet nonsense)
3. Therefore God exists.
Please ignore me being an idiot here.
It was 6:30 in the morning, and my brain was operating on 1/8th capacity.
There’s something to be said for mystery and what not. I was getting advice on which spiritually oriented books to read from a prof of mine (I consider myself a spiritual atheist) he said this to me:
“by the way…i’m bored when people say
A) they believe in something
B) they’re an atheist.
it’s the same excuse for not paying attention to what’s really going on.”
I think Desmond Tutu has some cool stuff to say, but random theologians defending the faith probably don’t.
Spiritual atheist?? Materialistic christian?
Back when I was in college in the mid-80s, koans were in vogue. A popular source for them was Lao Tze (or Laozi or Laotze). Students acted as if there was some kind of vast meaning in questions like “Is there a difference between ‘yes’ and no’?” It never made any sense to me, then, and it still doesn’t, now.
In the case of Lao Tze the koans did have an indirect didactic purpose within the time that Tao Te Ching was first being trafficked in ancient China, and that was to make a point about the limits of scholarship and to cause more “legalistic” thinkers (read: Confucianists) to stumble over what appear to be trivial considerations. In essence, these koans were anti-intellectual in nature … in keeping with the rest of Tao Te Ching and early Taoism generally. (Yes, I know, Taoism later became an academic pursuit on its own, but originally it was anti-academic and anti-intellectual.)
Ultimately these koans have little point other than to show how relatively easy it is to fool people into thinking that gibberish and nonsense can be profound. That doesn’t mean the gibberish and nonsense actually is profound. At some point a rational person moves past such things.
As for the fluff and nonsense that postmodernism often is, that was spectacularly and hilariously — as well as famously — lampooned by physicist Alan Sokal back in the 1990s when he got a purposely-meaningless hoax article published in the postmodernist academic journal Social Text. Unfortunately, postmodernists didn’t learn the lesson. They railed instead against Sokal’s dishonesty, choosing to be offended rather than admit there might possibly be something wrong with what they were doing.
(Does that sound like religionism? Curiously it does.)
A mystery is not a problem. A problem is a puzzle to which techniques can be applied, intuition brought to bear, and a solution found. Science tackles problems. It’s brilliant at it. But a mystery is not amenable to that strategy.
Tell that to all of the fans of Agatha Christie out there. Apparently what we need is Miss Marples to come into our living room and explain it all to us.
When people say “God is a mystery” what they mean is “I don’t want to have to think too deeply on this so I’m going to say ‘God is a mystery’ and pretend like that’s an answer”. God is not a mystery. God is a character in the Bible with discernible personality traits. The folks who say “God is a mystery” tend to be the people who find those personality traits repulsive and want to explain them away by claiming that the text of the Bible doesn’t actually mean what it says.
Now the universe – the universe is a mystery. And there are a ton of great detectives out there working to discover its secrets. But unless you’re a pantheist who believes that the Universe (note caps) is God then I’m not going to accept the phrase “God is a mystery” as explanatory of anything – it certainly isn’t a helpful phrase to get this non-believer to come back to belief again at least (I’ve heard it enough from well-meaning religious friends to know that it has no sway over me as an argument).
Sigh people,
I think that the poor person who is being shortchanged here is Rev Herbert McGabe, the original author of the letter Mark Venom summarized. In short:-
(1) Francesco, Lone Wolf, blotonthelandscape, you people (and Mark) are confusing Analogy with Description. McGabe here is arguing that “How to find God?” is the question that all of us should be asking. “God is a question” and “God is a mystery” is an analogy, not a taxonomy.
(2) nomad, Sam Harris is not reliable on these matters; he knows zero theology, so he has no authority to comment on it. He has authority to comment on the applications of theology that he observes around him and which he has knowledge of, but not on the Theology itself, which he doesn’t bother to read in full detail.
(3) Elliott, the reason why most theists do not wish to discuss things with atheists is because atheists make foolish faux pas statements like yours. But anyway, if you are trying to use Dennett to prove a point, then you are not doing him justice either.
There is no use-mention error here. “God” can refer to one of two things: The Concept of God or the Entity that the Concept is describing. So, what Mcgabe is arguing is that the Entity exists, but the Concept in its entirety is a mystery.
(4) PsiCop, this ridiculous concept of “Koans” is a Western New-Age invention; both Buddha and Lao Zi would be shocked to hear this idea applied to their teachings. Ahh, they would be turning in their graves.
Lao Zi wrote the Tao Te Ching at around the same period of time Confucius wrote his classics. Lao Zi did not write the Tao Te Ching in order to refute Confucius, and Confucius himself was strongly critical of the Legalists. The Tao Te Ching is meant to be esoteric, but not incomprehensible.
Taoism did not become an academic pursuit; it became merged into Chinese Folk Religion; and has stayed there. Taoists have temples and shrines and monasteries, like the Buddhists do. The famous Shao-Lin Temple, for instance, is Taoist.
Is there a difference between “yes” and “no”? There is a difference between “yes” and “no”, but no difference between saying “yes” and “no”. Anyway, which verse in the Tao Te Ching asks such a question? I have read the Dao De Jing before and not seen such a verse. Incidentally, the translation – as opposed to the transliteration – of the Tao Te Ching is “Book of Morals”, which should quite give you Lao Zi’s intent in writing the book.
I don’t know about Sokai, but post-modernism is certainly not identical to religion. Religion seeks to construct; post-modernism seeks to de-construct.
(5) Jer, God does not have personality traits, because in the first place God is not a person. (“Physis” which translates to “Person” in the Trinitarian doctrine is not the standard meaning of “person” as we use on the street.) The personality traits of God in the Bible – even those in visions – are analogies.
God is not merely a character in the Bible, just like Napoleon Bonaparte is not merely a character in an account of the Battle of Waterloo.
If you really want to think about God without analogies, you are going to get a migraine, because we have a limited field of perception. We can deal with big-pictures and small-pictures, but not both at the same time. But if we were to deal with God all at once, we need both, and we can’t handle it. So yes, as long as we are humans, God is a mystery for science and empiricism.
This is the reason also, I think, why post-modernists fail. They can de-construct everyone else’s Framework of Discourse but not their own.
If God is Mystery, as in ineffable, one woudn’t be endorsing any social policies based on theological arguments, right? And one would firmly stand against those who do, right? If so, I have no objection to individuals playing this particular language game. Using religious language to help move religiously inclined people deeper into agnosticism seems a good thing.
(1) “God is a question” is surely an analogy, but “God is a mystery” isn’t, at least from the common understanding of the construction. Is “the killer’s motivation was a mystery” an analogy? I don’t think so.
(2)
a. It’s meant to be an epigram; he’s not making a sincere attempt to engage theology.
b. You should consider that you dismiss the Norse pantheon, but probably know little about Norse theology.
(3) Noted. But you don’t have to be an ass.
(4)
…? Could you possibly enlighten me as to what you mean by this? Because on the surface, that seems like bullshit.
(5)
This is what I meant earlier, when I was saying Christians like to play these smokescreen games. Sure, for the purposes of this argument, you deflect criticism by saying this. But in other circumstances, Christians say things like “God is merciful, God is loving, etc.” these are not analogies, they’re personality traits that apply to God.
I tried really hard to understand what you were saying here, but I just don’t get it. I invite you to explain further before I make a judgment.
–
Once something reaches a level of nonsensicalness such that you can no longer ask any meaningful questions about it, it may be time to reexamine.
We can argue all day, and you can keep defining God in the negative. “God isn’t what you think,” “The questions you ask don’t apply to God,” blah blah blah.
But why don’t you tell us what God is?
” You should consider that you dismiss the Norse pantheon, but probably know little about Norse theology.”
Good one, Elliot.
So how do you know anything about this God, or that he even exists?
You smug, intellectual elitist Christian! =P
TheChristian, my previous post (as this very one) was just an, admittedly, stupid joke.
I don’t like to argue semantics nor lexicon.
From an atheist point of view, theology is the study of nothingness, purely vacuous and pointless, a huge, elaborated, monumental cardboard castle built on nothingness.
Then again, probably we would not agree on the meaning of “theology”, but I don’t really like arguing on the meaning of a word.
All my best.
“We can deal with big-pictures and small-pictures, but not both at the same time. But if we were to deal with God all at once, we need both, and we can’t handle it. So yes, as long as we are humans, God is a mystery for science and empiricism.”
Really what a load of complete bollox … do you practice handwaving in your spare time?
Sigh, “theChristian.” You make the same mistake my college friends did in attributing far too much meaning to Taoism and Tao Te Ching. The quip about “yes and no” is present in at least a couple translations, in particular one by Stephen Mitchell, verse 20 (IIRC). If it’s a bad translation, that’s not my doing, and in any event it doesn’t change the fact that a lot of people believed this quip to have meaning — when it did not — because they believed it to have been in that book.
As for whether there is a difference between “yes” and “no,” of course there is. And that difference is so self-evident that it’s foolish even to say any more about it as you did. Which is why the question is inane and stupid and merits no answer whatsoever.
Second, Tao Te Ching itself was likely not written by Confucius contemporary Lao Tze, but by other Taoists or quasi-Taoists, and attributed to him later. Thus, it contains material which was designed to counter the Confucianists, who by then were well-known, and even the Legalists.
Third, the name Tao Te Ching certainly does not mean “book of morals.” That’s merely you’re interpretation of its meaning. It’s an amalgam of three words … meaning “way,” “virtue,” and “classic/book.” How those words get integrated semantically is up to the reader; meaning can only be interpreted out of them. One might say — as you do — that it means “the book of morals,” but a stricter meaning might be “the book of the way of virtue.” Which is not the same as “the book of morals.” (A true “book of morals” might contain a list of statements of moral precepts; a book describing the way to become virtuous, on the other hand, can be something else entirely; it might contain no moral precepts at all, just a discussion of how they’re arrived at.)
As for the postmodernists, their reaction to the Sokal affair was quite similar to how religionists react to refutations or debunking of their own beliefs … i.e. denial that anything contrary to their beliefs can be true, as well as fury and outrage that someone has actually dared question them. In any event, I did not say postmodernism was equivalent to religion. I said that postmodernists, when provoked, behaved in a manner similar to, if not identical to, how religionists behave when they are provoked.
And then there are the question-begging definitions, where someone tries to insert their answer into the definition of basic terms so that they can point to it later as a success for their view.
Example:
Comment by “ayer” at Common Sense Atheism
I liked something Sam Harris once said:
Ah, I love this point! The attempts to prove God’s existence “by definition” are so ridiculous that it’s sometimes hard for me to figure out how to rebut them coherently beyond just saying “that’s nonsense!”
I think people are so used to these kinds of arguments being treated seriously in the theological context that they don’t apply the same standards of reasoning that they would to the same arguments in any other context. That’s why Harris’s approach — shifting the context — is so effective.
Jesse,
That is because Marzipan and God exist on different (ontological) levels. Harris is no philosopher, unfortuantely.
Reginald,
Does Existence exist? Or can you exist without Existence existing?
Please define your terms “exist” and “existence” before we can continue with this discussion. Your question makes me think either you have very different definitions of the words than I do, in which case we wouldn’t be having a productive conversation, or you yourself don’t have a clear conception of what you mean by the words. I certainly don’t presume the latter, so please let us know so we can continue to have what looks to be a fascinating back-and-forth!
That is because Marzipan and God exist on different (ontological) levels. Harris is no philosopher, unfortuantely.
Actually, he is. And your god exists in the same level as Spiderman, Harry Potter and Darth Vader: in people’s imagination.
What does that even mean? Things either exist or they don’t. There aren’t levels of existence, unless you mean between the definition of an object and an actual instance of that object.
And addressing whether Harris is a philosopher or not is ad hominem; his statements are either wrong or right on their own merits, and you’ve yet to conclusively dismiss them aside from waving your hands about (rhetorically, of course) and expecting someone to agree with you.
Either I’m too stupid to glean the essence of these questions, or they’re utterly devoid of content.
Is Length long? Or can something be long without Length being long?
/deepism
Yeah.
Philosophical wanking, the first resort of the religious pseudo-intellectual.
*yawn*
Ph.D = Doctor of Philosophy
“Marzipan and God exist on different (ontological) levels”
Please provide your evidence for god existing on any level.
Christian, your statement
“If you really want to think about God without analogies, you are going to get a migraine, because we have a limited field of perception. We can deal with big-pictures and small-pictures, but not both at the same time. But if we were to deal with God all at once, we need both, and we can’t handle it. So yes, as long as we are humans, God is a mystery for science and empiricism.”, seems nothing but a copout.
If we had spent the last 2000 yrs with that attitude, we’d be sitting in the back of a cave, saying isn’t it a big difficult to understand world out there. We’ve made huge progress over this time, by having a stab at understanding the world around us and testing and refining our models. The concept of God as a made up being to help us cope with our fear of the unknown is fine, but surely you can do better, than this copout, if you want us to share your delusion.
Can we have a reply that actually makes logical sense.
Still, I don’t get that cartoon. ???
You know, it looks like he messed up the joke in the first panel!
It’s supposed to be along the lines of “Some words end in ‘gry’ like ‘hungry’ and ‘angry’. There are three words in the English language, what’s the third?”
I’ll out myself as more of a nerd in admitting that I first came across this riddle while playing Planescape Torment, the best computer RPG ever.
Language of course …
Yay Planescape.
the third word in English that ends with the letters “GRY” is “PUGGRY”, which is a kind of cloth out of which hats are made.
I think you appropriately called Mark out for not making much sense on the topic of God and confusing the meaning of words. The fact is there are tons of people that have very specific meanings of the word “God” that have nothing to do with “Mystery”. And mystery CAN be a problem to be solved if the mystery is “Who killed this man?” or “What is that rash on my nether regions?”
On the Zen Koan thing. I can’t comment about Taoism because I don’t know much about it, but I do know something about Zen. Zen Koans were not mean to sound “deep” or make logical sense or be “believed in”. Pop culture has misappropriated them. Koans were meditations that were designed to exhaust the logical, rational, conceptual mind and allow the meditater to experience the world in a non-dualistic fashion, i.e. where you feel you and the rest of the world around you are not separate, but one. Sam Harris talks about this experience in “The End of Faith”. He also rightly notes that there is no reason to take this experience and make a religion out of it.
Koans are not mean to be literally true. They are MEANT to be contradictory. The meditator is not expected to believe them in any way, like a fundamentalist christian is supposed to believe that God is “three in one” or other similar contradictions. They are a meditation tool and thats it.
Sigh again,
Where do I start?
(1) Question-I-Authority, well, that is because what God is is a mystery, not what God wants. It is just like I could quote a line from Shakespeare without knowing a single detail of Shakespeare’s life. Does it make my quote any less valid?
(2.1) Elliott, “God is a mystery” means that “the physical nature of God is a mystery”. That is why I qualified by saying “a mystery to science and empiricism”. You don’t seem to have gotten the last three words. But then we have two brains, left and right. Science and Empiricism come from the left; so God is a Mystery to the Left Brain, but not to the Right Brain.
(2.2) Haha, I should have guessed as much.
(2.3) Neither do you.
(2.4) “yes” and “no” are two alternative positions you can take toward any proposition/argument. For example, “Does God exist?” (Technically, there is a third called “maybe”.) By saying “yes” to an argument, you implicitly say “no” to its refutation; and in saying “no” to an argument, you implicitly say “yes” to its refutation. Therefore, saying “yes” and saying “no” is equivalent in that both involve endorsing a position and rejecting a position.
(2.5) They are analogies. They are presenting God’s characteristics from the human perspective. They are analogising God with human beings.
(2.6) God doesn’t just exist in the Bible. The Bible merely records a portion of the history of God’s interaction with man, not the whole history.
(2.7) I already did … implicitly. God is Existence, that is the Always-Acting Principle of Existence. That is the official definition of God by all the churches, even the most liberal ones. What the Deists cut out is the “always-acting” bit. What the Pantheists misunderstand is that the Principle of Existence is not identical to everything that is defined by it, in the same way that a Microsoft Word document is not identical to Microsoft Word.
You can visualize a symbolic diagram for the Principle of Existence, but the “In Action” part is not possible to visualize without getting a migraine.
(3) Nomad, except that we know enough about the Norse Pantheon to dismiss it.
(4) Jtradke, You know God from the side of your brain that deals with Integrative Wholes, the Right-Brain, not the Left-Brain that deals with reductionism (i.e. Scientific Rationalism and Empiricism). Of course, if you are a slave to your Left-Brain and ignore the Right-Brain entirely, you will never know God.
(5) Francesco, “Theology” comes from the words “Theos” and “Logos”. “Theos” means God or Truth; from “Logos” we derive the word “logic”. So Theology means “The Logic of Truth”.
(6) Jabster, why don’t you try doing that, looking at an art-piece and admiring both its details and its general idea at the same time?
(7.1) PsiCop, well hmm, I read a translation, not the Mitchell one; but I also read a re-print of the original text. Whether Mitchell translated the Tao Te Ching wrongly, I have no idea because I haven’t read Mitchell’s translation, but I do know the meaning of the Tao Te Ching, because I have read the original text, and I know the original language it was written in. (Oh, and by the way, I am not American in any way.)
(7.2) I really think that the question on “yes” and “no” is a mistranslation of the Tao Te Ching; but anyway, I provided a reply to that in (2.4), so you can read it and tell me if it makes sense.
(7.3) Hmm, really?
(7.4) Remember, I know the Chinese Language. Yes, “Dao De Jing” is an amalgam of three words, but the two words when combined and used as a “phrase” – for lack of a better term – in Chinese, is used to mean “morals”. And if you want to look at closely, “Morals” and “Way of Virtue” is not really so different. (A “Way of virtue” means a way to attain virtue, not a way to attain the method to attain virtue.)
(7.5) Have I done any of those things so far?
(8) Jesse, “To Exist” simply means to be defined, to be present. That is a standard definition, but perhaps you are confused because you have chosen to restrict Existence to Empirical Existence?
(9) Bender and Jtradke (again), Read Aristotle and understand his meaning of priority. Simply in an analogy, both a Principal and a Teacher are part of a school hierarchy, but at different levels. Similarly, God and Marzipan are part of the hierarchy of entities which exist, but God exists at a higher level. God exists “before” Marzipan exists. (“before” here is used in the logical sense, not the chronological sense.)
(10) Elliott, Length is a property that determines longness or shortness; Anyway, your question is ridiculous, not because it is a “deepism” – which would be ridiculous in itself – but because Length itself is neither long nor short.
(11) nomad, Th.D. = Doctor of Theology; D.Div = Doctor of Divinity. (Yes, these are real-life academic titles.)
(12) Guy, it is not a cop-out unless you can prove to me that you can do what I said humans cannot do; the same challenge I gave to Jabster in (6). Can you?
“(3) Nomad, except that we know enough about the Norse Pantheon to dismiss it.”
And we know enough about your beliefs to dismiss them.
TheChristian, what you seem to wish for us is to simply accept your beliefs at face value without any scrutiny. You must have very little respect for the human race if you expect that of any adult.
(2.1) You’re right, I didn’t get those last three words because they were at the bottom of your post and not in the point I was addressing. However, even your rewording “The physical nature of God is a mystery” still isn’t an analogy. Sorry.
(2.4) I’ve never heard that ‘yes/no’ drivel. And it’s deceptive to say they’re ‘the same’ or ‘equivalent’ without qualifying the sense in which they’re the same. In order to be honest, you’d have to say they are similar because they disclose a speaker’s attitude towards a proposition, but in that sense they are also opposites, because they denote different attitudes.
But yeah, it makes sense what you were saying, now.
(2.5) No, they are not analogies, “God is merciful” attributes mercy to God, and it’s as simple as that.
When I say “my plant is happy because I watered it” or “this apple tree is generous” it’s clear that those are forms of analogies in the sense you’re talking about — and the brain knows it. There are a certain set of mechanisms that say ‘ah, human emotional predicate with non-human subject.’ But that’s not what’s happening with God.
Christians say “God is merciful” or “God is loving” and those mechanisms are not cranking (I know, because until recently I was a Christian). In my mind, and in the minds of most Christians, God is a person and an acceptable subject for human predicates. Except when you challenge them on it, and they slip out your theological trap door and the argument turns to garbage before your eyes.
(2.6) My problem is that I don’t understand how
Supported the previous paragraph, which stated
Maybe it wasn’t supposed to. Whatever, I understand what you’re saying.
(2.7)
You aren’t making a case for your God. Why not “Allah is existence” or some other deity. All you’re doing is deflecting criticism — which you seem to be very good at.
But let me grant that your God is Existence. Then do you believe Existence psychically inspired a bunch of morally bereft desert nomads to compile a book detailing the sacrifices It wanted made to It?
Do you believe that this Existence is responsible for the parlor tricks of an itinerant preacher in first century Palestine?
Does Existence interact with Itself through human sacrifice, to redeem sins that It Itself created? Or at least allowed to come into [Itself]?
Because those are the things you have to minimally believe in order to call yourself a Christian, let alone ‘TheChristian.’
If it weren’t for those bizarre material claims (Jesus was born of a virgin, resurrected, performed miracles etc.) and the deontic claims (about sex out of wedlock, or using certain words as epithets) I would have no problem playing the ineffability game all day. In fact, it’s quite fun, and really poetic.
But at some point, they roll out morality and miracles, and then they lose me.
Oh, and (10), I wasn’t serious about the Length thing, it didn’t need a serious retort. But thank you.
So yes you do practice handwaving in your spare time … thanks for clarifying.
Ty,
Notice I said “Norse Pantheon”, not “Norse Theology”.:p
And no, my argument is that you do not know enough of our beliefs to dismiss them. In fact, you don’t know any of our proper beliefs at all. What you know is a set of stereotypes that you have formed about our beliefs.
If you knew anything about me, you’d know how stupid what you just said was. Daniel isn’t the only former pastor on this site. I won’t drop my bonafides, because frankly you aren’t worth the effort. But when I made my statement about knowing enough about your beliefs to dismiss them, I wasn’t talking generalizations and stereotypes.
There is an inherent arrogance in your screen name that also shines through in almost all your posts. Interesting, that this arrogance is so common in those that come to battle the atheists on their home turf.
You’re just a false convert as you never really knew Jesus!
As much as I dislike postmodernism, there is no question that much of what they write has meaning. Some of the concepts are probably founded in meaningless bullshit, and much of the writing intentionally obfuscates its true meaning, but most of the time, the meaning is there.
How do I know that? Because I understand some of it, and what I don’t understand, I can ask other people and get consistent answers from a large community. I can look up explanations of the writings online that generally agree with each other and generally make sense. I can even attempt to piece them together myself, and sometimes I am successful.
Consider the following passage by Jacques Derrida from his book The Gift of Death, as translated by David Willis. It is a classic piece of intentionally confusing postmodernist garbage:
As soon as I enter into a relation with the absolute other my absolute singularity enters into
relation with his on the level of obligation and duty. I am responsible to the other as other, I
answer to him and I answer for what I do before him. But of course, what binds me thus in my
singularity to the absolute singularity of the other, immediately propels me into the space or risk
of absolute sacrifice. There are also others, an infinite number of them, the innumerable
generality of others to whom I should be bound by the same responsibility, a general and
universal responsibility. I cannot respond to the call, the request, the obligation, or even the love
of another without sacrificing the other other, the other others. As a result, the concepts of
responsibility, of decision, or of duty are condemned a priori to a paradox, scandal, and aporia.
But when I looked at this for long enough, I figured out in a very rough sense what it probably meant, even having never read any of Derrida’s work or even any other passages in that book. And when I asked a philosophy teacher, he confirmed this. And so did debaters online.
More or less, this passage is saying that we should not assign absolute obligation (a moral obligation that is binding in all circumstances) to a given other (not the same Other Lacan discusses as a state of mind, but rather a literal category of people–anybody who is not you may be the other, or any race that is not yours, or generally any class of people you distance yourself from), because doing so will lead to sacrificing that very same obligation to “the other others,” that is, all those other people you aren’t helping. Essentially, you can’t have a moral obligation to people in general, because that would force you to attempt to help all of the “infinite number” of others (There are not an infinite number of others, but Derrida says there are. I am not sure what he means here.), which is obviously impossible. Hence, absolute singularity corresponds to absolute sacrifice. Therefore, Derrida claims, traditional notions of “responsibility,” “decision,” and “duty” break down (the word “aporia” here essentially means confusion or meaninglessness), since they can never be fully realized.
But at this point, you may realize that once it is translated into ordinary speech, Derrida’s point is not especially novel or profound. In fact, it is not even evident what his warrants are: for example, why does the inability to satisfy absolute obligation to the generality of others prevent us from creating absolute moral systems that demand noncontradictory action in most or all cases? Obviously demanding we help everybody is impossible, but if we, for example, merely demand that we always have compassionate relationships and assist those vulnerable with respect to our actions and promises, shouldn’t we usually if not always be able to satisfy these demands? This really comes down to Derrida pointing out that we can’t help everybody all of the time, just in more words.
The biggest problem with postmodernism isn’t that it doesn’t make any claims at all, but that it does not adequately support these claims, and covers up this fact by making their work inaccessible and incredibly difficult to comprehend. Much postmodern literature does not have a widely-agreed-upon interpretation by anybody, and this might be completely meaningless, or, like most postmodern literature, it might be merely incredibly confusing, only now to such a degree that nobody understands it. Furthermore, postmodernists often reject scientific, empiricist, or modernist ideas of “evidence” and the like, which essentially means there is no way to verify their theories. They can all disagree with each other, and the only way to decide whom you believe is pure emotion and aesthetics. Some may claim this is good. I think this is bullshit.
“How do I know that? Because I understand some of it, and what I don’t understand, I can ask other people and get consistent answers from a large community. I can look up explanations of the writings online that generally agree with each other and generally make sense. I can even attempt to piece them together myself, and sometimes I am successful”
Are you speaking about postmodernism or about theology?
Sigh once more,
(1) Jtradke, if I really was that infantile, why would I bother writing such a long post each time to you people? I don’t expect you to accept my beliefs without any scrutiny; I expect you to accept my beliefs after proper scrutiny.
(2.1) No Elliott, that line is not meant to be an analogy. Which is why I explained it.
(2.2) Okay, let’s put that matter to rest.
(2.4-2.5) Well, I am telling you now that those lines are emotional predicates. I understand that many Christians forget what God is and get lost in the analogies they use, but what I am referring to is a Common Doctrine that all Christians share, and will tell you if you ask them about God (and not about the emotional predicates).
(2.7, 2.8, 2.9) If you still need clarification, feel free to ask.
(2.10) Well, actually I would say that “Allah is Existence” too, and so is El, Baal, Ra, Zeus, Apollo, the Brahman and Odin. The problem with the last seven though is that over time their forms became reduced in scope, and therefore they became idols. And yes, sadly, many Christians are doing the same thing to God.
Just as articles are important, so are possessives. God is just God, not “my God”, “your God”, “Fred’s God”, “Benedict’s God”, “The Christian God”, “The Muslim’s God”, “The God of the Jews”, or “the Theist God”. Just like the finches discovered by Darwin on the Galapagos are not his property.
(2.11) What makes you think that these “desert nomads” were “morally bereft”? Is that not an arrogant statement to make? But yes, I believe that Existence emotionally inspired these people to “sacrifice to it”, as you put it. But however, the sacrificing is meant for them, not for Existence. It is (supposed to be) a mode of attitude reflected through action. As the saying goes, “God does not need our sacrifices; we need to sacrifice to God”.
(2.12) Yes, just like I believe that the IRS in your country has access to all taxpayers’ records.
(2.13) That is a misunderstanding, the same one that the Muslims have. The Son is epistemologically the Father (Existence), not physically the Father. Therefore, the Son sacrifices Himself in-lieu of the Father, and not for Himself or for the Father, but for humanity which requires the emotional and psychological impact of such a sacrifice to at least save themselves.
(3) Ty, I don’t know what arrogance you see in my screen name; I am “the Christian” on the threads that I participate in, meaning that I am – if I am wrong, you can correct me – the only practicing Christian in and around the threads I participate in. Is there any other practicing Christian on this thread? (Ex-Christians don’t count.) Also, because you are a former pastor does not mean that you understand everything about Christianity; you only understand Christianity as practiced by your church, not as understood by the Church for 2000 years. Have you read either the Summa Theologica or the Confessions or the Dialogues of Justin Martyr? If not, try not to claim that you know Christian theology, please.
“I expect you to accept my beliefs after proper scrutiny.”
I expect you to be surprised at how many people here know a great deal more about the Christian faith than you do. I further expect you to completely ignore the fact that most of us here have given the Christian faith a great deal of examination and we still don’t believe it – because we know where it comes from – and it’s not from any divine source.
“The Son is epistemologically the Father (Existence), not physically the Father.”
I don’t think that word means what you think it means.
LOLOLOLOLOL.
Am I in error? I’m really not sure how epistemology could work in this context….
Nope is laughing because he always says that line…. :P
Ah right! Given that epistemology is the study of the nature of knowledge, it would have been slightly ironic if I’d got that one wrong. I stole the line from The Spaniard in The Princess Bride, obviously :-)
Custador,
Well, as far as I have seen, nobody has proven to have given the faith the appropriate degree of examination. And as long as you are stuck with your IPU and FSM stereotypes, none of you will. Although I have an interesting question for you: do you believe that a divine source could exist? Or is your last phrase simply rhetorical flourish?
Nope. The sources of the bible are too well understood; it’s well proven that the OT was written by five different writers over several decades. The NT, ironically, suffers from the opposite problem in that most of it is plagiarised from a one source but it contains significant passages which directly contradict its own content – for example in Matthew, Judas flings his thirty pieces of silver into the temple and then goes away and hangs himself but in Acts he uses the silver to buy a field but then falls down and his guts explode. Then there are the two different versions of Genesis, two different versions of Jesus’ geaneaology, etc. etc. etc.
I know the standard apologists excuses for these things, but the cold fact is that those excuses raise more questions than they answer, and they fail to adequately explain the contradictions.
If, as a lot of Christians I know believe, God inspired men to write the Bible, do you not think that an omniscient, omnicognisant, omnipresent, omnipotent being (as most Christians would have us believe God is) could have ensured that his own book of words was clear, unambiguous, timeless, without requirement for interpretation? It can’t be denied that the Bible contradicts itself – it clearly does. It can’t be denied that it requires a great deal of interpretation – it clearly does. Those things alone show the authors were fallable – i.e. that they were humans.
You can’t make excuses for “God” screwing up that badly – if he were real, he would not screw up at all, ever. That in itself should make you examine things like Noah’s flood and make you say “hold on a second, this isn’t right…” – quite apart from the fact that there are places in South America which are fifty times drier than Death Valley and where there is no geological evidence to suggest that it has ever rained. I’m quite serious – there are places on Earth where is has never rained since those places came to exist.
We are not *stuck* with the spaghetti monsters and unicorns, they are simply rhetorical devices. No one’s even brought them up in this entire thread.
Further, what’s the “appropriate degree” of examination one needs to apply to your theology, in your mind? I have to read Summa Theologica and the Confessions and Martyr and, what, then I’ll get it? Sorry, I don’t have that kind of time, and you’ve done little to convince me that it’d be worth it anyway.
I wonder if TheChristian isn’t going to do the opposite to what he intends; from his style of writing it’s obvious that he’s either well educated, quite intelligent or both. It’s been my experience that intelligent Christians who come to debate atheists tend to leave those debates with more than a little bit of cognitive disonance – that is to say, they will be told things which are demonstrably and proveably true, but which will contradict their faith.
I’m not talking about idiots like Mimi and that Jeff chap who failed miserably to debate Jabster, Sunny, LRA and I about creationism; those people are beyond help because they’re incapable of abstract thought and need to take the first steps in education for themselves.
I do, however, think that there are plenty of people who debate here (not just Daniel) who started off as faithful as any other theist, but who became atheists through the simple process of learning the facts and why they don’t fit with any religion (not just their own).
That’s probably why I have such a problem with people who convert between religions; it feels like they examined their original faith, saw all the failings and flaws, and then instead of taking the next logical step and questioning all faiths, found another little comfort bandwagon to jump aboard. I accept that’s just my prejudice, though.
Custador,
Okay, just in case:-
“The Son is the Father in the sense that the Son conveys the Father’s presence, knowledge and purposes fully; but the Son does not share the same material body as the Father.”
I was trying to figure out if “ontologically” is a better word, or “epistemologically”, and came to the conclusion that the latter is more specific than the former. You are free to correct me if you think that I am wrong.
Dear The Christian, I’ve now read several rather rambling and difficult to comprehend postings from you. If you expect me to be convinced of the correctness of your ideas, then you need to put forwards positive ideas that make me think. So far it’s just semantics and vague pseudo-logical statements that do little to interest me let alone convince me of the need for a God (of any persuasion).
I know you say it’s all a mystery, but I’m a grown up, so I try and unravel mysteries and understand the world. And please either answer my post or don’t. I get nothing from being addressed as point number 6, see above.
Custador,
(1) The Old Testament was certainly written by more than 5 people. But that doesn’t make it any less reliable than a book that is written by 10 historians.
(2) The “contradictions” can be explained in that each Sacred Writer had a unique intent and thus presented the same event from different perspectives. An example is the contradiction over the timing for the Last Supper. That can be explained simply by understanding that for the Jews, the day starts at 7 pm, whereas for the gentiles (like us) the day starts at Midnight. Therefore, if the Last Supper was between 9 pm and 11 pm, it would be the first day of Sabbath for the Jews but the day before the Sabbath for the Gentiles.
(3) Well yes, God could have made it all that you described, and if it were all that, it would be even more complex to understand, and you people will be whining about why an omnipresent, omnipotent, omnicognitient, omniscient being couldn’t write something that is easier for men to understand. The Bible does not contradict itself, if you bother to examine all contexts exhaustively. It only contradicts itself when you apply anachronisms to the text or bring a passage out of its context in another manner.
The authors of the Bible are human and therefore as fallible as anyone of us; but they are not fallible in the meaning that they intended to express, if you bother to look at the text carefully, and even de-construct it further than the post-modernists have.
(4) I think that you are also going to far in saying that there are places where it never rained before. Not even people who refute Noah’s Flood make such a bold claim.
Jtradke,
well, you are stuck in believing in the equation of God with your imaginary constructs of the FSM and IPU, even though you claim to have an open mind.
The “appropriate degree”? Read at least parts of the Summa and the Confessions with a fully-open mind.
Custador,
(1) Well, I haven’t actually seen any real contradiction to my faith yet on Atheist websites. The only thing, I have to say, that I have seen, are miserable parodies of faith which are not even good parodies.
(3) I think that they made a big mistake.
(4) Interestingly, I have gone through the process. I have questioned my faith, the history of my Church, other faiths, and have come to the conclusion that there is Truth in all, just different degrees in different aspects. But you need to trust the existence of Truth before you can find it.
Why post-modernists end up going in circles is because they deny the existence of an objective Truth outright, which is a logically untenable position.
Guy,
I said God is a mystery to your reductionist side, not that God is a Mystery to you in general. I am certain that if you look deep enough inside yourself, you can find a connection with God. Even Richard Dawkins does, although he doesn’t want to admit it.
What I have learnt is that if you accept yourself fully, you will also accept God fully.
When’s the last time it rained in Antarctica?
TheChristian,
If your faith is useful to you then I wish you well of it. However, the mental hoops you are trying (and failing) to jump through in order to validate your faith are misplaced here.
“The Old Testament was certainly written by more than 5 people. But that doesn’t make it any less reliable than a book that is written by 10 historians.”
It does when many Christian denominations teach that the OT has only one author, Moses.
In reply to my comment, “If, as a lot of Christians I know believe, God inspired men to write the Bible, do you not think that an omniscient, omnicognisant, omnipresent, omnipotent being (as most Christians would have us believe God is) could have ensured that his own book of words was clear, unambiguous, timeless, without requirement for interpretation?”, you replied:
“Well yes, God could have made it all that you described, and if it were all that, it would be even more complex to understand, and you people will be whining about why an omnipresent, omnipotent, omnicognitient, omniscient being couldn’t write something that is easier for men to understand.”
TheChristian, your reply makes no sense at all. All the semantic wrangling in the world cannot disguise that your reply is pure nonsense – it doesn’t answer the question, it simplly poses the same question again! What your reply boils down to is “Yeah, sure, God could have made the Bible perfectly understandable and flawless – but then it wouldn’t have been perfectly understandable and flawless”. Surely you realised how stupid that was even as you wrote it?
“I think that you are also going to far in saying that there are places where it never rained before. Not even people who refute Noah’s Flood make such a bold claim.”
Quite apart from the fact that Noah’s Flood automatically voids the entire idea of an infallible God (why would an entity which made no mistakes need to erase its mistakes?), I invite you to research the Atacama Desert. There really are places there where it has never rained. Their entire precipitation consists of an occasional morning dew – 5mm or less of it per year.
Christian,
to suggest that Dawkins has a connection with God is a severe libel on all his works and all he stand for.
“if you bother to look at the text carefully” as you say, and read all of his books, (as I have done over the years), you would know that you don’t know what you are talking about.
And no, I don’t have a connection with God, nor the Easter Bunny or the Tooth Fairy. Smug patronising comments like that are not arguments.
LRA,
Antarctica did not always exist.
Custador,
(1) Ok.
(2) I think that in this instance, you got them wrong. Most Christian denominations assert that the Pentaeuch – that is, the first 5 books of the Bible – were written by Moses. The others assert that their writing received direction from Moses. That is a far cry from saying that the entire OT is written by Moses.
(3) Hmm, actually I am puzzled at your interpretation of it. Could you care to explain how you came at such an esoteric conclusion?
(4) Human beings have free choice, so the fact that humans make mistakes shows that God’s creation of free choice is not a mistake. Secondly, what isn’t immediately clear from the Genesis story is how much of the flood is really the consequence of man’s actions (see as in Evan Almighty). Thirdly, to be thoroughly post-modernist, “mistakes” are a categorization in your Framework of Discourse.
“Never rained” is still a very tenuous claim. I have not researched that particular desert, but I need to ask if it has always been a desert?
“(3) Hmm, actually I am puzzled at your interpretation of it. Could you care to explain how you came at such an esoteric conclusion?”
Esoteric? I don’t think that word means what you think it means, you know.
–adjective
1. understood by or meant for only the select few who have special knowledge or interest; recondite: poetry full of esoteric allusions.
2. belonging to the select few.
3. private; secret; confidential.
4. (of a philosophical doctrine or the like) intended to be revealed only to the initiates of a group: the esoteric doctrines of Pythagoras.
Okay, third party opinions on this, please.
I said:
“If, as a lot of Christians I know believe, God inspired men to write the Bible, do you not think that an omniscient, omnicognisant, omnipresent, omnipotent being (as most Christians would have us believe God is) could have ensured that his own book of words was clear, unambiguous, timeless, without requirement for interpretation?”
To which TheChristian replied:
“Well yes, God could have made it all that you described, and if it were all that, it would be even more complex to understand, and you people will be whining about why an omnipresent, omnipotent, omnicognitient, omniscient being couldn’t write something that is easier for men to understand.”
My interpretaion of that reply was that it boiled down to this: “Yeah, sure, God could have made the Bible perfectly understandable and flawless – but then it wouldn’t have been perfectly understandable and flawless”.
Now, could somebody please explain to me how, if it is indeed the case, my interpretation was “esoteric”?
Did anybody interpret TheChristian’s reply in any other way to me? If so, what was your interpretation?
As I’ve said elsewhere, TheChristian thinks he’s a lot more learned than he actually is. It comes through in the arrogance that drips from every post he makes, and in his fairly consistent misuse of philosophy and terminology.
But read the whole of my last post: Was there any other way I could have interpreted what he said?
“Was there any other way I could have interpreted what he said?”
Some examples:
“Treat Others As You Would Like To Be Treated.” means “Kill homosexuals”
“Turn the Other Cheek.” means “Public health care is evil”
“Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves, for the rights of all who are destitute. Speak up and judge fairly; defend the rights of the poor and needy.” mean “Screw the poor and make buckets of money”
“Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.” means “Heavy calibre machine guns are a right.”
““Well yes, God could have made it all that you described, and if it were all that, it would be even more complex to understand, and you people will be whining about why an omnipresent, omnipotent, omnicognitient, omniscient being couldn’t write something that is easier for men to understand.””
My interpretation is, ” “Yeah, sure, God could have made the Bible perfectly understandable and flawless, but you would still be calming that it wasn’t perfectly understandable and flawless.”
Essentially he’s claiming that it already is perfectly understandable just the way it is written. Which is obviously bullshit.
calming = CLAIMING
So… “The Christian”… You really think the Antarctic didn’t exist 3500 years ago???
HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAhaaaaaaahaaahahahahaaaaaaaaa!
*wipes tear*
Good one!
No, I’m agreeing with you.
Custador, I mean.
I take back my earlier comment about him being educated/intelligent on the grounds that he’s trying to bullshit his way past not being able to answer simple challenges like that. Given his slightly bizzare use of a lexicon which he clearly doesn’t understand, he does make me wonder if perhaps George W Bush has learned some long words and found a PC.
He strikes me more as a moderately bright 13 year old who found his father’s philosophy books from college.
Any child raised to believe like that does not have a philosophy student for a parent. Not one who actually got course credit for it, anyway.
Ty, Ty,
You sound much more arrogant in one post than I have in six.
Guy,
No, it is not libel. You only think that it is libel because you don’t know God. And plainly speaking, if you did not have a connection with God, you would be dead – literally and metaphorically.
Custador,
(1) Yes, I meant number one, alluding to “mysterious”.
(2) Ah ok, I see where we are clashing here. I thought that your emphasis was on “unambiguous and timeless”, but you see your emphasis to be on “perfectly understandable”. Fine then. Your statement is not esoteric; it is a logical contradiction. Something that is flawless cannot be perfectly understood by beings who are flawed. Similarly, something that is timeless cannot be understood by beings within time.
Jabster,
What can I say: stop being American!!
Sunny Day,
That is because you don’t bother to read it properly. I noticed something about atheists. Atheists love to claim that they have an open mind, but the moment it comes to really reading any text – whether theistic or agnostic – suddenly you come across a whole list of suppositions that an atheist must adhere to to provide an “objective” reading. Is that really “open-mindedness”. Are you letting the text speak to you, or are you shouting your thoughts at the text?
And no, I am not claiming that it is perfectly understandable the way it is written. It is understandable though, if you bother to examine it properly. All I am saying is that it is impossible to create a text that is perfectly understandable by everybody, because nobody has perfect understanding. And on a more philosophical level, there is no such thing as “perfection”, only different perceptions of how to attain it.
LRA,
Oh, so you have a time limit? I thought that (most) atheists believe that the Earth is billions of years old? So why are you restricting yourself to 3500 years ago?
Custador,
I feel really sorry that you chose to take back your comment. Apparently, you cannot believe that someone intelligent would go through the process you described and not de-convert. Sigh…
Ex-Rev Ty,
I am a 21 Year-old studying philosophy, and I have been reading the Summa, Descartes, on Liberty, Euthrypho and the Republic. And I got a 1 for Logic.
Moral of the story: don’t try and make judgements about people you don’t know. I had hoped that you would at least have gotten that message before you de-converted.
TheChristain,
1) Esoteric does not mean mysterious – way to bullshit your way thorugh not knowing what something means but saying it anyway – you’ve been doing that a lot here. You are in serious need of educating yourself before you attempt to debate. That crap might flow on fundie forums, but not here.
2) WHAT?! A book that was PERFECT would be understood by anybody, no matter how flawed – throwing a phrase like “logical contradiction” when you very obviously don’t know what the phrase means is just bullshit – especially since if you want to start discussing “logical contradictions” (and I appreciate that you’ll have to learn what “logic” means first), then I can tear your ridiculous fairy tale and it’s accompanying book of myths to tiny little shreds. Unfortunately for you, I have some skills and training in both verbal reasoning and in the theory of debate – you clearly have none.
You know what, I gave you some respect when I first read some of your posts, but now it’s just obvious that you’re way out of your depth and incapable of actually assimilating new information or of engaging in anything like independant thought before you start typing.
“I am a 21 Year-old studying philosophy, and I have been reading the Summa, Descartes, on Liberty, Euthrypho and the Republic. And I got a 1 for Logic.”
LOLOLOLOLOLOL!!!!! BULLSHIT!!!! Not outside of a non-accredited religious college would you ever, ever, ever get course credit for “logic”! You don’t even know what the word MEANS!!!!!
The Christian–
I listed 3500 years ago because that is when the “flood” supposedly happened. A small, local flood I can buy. A global flood is complete and total fiction.
“Jabster,
What can I say: stop being American!!”
“Moral of the story: don’t try and make judgements about people you don’t know.”
Oh dear, what a complete twat you are …
erm … thread problems.
Christian, (sorry THE Christian)
What does this mean?
“You only think that it is libel because you don’t know God. And plainly speaking, if you did not have a connection with God, you would be dead – literally and metaphorically.”
It’s just gibberish. If I didn’t have a connection with an imaginary being then I would be literally dead. Well I don’t and I’m not. Can you try and talk sense instead of this pseudo-philosophical excuse for English that you spout?
Custador,
(1) I was using “esoteric” as a synonym of “cryptic”. “Cryptic” is listed down as a synonym of “esoteric” and means “mysterious in meaning”. So my English is not as poor as you think it is.
(2) I know what “logic” means, thank you. I can give you a list of logical fallacies, if you want. But anyway,
Premise 1: If something is perfectly understandable by people of a particular era, then it has to be written in terms suitable for people in that era.
Premise 2: Each era has a different Framework of Discourse.
Premise 3: A necessary condition for people to understand a text is that it must be written in their Framework of Discourse.
Conclusion 1: Therefore, a person in one era cannot perfectly understand a text written by a person of another era.
Premise 4: If a text is written for all eras (i.e. is timeless), then it either needs to incorporate terminological constructions from all eras, or just the similar terminological constructions.
Conclusion: Therefore, a timeless text cannot be perfectly understood by any person in any specific era.
Assumptions:-
[Assumption 1] A text is a discrete structure composed of many symbols organized into terms. Therefore, a text has a grammar and a vocabulary.
[Assumption 2] Different frameworks may share similar terms, but assign different meanings to them. (Post-Modernist view)
[Assumption 3] Written language cannot express everything. (Wittgenstein’s Argument)
[Assumption 4] Perfection requires a Frame of Reference. (derived from the Theory of Relativity – I read the original paper through and through.)
I will wait to see your analysis of my argument, since you are so much more skilled in logic and argument than I am.
(3) That curiously sounds like Theologians’ responses to the books by the New Atheists.
(4) Like I said, I am not American, and I am also not studying in the USA. My University is fully secular – I guarantee you. Anyhow, if I was educated at a religious college, then I should be knowing more Theology than you… isn’t it?
I always find it comical that atheists think themselves so qualified to comment on religion, even if they don’t have a philosophy degree, but think that the religious have no qualifications to talk about atheism, even when they do have a philosophy degree. Hypocrisy much?
LRA,
Well, not very Christian agrees that it was a global flood. It could have been “global” from the human perspective, although not global from the Earth’s perspective. That is to say – in case anyone wishes to accuse me of “esoteric” language – that in Noah’s day the human population was concentrated in a small portion of the Earth. Therefore, Noah’s Flood is a trigger event that led to a Migration.
Jabster,
You are not American then?
No, no, no. The human population was *not* limited to the middle east at the supposed time of Noah’s flood. People were everywhere by then– including Australia and the Americas. Also, the flood story looks suspiciously like the Epic of Gilgamesh, which predates the Flood story in Genesis, making it *highly* likely that the story was borrowed from the Babylonians and modified by the Israelites for religious reasons.
The last time the entire human population was together in one place was 150,000 – 190,000 years ago near modern day Ethiopia and Uganda. As far as I know, there was no flood there at the time, and even if there were:
1. Modern language had not yet developed, so such a story would have been lost.
2. As far as we know, there’s no geological evidence for a ‘[human]-world wide’ flood at the time.
3. That’s 146,000 – 186,000 years before the advent of writing, and just as long before the story of Noah.
So no, TheChristian is wrong: it couldn’t have been “…’global’ from the human perspective, [and] not global from the Earth’s perspective.”
Unless, of course, it happened way later, and you don’t consider Africans, early Europeans, Asians, Polynesians, Australian Aborigines, and Native Americans as part of a ‘human perspective.’
BTW, http://www.bradshawfoundation.com/journey/.
Whoops, ignore pt. 2., I already said that.
You think ‘God’ didn’t know that? It sounds like he just resigned himself to his words being passed through a Bronze Age Discourse Filter, and said “Oh well, this is the best it’s gonna get. If they have trouble understanding it in 2000, too bad for them.”
Why couldn’t an omniscient being inspire people to write a text bleached of transient cultural references and metaphors destined for misinterpretation? Hell, it doesn’t even need to be in language. He could have inspired prophets to do a series of sculptures, or record pictograms instead of words. Sure, those things have understandings tied to some zeitgeist, but God could surely figure something out.
Instead, we end up with some religious holy book that looks and reads just like all the other religious holy books. It’s nothing special.
(God: “By the twenty first century, all my hard work will be ruined, and this compilation I’ve been guiding them to write will be convoluted, difficult to understand, and inapplicable to their current culture — just like all the other holy books. Fuck it, it’s only their souls that are at stake.”)
“Jabster,
What can I say: stop being American!!”
“Moral of the story: don’t try and make judgements about people you don’t know.”
Oh dear, what a complete twat you still are …
I gave a little gigglesnort….
I’m just surprised that anybody can still be bothered to give this idiot the time of day …
1) If you’d meant “cryptic” you would have said “cryptic”. Keep on bullshitting yourself by all means, but you’re convincing nobody.
2) Premise one is shaky at best, premise two completely untrue – and there goes the whole structure of your argument. I didn’t bother reading the rest of the premises. Your conclusions? Oh dear… Obviously wrong thanks to being built on flawed premises.
You’ve also failed to list a presupposition that most Christians would use in any other argument – You are Christian. That means that by your rules, God is not constrained by any rules whatsoever – he can do anything he wants. He’s God. He’s got the ultimate magical joo-joo.
Interestingly, this has led you to ignore the obvious conclusion: The creations of a perfect and infallible being would by their very nature be perfect and infallible; they would have perfect physical forms, minds, language and be unchanging. The fact that there really isn’t any such thing as an objectively perfect person or object should be a pretty solid clue that no “God” had anything to do with anything at all.
“you are so much more skilled in logic and argument than I am.”
The first thing you’ve said which isn’t total bullshit, well done.
“you are so much more skilled in logic and argument than I am.”
I wouldn’t get to carried away … my dining room table could outwit this one!
Custador,
(1) I did say that I meant “mysterious”…
(2) Is Premise 1 shaky? I take “perfectly understandable” to mean “understandable on the surface”. Are you using the same definition?
I am also confused by your assertion that Premise 2 is false. You would agree that medieval people have a different Worldview from modern people? If so, from what I understand in post-modernism, the Framework of Discourse of a person is determined by that person’s worldview. Thus, if the worldview changes, so does the Framework of Discourse. Am I right?
(3) Is it true that all things are constrained by their Natures?
(4) I am puzzled: could you describe to me, in scientific terms, what a “perfect form” looks like, and what “perfect infallibility” is?
Also, if there is no God to have anything to do with anything at all, then what has to do with everything?
Also, if there is no God to have anything to do with anything at all, then what has to do with everything?
What nonsense.
How is it nonsense?
If that were explicable, it wouldn’t be nonsense.
*Happy sighs* I really do like some of the folks here, you know :-)
“Premise 2: Each era has a different Framework of Discourse.”
Citing one example where that is the case does not prove your premise – and you have yet to provide a logical chain from first principles which demonstrates that premise. Are you seriously telling me that you can’t think of cultural examples of instances where a people of, say, 800 years ago would have a highly similar framework of discourse to that which they’d have today? If you are, I suggest you think harder!
Custador,
No, you have lost me. Which culture in the 1200s has the same Framework of Discourse as a culture in the 20th Century? Even members of the Church have a different Framework of Discourse from their ancestors.
Here is the logical chain:-
Premise 1: Everyone has a worldview. (Post-modernist theory)
Premise 2: Every Worldview has a Framework of Discourse that expresses that Worldview in words and/or images. (Post-modernist theory)
Conclusion 1: Therefore, Everybody has a Framework of Discourse.
Premise 3: Worldviews change over time due to outside influences. (Psychology’s premise)
Premise 4: A transition from one era to another involves a movement over time.
Conclusion 2: Therefore, Frameworks of Discourse change in between eras.
Your theory requires subsequent discourse frameworks to be mostly or entirely incommensurable. They demonstrably aren’t.
Aside from the fact that you still haven’t thought about the original problem (considering cultures outside of the US might help), you’ve only intriduced more questions:
“Premise 2: Every Worldview has a Framework of Discourse that expresses that Worldview in words and/or images. (Post-modernist theory)
Conclusion 1: Therefore, Everybody has a Framework of Discourse.”
Why should it logically follow that an earlier or even just different framework of discourse is one that can’t be readily understood or interpreted? Why should the Bible be written in such a complex way that it’s difficult to interpret thousands of years later? Better yet, why couldn’t God just “create” a language that would be readily understood through the ages? And since God is supposed to have given us the gift of language, why aren’t languages unchanging in their (presumably divine and perfect) original forms as created by God?
“And since God is supposed to have given us the gift of language, why aren’t languages unchanging in their (presumably divine and perfect) original forms as created by God?”
Adam and Eve did speak English you know. It was only after the fall that language became imperfect.
Well, that’s true. I hear that Jesus was a blonde haired, blue eyed white man, too. Say…. Does that make you wonder if “conceived by God” is a synonym for “raped by a Roman soldier”?
“I hear that Jesus was a blonde haired, blue eyed white man, too.”
The perfect Nazi you mean?
Strike me down by Godwin’s law if you dare!
“And since God is supposed to have given us the gift of language, why aren’t languages unchanging in their (presumably divine and perfect) original forms as created by God?”
It was perfect originally. It worked too well. So God decided to sabotage it.
“(4) I am puzzled: could you describe to me, in scientific terms, what a “perfect form” looks like, and what “perfect infallibility” is?”
After I’ve already pointed out that objective perfection doesn’t exist? Now that would be a neat trick!
I award you no points.
LRA,
That is assuming that we all know the actual date of Noah’s Flood. As I said, I believe in the historical accuracy of Genesis 11 onwards; Noah’s Flood is before that. Incidentally, based on cultural cues (see K.A. Kitchen’s “On the Reliability of the Old Testament”) one can date Genesis 11 back to the Sumerian Empire, and I would assert, to the early Sumerian Empire, which would fit Abraham’s religion. (Sumerians were originally monotheists; they developed polytheism later.) Abraham lives in around 2500 BC.
We have to be careful about saying which story predates which, because we can only be certain as to which story has an earlier or later manuscript. The age of the manuscript does not indicate the age of the story, which would have been transmitted for many years orally.
By the way, one inconsistency with your historical analysis is that if the Israelites had copied a flood narrative, most likely they would have copied it from the Egyptians, whom they were slaves under for a considerable amount of time. (There is a break in geneaologies between the end of Genesis and the Beginning of Exodus.) And having the nationalistic identity they had after the Exodus, they would not have modified their theology so much as to dredge in Babylonian elements, which they hated anyway. (If not, why reject Baal?)
And that is where the problem crops up. The Egyptians had a flood narrative as well, and theirs is certainly older than the Babylonians. However, in the Egyptian flood narrative, the flood is sent as a reward, not a punishment. Therefore, if the Israelites had plagiarized Noah’s Flood from the Egyptians, then the story would be completely opposite from what it is!
The first enslavers of the Israelites were the Egyptians, not the Babylonians.
Elliott,
(1) Still, there was some form of language; Even Homo Erectus had a language, and we are talking Homo Sapiens Sapiens here. If the event was as significant as is described, you can be sure that it will persist on in memory. With some embellishments and transformations perhaps, but it will stay on.
(2) Actually we don’t. Paleontologists are trying to figure out why humans started their migration in the first place, and paleoanthropology is full of extrapolations. 1 fossil or a few fossils discovered in a particular cave can lead to the conclusion that “thousands of people” lived there.
(3) Before the advent of writing, yes. Before the advent of the story of Noah – assuming that it is just a story – is very difficult to verify. Oral traditions can be handed down for many generations before being put to writing.
(5) That is why I am talking about the First Migration.
(6) Yes, of course God would know that, but you don’t seem to know that. But the Word was written for a Bornze-Age filter – in fact, more accurately a Stone-Age Filter – because it was initially meant to be addressed to Stone-Age/Bronze-Age people. Also, it was being addressed through Stone-Age/Bronze-Age people, so they couldn’t write in a timeless style.
(7) Because God inspires the Writers; God does not dictate to the writers. And why does God do that? Because The writers are also people created with Free Choice, so to honour their Free Choice, God inspires, but does not dictate. You are making the same mistakes as the Protestants on the meaning of Divine Inspiration. What Divine Inspiration is is that God gives the Writer the Sense and the Concept and the Emotion (which is deeper than meer feeling, so don’t equivocate) which the Writer then interprets in his or her own Framework of Discourse.
(8) Does it, really? I think that even Non-Christians will agree with you on that point.
(9) Unfortunately for you, God is much “smarter” than you. (I put “smarter” in inverted commas not for skeptical irony, but because God’s Intelligence is necessarily not like Man’s intelligence.) God provides the Bible, along with the manner to interpret it. So God says, “Culture changes, but the Sense which I provided to the Sacred Authors does not. Thus, I give them and their contemporaries the Sense that will be passed down from 146000 BC to 2010 AD. But I also choose to allow the people in 2010 AD to have Free Choice on whether to seek for that sense or not.”
So the difference between Divinely Inspired Writing and just plain old Writing is what you want to believe? How typical of the thoughtless christian.
That’s pretty much what his argument boils down to, isn’t it? I’m still waiting on an explanation for why “divinely inspired” looks identical to “obvious propoganda filled political manifesto from several thousand years ago”, but I’m not holding my breath on that one.
(1) We have good reason to believe that Homo Erectus did not have language. It may have been able to communicate in a more sophisticated way than early apes, but there was almost surely no generative grammar, or ability to communicate temporality (which would have been required to relate stories). These things are unique to Sapiens, and tied to Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas in the brain. Source: I have a degree in linguistics.
You think a story can persist — even in a most basic form — for nearly 200,000 years? It’s only been a few decades, and people are already saying Elvis never died. We’re talking 6,000 generations here. 6,000 generations of “embellishments and transformations” would give me reason to doubt every single detail of the story.
(2) Assuming this is in response to my #2, I said:
You responded:
I didn’t say “we know there is no evidence” I said “as far as we know, there isn’t any.”
If you think that leaves room for Noah’s flood, fine but that’s a silly ‘God of the gaps’ argument. “Science doesn’t know why we moved, maybe it was Noah’s flood!” You’re looking for a whole to stuff your God in, so the stories aren’t proven wrong. We have no more reason to believe it was a flood than a famine, or a drought, or a volcanic eruption. Be objective. Reserve judgment before saying goddidit.
(3) That story made it 6,000 generations intact until it was ready to be written down? Again, I’m incredulous. But maybe with God’s help.
(6) You don’t seem to get it. If God wanted to provide a rulebook, and he’s willing to suspend the rules momentarily to intervene in human affairs and ‘inspire’ them, there’s nothing stopping him from ‘inspiring’ them in a way that could be timeless. He’s magic remember?
Either he wanted it to be inapplicable and opaque to later generations, or he allowed it to be. If the former, he’s a dick. If the latter, he didn’t care if it was timeless, and he’s being lazy with our salvation. And he’s still a dick.
What’s easier to believe? It wasn’t inspired by God.
(7) Do you realize how silly that sounds? How is it OK to give people ‘divine emotions,’ but not dictate directly? It still interferes with their free will to crawl into their heads and give them feelings that others don’t have.
Plus, it’s unfair to people like me, whose souls are on the line, and who would welcome a divine inspiration, but who have never and will never receive one. For the people he did inspire, they get a ‘get into heaven free’ card, because they get firsthand evidence God exists. The rest of us just have to be confused, and maybe figure out the truth.
(8) You said:
Huh? Was that meant to be in response to what I said about the Bible looking and reading just like all the other holy books? Because if so, I agree with you.
(9)
[emphasis mine]
Wow. That’s a really slimy thing to say, and is one of the attitudes I hate most about Christians.
Do you really believe that? Honestly? Stop for a moment and look at all the different denominations, of Christianity alone. There are thousands, with mutually incompatible beliefs, and tell me again that God provides a manner of interpretation.
It’s clear to anyone with half a brain that it’s a sociological phenomenon, not a divine one.
Elliott,
(1) Why do you need temporality for stories? All you need is the ability to communicate actions and figures. And incidentally, Biblical Hebrew measures process according to actions, not according to our modern English Tenses which have past, present and future tenses”.
(2) Yes, if people are dedicated to keeping it that way. I am too tired to think of examples off-hand, but there are examples of stories having been preserved in original form for 10000 years.
(3) The moment you accuse me of “God of the Gaps”, I know that you are not listening to me. All I was saying is that a hugh catastrophe like a flood is a reasonable explanation for a migration.
(5-6) What makes you think that the rules are being violated by God when he inspires the Sacred Writers? That is arrogance on your part, thinking that you know all the rules there are. There is nothing to stop God from inspiring the Sacred Writers to write something timeless, except that it would violate the Free Choice of the Writers, which God created. God wants to preserve Free Choice.
(8) No, it doesn’t. These emotions arise in the heads of the people due to some form of external or internal stimulus, which are in accordance to the way humans were designed (evolved), And who says that other people didn’t have them? It is just that other people chose to ignore the Sense, that’s all. That is Free Will.
(9) And I think that is your mistake. Because of your (chosen) aversion to the “Divine”, you have chosen to reason away any Divine Inspiration that might have been given to you as superstition or random occurrence, or some other rationalistic (note: not “rational”) explanation.
Instead of seeking the truth, you have consigned yourself to the trap of “maybe”. If you are confident that there is a Truth, you will find it, I am certain.
Anyway, the “get to heaven free card” is not so easily received; in fact, one might say, never received. An analogy might be that Moses himself did not get to enter the Promised Land. And incidentally, I doubt if there is even a “card” at all. Heaven is something you choose to be in, or be out of. All the “Final Judgement” tells you is what you have already decided for yourself. So if you have decided that you are away from God – and I really doubt that anybody truly has – then you will be in Hell. If you have decided that you are with God, you will be in Heaven. If you are really Agnostic, you will be in Purgatory.
So if you an Atheist who believes deep down inside that you are trapped with the Fundamentalists, then you will be in Hell, albeit one with alot of Fundamentalists. (Not meaning that the Fundamentalists themselves are in the same part of Hell as you are.) And that will be your fault, not Pat Robertson’s, not Fred Phelps, or that crazy Christian who shot an abortion-doctor; because you always had the choice to love them (just as they have the choice to love you).
(11) I admit: Unfortunately, I am not as patient as God.
(12) God provides the manner/attitude to interpret Scripture, and that is taught in Scripture; but sadly the teachers of Scripture seldom follow it. God provides; but religious leaders choose to reject.
So yes, the interpretations of religious leaders are sociological, but the Intended Interpretation of the Sacred Writers is divine.
I’m kind of lost on your numbering scheme.
(1) You need temporality to relate actions that happened in the past, or will happen in the future. That’s the main way our language is different from animal communication, because they can’t do that.
Animals have ‘words’ or calls that mean things, but they are only useful for the immediate present. When a meerkat uses its word for “snake” they all dive for cover, and discussion ends. Humans have the ability to talk about snakes of old and snakes that will be, without having an immediate panic reaction.
Animals can communicate images like ‘snake’ and perhaps actions like ‘bite’ or ‘hide’ but they can’t dislocate them from the present.
First off, I don’t know what you’re trying to say here. All languages express temporality. They may do it paraphrastically by use of prepositional phrases, like modern Hindi, but they all do so.
Second off, I’m not an expert on Biblical Hebrew, but I call bullshit on its lack of tenses. I’ve studied Arabic, and some Tigrinya, both Semitic languages. They may not have grammatical tense, but that’s deceptive to the layman. They encode temporality in the verb using aspect and mood, which are a bit different, but still get the job done. That said, the Semitic languages have a very elaborate system of marking temporality. It’s actually mind blowing how complicated their systems are. Anyway.
(2) Then you don’t get to claim the point.
(3)Fine.
(4)You’re putting words in my mouth. I didn’t say I knew the rules. I said if you sit back and contemplate ‘free will,’ having emotions or images — or whatever you want to call it — plugged into your head violates it.
Stop and feel what you’re doing with your brain. You’re imagining a way this whole thing could work. You aren’t thinking. You are just counting angels on the head of a pin, and I’m done with this line of argument.
That makes my blood boil. I’m losing my desire to remain civil with comments like that. I appreciate ‘Religious’ experience as much as any other human on the planet. In fact, I seek it out. I just don’t need to believe in the supernatural to do it.
If I reason away anything, it’s supernatural, hollow, nonsensical explanations of the divine. John Dewey puts it best when he talks about separating the Religious (capitalized) from religion in A Common Faith.
I still have ‘Right Brain’ Religious experience, and with my non-religious friends it even rivals the crucial communality of traditional religious experience. Another commenter on this forum (Elemenope) put it more beautifully than I ever could, and hopefully I do him justice in paraphrase. If the universe was designed, it’s a tragic failure. It’s only beautiful if it was an accident. Goosebumps, man.
Sorry to tell you, C, but the Epic of Gilgamesh is the *FIRST* written story and predates the Pentateuch! Therefore, the proto-Isrealites *borrowed* the Epic for their own purposes (that happens a bunch when cultures neighbor each other). Check it out:
http://www.utexas.edu/courses/clubmed/gilgamsh.html
But then the Proto-Israelites were closer to the Egyptians; Moses was an Egyptian. So why did they borrow from the Sumerians, instead of the Egyptians?
Because, fairly unshockingly, language analysis and archaeology from the region reveal that pretty much all the stories in the early sections of the Bible are ahistorical. Of course, if you take “The Bible is True” as a starting axiom, I would imagine the picture painted by actual physical evidence would be pretty nonsensical and lead to all sorts of errant conclusions.
Not really true, but I am too tired to argue. And even myths have basis in fact. Humans simply don’t create things ex nihilo. And that only applies for Genesis 1-11, which is hardly 1% of the Bible.
Also, all the near-eastern peoples, including the Egyptians, had a flood story, so there must have been at least One Flood that is etched into their memory. Perhaps the details are sketchy, but at the very least the event did occur.
Most ancient civilizations have a flood myth.
Most ancient civilizations lived in river valleys.
You put it together.
LOL!!! Loves ya, Nope! :P
I would like to add, also, that there is very little(if any) archaeological evidence that the proto-Israelites were ever slaves in Egypt. It is more likely that a small band of Semites migrated there and lived among the Egyptians as free people, but were never slaves per se. They may have lived as indentured servants, but there is no evidence to support a large number of Semites living in Egypt…ever. Add to this fact that Sumeria is much closer to the Dead Sea than to Egypt, so it would make sense that their legends would make it into the proto-Israeli lore (since the majority would have stayed) over Egyptian lore. For instance, there is *no* archaeological evidence of a group of people wandering around the desert for any period of time, let alone 40 years. It simply couldn’t have happened because there was no trash (ie ampules, animal bones, and the like) left behind.
(1) On the other hand, Egypt did last much longer than Sumeria.
(2) Is “trash” from a wandering group that easy to find?
(3) Incidentally, that doesn’t actually contradict the Bible. Genesis ends with Joseph’s family being favoured in Egypt, and by implication, their descendants. Exodus begins with a sudden change in Pharoah’s attitudes. So, the proto-Israelites did live as free people, but became oppressed because they had grown too numerous for Pharoah’s liking.
You know nothing about archaeology or history, do you?
LRA you could stop right here, “You know nothing.” and still be correct.
Elliott,
(1) I number my sections according to the order of the paragraph I am responding to.
(2-6) Biblical Hebrew has the perfect and imperfect tenses, which are linked to verbs. Temporality is not expressed directly, but inferred through context.
(9) Well, I am telling you that they are not plugged, except in the case that a knee-jerk reaction is plugged into your body. Does such a reaction violate Free Will?
(10) I am not counting angels; honestly, you are just being derogatory.
(11) Number One Misconception: God is Super-natural. God is not Super-natural; God is Trans-natural.
(12) I guess that I would agree with Dewey but I am not sure if you understand what he means by “Religious”. The way that we are (still) arguing with each other seems to indicate that you still can’t distinguish “god” from “God”. Please prove me wrong.
(13) Elemenope is somewhere around … I challenge him to prove his tremendous claim.
Newsflash: Christian who flings bald assertions with great abandon requires others to back up their claims while ignoring his own.
(2) Perfect and imperfect are not tenses, they are aspects.
Knowing little about Hebrew grammar, I can still almost guarantee you that they obligatorily express future or past paraphrastically. Usually in languages that lack grammatical tense but retain aspect, there are strict grammatical rules about prepositional phrases or time particles which must be present. I don’t know how we got on this topic.
(9) The knee jerk reflex is due to a particular configuration of nerves present in healthy human bodies. It’s a naturalistic phenomenon. Divine muse to write a holy book is not a naturalistic phenomenon. Since you seem averse to ‘supernatural’ I’ll say it’s an extra-natural phenomenon, because trans-natural is retarded.
(12) Enlighten me.
Speaking of “tremendous claims,” it falls to you to provide incontrovertible evidence and proof of the existence of your deity. After all, you are the one who claims it exists–let’s dispense with the philosophical babble and get to it, shall we? If you’ve got some independently verifiable evidence of the existence of your deity, show it.
I’m reminded of the old saying that attempting to use “big” words doesn’t mean you’re not speaking rubbish, it means you are speaking rubbish with more syllables. Of course it also means that someone will point out that you don’t actually know what the words mean.
Yep – usually me or ‘Nope :-)
Okay, I gotta weigh in on this moron. The flood myths of the world come because human civilizations experience floods. It is simple extrapolation on the part of the people that lead them to think of a massive flood that destroyed the world. When you look at simple logic there are two possible explanations; 1) there was a world wide flood, or 2) there is something that all people share that makes them create stories of floods. Looking at the geological evidence of the planet there is zero evidence of a global flood and innumerable amount of evidence going against a global flood. Ergo, using simple logical procedures, we eliminate possibility 1 and leave possibility 2. Further we can expand upon this by looking at other world wide myths. For instance, every culture on earth believed at one time that the sun revolved around the earth. We use the same process 1) they are right, or 2) they share an experience. We know the sun doesn’t go around the earth (and don’t try to pull the relativity bullshit. Relativity doesn’t come even close to excusing the geocentric model). If we are to take your position we would have to believe every universal mythology, which as I’ve shown with the geocentric model, is ridiculous.
It is completely possible for a text to be, if not totally timeless, at least a lot more timeless than the bible is. Hell, one of my favorite reads was Sun Tzu’s “the art of war”. That book has far more value for society today than the bible. It is practically timeless. Let us look at the writings of Socrates. That too is studied to this day and holds immense value for humanity. How about the writings of John Locke? Those contain far more universal truths than any holy book on the planet. Further, god could have inserted basic things into his writing to make it more timeless. How about the scientific method? That would be extremely timeless and useful. He could have included rules on logic and human rights. These would have made the bible far superior. It could have not included contradictory statements, would that have really been so hard for the omnipotent creator of the universe? The idea that the bible is the best that god could do is absolutely absurd. Of course though, it is impossible to have a perfect bible. In fact perfection itself is a logical impossibility. Of course this would also destroy your god so I’m sure you will halt your logic before it can reach his lofty heights.
So the original premise that god is simply a “mystery” and nothing else. Firstly this is a misuse of the term mystery. A mystery is not a thing, mystery is the state of our knowledge about a thing. For something to be a mystery it must exist in the first place. What the inhabitants of the planet Omicron that orbits Mars say when someone sneezes is not a mystery. I don’t know what they say, and neither do you. That doesn’t make it a mystery because they don’t exist. So god cannot “be” a mystery. For god to “be a mystery” must mean there is something that we don’t understand. God must be a “thing” and he must “exist” or else there is no mystery. For something to exist it must have properties. Anything without properties does not exist. Again, I could claim that Omicron is a planet without any properties (of course planet is a property so I’ve already defeated myself) but this would be a logical contradiction. Contradictions are not wise, they are stupid. Claiming yes is no doesn’t make you wise. In answering questions like this you move out of the realm of philosophy to the realm of Solipsism. You can make all sorts of spacious arguments about how yes is the same as no, but this doesn’t make it so. You can claim they share properties, which they do (they are language, they both reject a position, etc.) but once you try and attach some mystical significance to this you have failed at logic. For that argument you advance a logically invalid claim.
1)”yes” and “no” share properties.
2)if two things share properties they are the same thing
3)”yes” and “no” are the same thing.
Claim #2 is obviously false. Such silly koans don’t hold up to real logic. I do understand their purpose though. Taoism is anti-intellectual. It is about being one with nature and the cosmos rather than trying to analyze it. That is neither here nor there though. Back to your mysterious god. For god to exist he must have properties. The bible attributes properties to god. If the bible is true then we must believe that these properties attributed to him are his actual properties. If they are not his properties then you have no idea what this god is. How can one claim to follow the commands of something that one has no understanding of? If what god says in the bible are all analogies and not meant to be taken literally then what do you have left? By saying that god is simply a mystery and we can never know anything about him you are not defending him, you are arguing him out of existence.
The fact that you claim the mysterious god and also study philosophy makes me sad. I too am a student of philosophy. The basic precept of logic and philosophy is that reason can be used to understand our universe. By saying that god is simply a mystery you are saying, in effect, that while reason can understand our universe, god is off limits. That is the fundamental flaw in your entire argument. Why is god off limits to reason? The basic premise of all human reasons relies on the belief that the universe is inherently rational. Having an irrational god as the creator of our universe and as an intervening force makes our universe irrational. With an irrational and mysterious god philosophy, science, theology, and even simple common sense are worthless. Apples do not fall to the ground because of gravity, they fall because god wills them too. Rationalism is what allows me to feel certain that tomorrow I will not wake up as a cockroach, or that if I do there will be an explanation for it. In the irrational universe I could never make predictions about anything, could never analyze anything, because the universe would follow arbitrary laws. Once you inject your irrational god into the equation it destroys the whole system. I could, if you are right, wake up tomorrow as a cockroach due to the whim of an inscrutable deity. That fact lies at the heart of why religion exists in the first place. When the ancient shamans and prophets claimed they knew the will of an inscrutable deity, they were given ultimate power. If I don’t want to be a cockroach tomorrow then all I have to do is obey my priest and he will make sure god doesn’t do that to me (though since god is inscrutable and irrational this can’t actually be trusted). They claimed to make the world rational and so were necessary for civilization to exist. We have moved beyond that and realized that the world is rational. There is no more room left for the arbitrary god of pure mystery in this world. You, as a student of philosophy, should know this better than anyone else. God cannot be immune from rationality, ergo god cannot simply be a mystery.
D’n,
(1) You are equivocating here. No, I am not going to use whatever “relativity bullshit” here, because I have no idea what that refers to. But the problem with your analysis is that myth does not form out of general experience. Every author has a trigger, an idea that inspires him or her or them. As the story develops, due to broken-telephone effect, the idea might change form, but something merely generic will not create a story. I know how creative writing or story-telling works. Anyhow, broken-telephone effect can be negated by vetting memory, such as is done in the African tribes, such that the same story can persist in the same form for at least 1000 years. As another example, an anthropologist working in Greece discovered that images of the Hydra in the depictions of the Odyssey matched the photographs of a prehistoric rhinoceros photo; she concluded that the fossils were melded with folk memory to produce what we now call the Greek Myths.
Something similar would have happened with the flood myths. Something happened to create the specific relation that produced the framework for the narrative, something of sufficient magnitude. But more importantly, something that required some form of nautical equipment to be built. Yes, there may be frequent flooding in the Ancient Near East, but flooding that requires a boat?
Secondly, the flood myths have the same number of people on board the ship, after accounting for cultural differences in census-taking. And here we are not only talking about the Babylonians or the Sumerians; the Filipinos have something which is identical. Surely, the Filipinos could not have plagiarised from either the Babylonians or the Sumerians?
And anyway, I said that the Flood is a flood that occurred “globally” in the human perspective, not the Earth’s perspective.
(2) Well then, my argument is valid. The Bible is timeless, only that people don’t bother to spend as much time trying to understand it as they do to Socrates and Sun Tzu and John Locke. By the way, my country’s government would argue that Locke only applies to the West, so your “timeless” is a Americo-centric view.
The aim of the Bible is not as a science textbook; it is as a moral guide. And yes, it teaches Human Rights; in fact it has the most important message of all: That all men are equal in dignity. That is a message in the whole of the Bible, and is written into your Declaration of Independence. And let’s see: Thomas Jefferson became a Deist, but was originally from the church headed by Fred Phelps today; George Washington was a methodist; John Adams was a Calvinist, and even Alexander Hamilton who had sympathies with the atheistic French Revolutionaries was at least Deist. None of them intended the USA to become a godless state; That is not the intent of the First Amendment at all. I was watching HBO’s documentary-film “John Adams”, and in one of the episodes Jefferson is told by Adams to change the wording of the Declaration of Independence from “sacred and undeniable” to “self-evident”. Assuming the historical accuracy, I wonder what this suggests about Jefferson’s private view with regards to religion and state?
The so-called “contradictions” only exist because you choose to see them as contradictions. They are contradictions, if you take them out of context. In their proper context, they are not.
(3) You don’t know anything about Taoism, except what you learnt from your New-Age teachers. You are an American whose exposure to Taoism is limited, and who has probably only read translations of the Dao De Jing. I am an Asian who has several taoist relatives and taoist friends, and who has read the Dao De Jing from cover-to-cover in English and Chinese, and I have learnt Chinese since I was four. So who do you think is more qualified to comment on the Dao De Jing?
Back to the Bible. The “properties” attributed to God by the Bible are descriptions of men’s experiences of God, not the description of God. The only description of God by God is in Exodus 3:14, where God identifies himself for Pharoah (and Moses).
God is not beyond understanding; simply beyond understanding of the Left-Brain. And that is all that I claimed: That God is A Mystery to the Left Brain.
No, what God says is not non-understandable and not analogies. To say that you need to understand God in order to understand what he says is like saying one needs to know Richard Dawkins’ favourite breakfast cereal to understand what he writes in “The God Delusion”. And because descriptions of God are analogies, it does not mean that what God says is an analogy. (At least not at the literalist and literal levels, which is what we are discussing now.)
(4) Your sadness is unwarranted, because you have misunderstood me. God is not inscrutable. God is there, if you are willing to look for God. God is not outside the Universe; God is beyond the Universe. The Universe is within God. Anyhow, it is not that reason cannot find God; it is that a particular kind of reason – Scientific Empiricism – cannot find God on its own. God is a mystery to Scientific Empirical/Reductionist Reasoning (of the Left Brain) alone, but when it is with literary/integrative reasoning (of the Right Brain).
That is the whole purpose of Jesus – to prove that God is not inscrutable unless you want God to be inscrutable. In the latter case, you have the responsibility.
“No, I am not going to use whatever “relativity bullshit” here, because I have no idea what that refers to.”
Ugh.
“God is a mystery to Scientific Empirical/Reductionist Reasoning (of the Left Brain) alone, but when it is with literary/integrative reasoning (of the Right Brain).”
Ugh squared.
They all have the same people “after accounting for cultural differences in census-taking”. What the hell is that even supposed to mean? You have records of how Filipinos took census before the invention of writing? I bet there are more than a few anthropologists that would love to see your amazing find.
You are stretching definitions. Take the hydra. I could come up with a million different things the hydra resembles. How about snakes, dogs, lizards, brontosauruses, etc. etc.
There is an alternative, more plausible, explanation for world wide flood myths. Namely, everyone lived in flood planes at one point. Further, even if your hypothesis was true, Noah’s flood is simply one of a multitude of flood stories. It holds no special place above the others.
Human rights in the bible? Like slavery, genocide, child sacrifice, subjugation of women? You mean those human rights?
Jefferson wasn’t part of Fred Phelps church. Fred Phelps formed his church. He is an offshoot of the baptist movement. Further, Jefferson was not a religious person, not even close. He edited his own bible to omit any mention of miracles or the divinity of Jesus. That though is actually irrelevant. Jefferson is the one who coined the phrase “seperation of church and state”. He understood that a religious country is the worst idea out there. The founding fathers of America were not christians in any real sense of the word (they did not worship Jesus). One of the fundamental freedoms my country (America) is based on is the freedom of religion. That is the freedom to worship, or not worship, in whatever way possible. Additionally the country must be free of religious influence.
No, I am not asian and I have not studied taoism extensively. So educate me, what is the thesis statement? Everything I have read about it points to becoming one with the infinite and going with the flow. That of course is discounting its merger with chinese folk religion, that created a different religion that was neither true taoism nor true folk religion.
So you change your statement. You never once before mentioned “left brain”. So does this mean that god is no longer a mystery? I can now understand him with my right brain? I think you are destroying your thesis simply to support it.
No, I don’t need to know what Dawkins likes for breakfast to understand his books. However, if I am to try and decide “what would Dawkins do” then I do need to understand his basic moral decision making process. The way we discover this is through observing the words and actions of a person. In the bible we observe the words and actions of god and then we infer what his personality, especially his moral decision making process, is like. If we don’t do this then we can have no concept of “what would god/Jesus do”.
God is not inscrutable? God can be understood by reason, just not the scientific method? Well, then how is god an eternal mystery? I see that your left hand does not know what the right is doing.
The universe is within god. So what does that mean exactly? It sounds like you are beginning to advocate a toaist, non-personal god. That is in stark contrast to the whole concept of a personal christian god. The problem is that you are saying things which mean nothing at all and then pretending they are wise.
FYI. I mentioned the theory of relativity, the idea that there is no basis for the objective viewer and that all points of view are equal, because you have shown a tendency towards sophistry and I am attempting to preemptively stop it.
D’n, you’re wasting your carpel-tunnels on him. He’s been here with his fingers in his metaohorical ears yelling “lalalalala I’m not listening” for a few days now, and frankly he’s just another boring idiot.
Like many things in Buddhism, koans are a technique for stopping the dualistic, conceptual mind.
It occurred to me the other day, “What if I go to mass, and whenever there’s some absurd doctrine I couldn’t possibly accept, I let it stop my mind instead of arguing with it? What if I treat the creed like a big koan?”
Turns out that actually lets me benefit from the mass as a spiritual practice – love those mantras and mudras – even though my beliefs or lack thereof are more Tibetan Buddhist. Anyway, I googled christian koan and found your post.