Why do you suppose Jesus never condemned slavery?

@vikorr,

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https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/we-dislike-hypocrites-because-they-deceive-us.html
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We’re averse to hypocrites because their disavowal of bad behavior sends a false signal, misleading us into thinking they’re virtuous when they’re not, according to findings in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The research shows that people dislike hypocrites more than those who openly admit to engaging in a behavior that they disapprove of.

Off topic, but I couldn’t help commenting that this probably explains the improbable popularity of Donald Trump.

Yes, he grabs pussy, but he’s not hypocritical about it like all the rest. We respect that whether we like him or not.

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@Leadfoot,

That's a really interesting observation.

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@vikorr,

vikorr wrote:

Is it true that it is an insult to show the soles of your feet to another?

Is burping polite, or not?

Etc

Have you done any reflection on why religious authorities would make a decision on such things one way or another?

If you reduce it to the superficiality of such a rule, it might seem arbitrary; but if you had access to look into and reflect on the deeper deliberations about why to regulate such behavior, you would find legitimate concerns, I think.

When you reach those legitimate concerns, the question is whether you can pick and choose whether they are legitimate or whether they are fundamentally sensible.

e.g. you might look at the rule prohibiting women from driving and just see sexism and project all your knowledge of sexism, e.g. regarding women as less capable and responsible than men, etc. . . .
. . . but then what if you found out that the fundamental logic was that driving or operating any heavy equipment for that matter carries a certain amount of danger that can be avoided if only certain people are allowed to drive and others prevented? Then, you could see that it makes sense to choose men as designated drivers because they don't have wombs to protect, i.e. because the womb can only make about one baby a year whereas the male testes can produce as many spermatazoa in a year as needed to replenish a decimated population, if necessary.

So modern feminists reject these kinds of logics as being essentialistic and discriminatory, but if you hold a more fundamental belief that people are truly created equal despite their differences, i.e. because we are all equal souls embodied in different forms within the creation, then it's no more discriminatory to use men as designated drivers than it is for children to be exempt from labor so that they can have freedom to do other things in childhood than contribute to household income.

So to sum up with a question, you may say that superficially rules about etiquette are cultural relative, but can you think of any deeper issues that are the fundamental reasons such rules are made that can be true for some people but not for others? Or can you see that there are fundamental universal truths that people struggle to put into practice in different situations and cultural contexts?

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@vikorr,

vikorr wrote:

As for God being incredibly obvious. Most of the scientific world disagrees. Many people disagree, on very solid ground:
- God can't be proven with direct evidence (see, touch, hear etc the being known as God)

This is the classic atheist-materialist shuffle: You take metaphorical imagery/language used to talk about God and you make it literal in order to argue/deny it using material logic.

It's like arguing with Forest Gump that life isn't a box of chocolates because a box of chocolates is small and human-made while life is large and God-made. If you criticize things on other levels than is relevant, you can make anything look wrong, and that's what atheists do to deny God.

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- Humans can attribute anything to God, and so God as a construct could be attributed to anything on earth (but to be believable, you have to come up with a believable contruct of the attributes and actions of God)

There is nature and there is culture, correct? Nature is beyond human control but culture is a product of human actions. But then what about the fact that humans take natural resources and hone them in different ways that preserve their natural functions in some ways and change them in others? There is no clear distinction between nature and culture, and yet we can see that there are things that happen beyond human control, both in nature and within human affairs. To what do you attribute such things except to God? What's more, humans didn't create themselves, so you can't attribute their existence to themselves.

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Within those two areas of human capability, God can either be explained to exist, or explained to not exist. This is incredibly obvious.

You can't explain God not to exist without needing something else to attribute divine power/actions to. You can attribute lightning to nature or to static electricity or whatever, but what do you attribute nature and static electricity to then? God is simply a shorthand way of talking about the sum total of antecedent causation without always having to look further for a more antecedent cause/source.

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This is not the same as 2+2=4. Which is true no matter when, where, or to whom you explain it to (so long as they aren't so mentally impaired as to not be able to grasp maths at a fundamental level)

So the difference between the concept of God, and Mathematics, is obvious - incredibly so.

Arithmetic isn't the only realm of cognition that exhibits universality. For any and every difference/discrepancy you can find/cite at any level, there is some connected level that is universal.

Obviously there is a level at which things are culturally relative, but that is a superficial level and the only way to make that level seem fundamental is to deny the deeper level of universalities.

E.g. you mentioned showing the souls of feet being rude to some people; well if you ask them why it's rude you would find some people who understand the deeper logic of standing on two feet instead of sticking one foot up in the air, kicking at someone, laying down and sticking your feet up at them, etc. You should be able to empathize with why this rule makes sense and if you can't it's because you are in denial and/or because you have a mischievous spirit that seeks to subvert rules by denying/ignoring the deeper reason for a rule.

It's one thing to not want to cover your head or to wear heavy clothing in the heat, but it's something else to want to wear skimpy clothing or flaunt your hair to be cheeky, and it's still something else to want to be cheeky and to use the weather as an excuse to do so while lying and saying your real reason is because it's hot, when deep down you know that is not your actual reason.

1 Reply

@livinglava,

Quote:

This is the classic atheist-materialist shuffle:

That God (the being) cannot be seen, touch, smelt etc is fact. You know this, and your talk about logic...is in the form of a diversion, enabling you to avoid acknowledging this incredibly obvious difference (and you don't acknowledge or deny it - you just avoid it). You do notice how often the word avoid applies to your behaviours?

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What's more, humans didn't create themselves, so you can't attribute their existence to themselves.

And no one has. The paragraph ending in this quote - is an example of the second part that I was talking about - that we can attribute anything to God (in this, creation), or not.

We cannot escape the inventiveness of the human mind, nor its abilities to make associations that can be right, wrong, or undetermined. We cannot escape that our minds can create attributes, and that we can create homogeneous ones at that. You call this Atheist twaddle (even though I am not an atheist). I call such recognition honesty, as it's impossible to deny outside of self deceit (as we absolutely can do this). I hope God exists, as I rather like the idea of God, but I am not certain of that fact.

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You can't explain God not to exist without needing something else to attribute divine power/actions to.

Scientists offer the Big Bang.

However, when I say I am not certain that God exists - my view is that, if he/she/it does exist, it is not in the way portrayed by any of the major religions.

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Arithmetic isn't the only realm of cognition that exhibits universality. For any and every difference/discrepancy you can find/cite at any level, there is some connected level that is universal.

It was you that offered the example. It is up to you to show that the difference doesn't exist, as you continue to imply...rather than make vague allusions (or diversions) to some unnamed evidence. I've pulled you up on this type of behaviour before, where you claim deeper understanding, but never name/specify it, exhibit it, or articulate it, no matter how many times you were asked.

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E.g. you mentioned showing the souls of feet being rude to some people; well if you ask them why it's rude you would find some people who understand the deeper logic of standing on two feet instead of sticking one foot up in the air, kicking at someone, laying down and sticking your feet up at them, etc. You should be able to empathize with why this rule makes sense and if you can't it's because you are in denial and/or because you have a mischievous spirit that seeks to subvert rules by denying/ignoring the deeper reason for a rule.

You asked for two examples of relative truths. I gave them to you. There is a reason they are described as relative truths. Your answer is that if they understood at a deeper level, both sides of what is the truth would agree. Did anyone deny this? Relative truth occurs at particular levels of belief...that doesn't make them not relative truths (unless you want to redefine what truths and relative truths are to people). The same could be said for subjective truths like beauty - one person finds a piece of art beautiful, and the other doesn't, and such is driven by their:
- genetics
- understanding; and
- life experiences
Their perspective is true to both viewers of the piece of art. It doesn't make one person right, and the other wrong. Both views are true to each respective individual.

You complain that I point your posting behaviours out - yet it is quite obvious, from having to point them out so often, that despite many explanations - that you continue to have great difficulty in engaging in logical conversation (which by definition tries its best to be free of self deceit. Free of self deceit is usually not hypocritical. Etc).

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Those who talk about some goofy divine creation lack the knowledge and imagination to understand how the natural universe can evolve into many things, including life, and clever apes.

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Why do you suppose Jesus never condemned slavery?

Because it was accepted at that time.

What can't be accepted now, is discussing one seeming anomaly in a fairy story full of fatuous flapdoodle.

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@Setanta,

https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/what-came-before-the-big-bang

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“We have very good evidence that there was a Big Bang, so the universe as we know it almost certainly started some 14 billion years ago. But was that the absolute beginning, or was there something before it?” asks Alexander Vilenkin, a cosmologist at Tufts University near Boston. It seems like the kind of question that can never be truly answered because every time someone proposes a solution, someone else can keep asking the annoying question: What happened before that?

I personally think that there is nothing wrong with God being the Big Bang, nor guiding evolution - so my view is there is no issue with such. That said, scientists are still arguing over how something came from nothing, and to me, that seems the fundamental question as to whether or not 'God' exists. But it doesn't seem like it has an answer.

At the end of the day, it seems to me to be a nice concept (in and of itself), that has become infected by religious ideology...one where people become certain they are right...which leads to all sorts of problems. Is it a necessary concept? No, I don't think so - we humans are more than capable of living happy, fulfilling lives through our own merits.

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@vikorr,

Quote:

the being) cannot be seen, touch, smelt

I think of him more a the BIG TUNA

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@vikorr,

vikorr wrote:

That God (the being) cannot be seen, touch, smelt etc is fact. You know this, and your talk about logic...is in the form of a diversion, enabling you to avoid acknowledging this incredibly obvious difference (and you don't acknowledge or deny it - you just avoid it). You do notice how often the word avoid applies to your behaviours?

You can't see/touch/smell/etc. the universe in its totality, yet you know it exists because of all the things you can see/touch/smell/etc. that exist as products of the universe.

Do you deny the existence of the universe because it's can't be circumscribed? No, so why God then?

Quote:

We cannot escape the inventiveness of the human mind, nor its abilities to make associations that can be right, wrong, or undetermined. We cannot escape that our minds can create attributes, and that we can create homogeneous ones at that. You call this Atheist twaddle (even though I am not an atheist). I call such recognition honesty, as it's impossible to deny outside of self deceit (as we absolutely can do this). I hope God exists, as I rather like the idea of God, but I am not certain of that fact.

Everything the human mind is capable of was a latent potential of the universe before humans ever emerged as species; or do you disagree with that?

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You can't explain God not to exist without needing something else to attribute divine power/actions to.

Scientists offer the Big Bang. [/quote]
The Big Bang is an event. It is an interpretation of the universe in terms of universal expansion. It doesn't account for all the latent potential for everything that manifests within the universe, only the observation of redshift between galaxies, which is interpreted to imply expansion, which in turn is interpreted to be the result of an initial expansion from a single point.

Nothing in Big Bang theory explains the emergence of life, let alone consciousness, sentience, and/or intelligence.

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However, when I say I am not certain that God exists - my view is that, if he/she/it does exist, it is not in the way portrayed by any of the major religions.

That's like arguing Captain Kirk doesn't exist in the way William Shatner portrayed him. Captain Kirk in fact DOES exist, but not as a flesh and blood human being but rather as an idea/character that emerged from Gene Roddenberry's mind, and the personality traits represented in the Kirk character are universal traits that can be found in many different minds and historical examples; so by limiting your thinking to the superficial level, you can deny the existence of something that actually exists in universal form outside of the narrow 'portrayal' you have construed in your mind.

Religion creates metaphors to teach people about things they don't understand yet, so if you debate their metaphors, you are just failing to understand what those metaphors are trying to teach about by wanting the metaphors to be more than just a representation of something deeper and thus less easy to describe than the material thing that serves as the metaphor.

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Arithmetic isn't the only realm of cognition that exhibits universality. For any and every difference/discrepancy you can find/cite at any level, there is some connected level that is universal.

It was you that offered the example. It is up to you to show that the difference doesn't exist, as you continue to imply...rather than make vague allusions (or diversions) to some unnamed evidence. I've pulled you up on this type of behaviour before, where you claim deeper understanding, but never name/specify it, exhibit it, or articulate it, no matter how many times you were asked.[/quote]
I just gave you a Captain Kirk example. As I said, anything that seems culturally relative at a superficial corresponds with deeper values that are universal. You gave the example of burping being rude, so if you would examine the deep reason someone considers burping rude, you might find that it stimulates thoughts of vomiting and vomiting is unpleasant and is associated with illness and/or that nausea is contagious, like yawning; so whatever the reason someone has for disliking burping, it is something that comes from a deeper experience that is shared universally due to universalities in biological functions, etc.

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You asked for two examples of relative truths. I gave them to you. There is a reason they are described as relative truths. Your answer is that if they understood at a deeper level, both sides of what is the truth would agree. Did anyone deny this? Relative truth occurs at particular levels of belief...that doesn't make them not relative truths (unless you want to redefine what truths and relative truths are to people). The same could be said for subjective truths like beauty - one person finds a piece of art beautiful, and the other doesn't, and such is driven by their:
- genetics
- understanding; and
- life experiences
Their perspective is true to both viewers of the piece of art. It doesn't make one person right, and the other wrong. Both views are true to each respective individual.

Regardless of what people find beautiful or ugly, the aesthetic experience is universal because people perceive sensory information in correspondence with emotions and other feelings. So you give children candy that's brightly colored with dyes and contains basically pure sugar mixed with some chemical aroma-flavoring and the children are programmed to like it because their different senses are getting stimulated simultaneously with their sugar/pleasure-response, but as people get older, they see that artificial flavoring and pure sugar are not really good for them so they start to appreciate other foods more.

The same is true of art. Kids might really like posters of their favorite cartoon characters while an adult begins appreciating more abstract art, but they still like certain themes more than others because they correspond with other experiences in their memory. Different people have different connections between memories and pleasure-experience but the fundamental experiences of sensory-perception, cognition, pleasure, etc. are universal.

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You complain that I point your posting behaviours out - yet it is quite obvious, from having to point them out so often, that despite many explanations - that you continue to have great difficulty in engaging in logical conversation (which by definition tries its best to be free of self deceit. Free of self deceit is usually not hypocritical. Etc).

It is impossible for you to engage in discussion without peppering it with these kinds of accusations. I guess you're just really into winning debates so you use accusation as a way of putting the other person in defense.

You are more concerned with losing than with truth and that is what makes you a loser.

1 Reply

@livinglava,

Quote:

You can't see/touch/smell/etc. the universe in its totality, yet you know it exists because of all the things you can see/touch/smell/etc. that exist as products of the universe.

Do you deny the existence of the universe because it's can't be circumscribed? No, so why God then?

So your argument is:
- you can't see the whole of the physical universe, but it is physically evidenced to our 5 senses....... and
- you can't see/touch/feel/etc any of the being of God (though you avoid like the plague actually saying this), and even though its being is not physically evidenced to our 5 senses...

...you then go beyond the fact in question (that of physical evidence of the being of God) and try and extend the (contested) discussion to comprehending the scope, which is a very different discussion (and avoids yet again you acknowledging the lack of physical evidence of the being of God).

The statement you are trying to respond to is the physical evidence (ie that our 5 senses can detect) of the being of God. In every reply of yours, you avoid this, trying to turn the discussion to other 'proofs'.

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Everything the human mind is capable of was a latent potential of the universe before humans ever emerged as species; or do you disagree with that?

No issue per se with it - though as you practice avoidance so much, perhaps you would be better off providing more of a response up front, to show you aren't avoiding facts.

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That's like arguing Captain Kirk doesn't exist in the way William Shatner portrayed him.

You realise this example of yours, used for comparison, actually supports what I said, right? The creation of Captain Kirk matched the human minds ability to attribute, and to give coherent attributes to a 'being'. Secondly, we know he was invented by the human mind, from nothing. There's more issues - but after these two, there's not need for further.

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Regardless of what people find beautiful or ugly, the aesthetic experience is universal because people perceive sensory information in correspondence with emotions and other feelings.

Everything that follows this avoids what was actually being discussed - subjective truth as relates to truth itself. That said - outside of the discussion of truth - you appeared to otherwise agree with what I said.

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It is impossible for you to engage in discussion without peppering it with these kinds of accusations. I guess you're just really into winning debates so you use accusation as a way of putting the other person in defense.

Winning debates? By now, you've ascribed to me so many different motivations for me posting, that it seems you can't make up your mind why I post. It might help you to comprehend, if you went back and looked at the very first post I made, that started this conversation.

After you do that, if you still hold that view, then I'm wondering what you think I'm trying to 'win'? Seeing as most of my posts to you are usually aimed at poor behaviours not recurring.I guess you could call that trying to win - If they stopped, then it wouldn't be a win in any normally understood sense of the word.

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@vikorr,

vikorr wrote:

So your argument is:
- you can't see the whole of the physical universe, but it is physically evidenced to our 5 senses....... and
- you can't see/touch/feel/etc any of the being of God (though you avoid like the plague actually saying this), and even though its being is not physically evidenced to our 5 senses...

...you then go beyond the fact in question (that of physical evidence of the being of God) and try and extend the (contested) discussion to comprehending the scope, which is a very different discussion (and avoids yet again you acknowledging the lack of physical evidence of the being of God).

The statement you are trying to respond to is the physical evidence (ie that our 5 senses can detect) of the being of God. In every reply of yours, you avoid this, trying to turn the discussion to other 'proofs'.

Quote:
Everything the human mind is capable of was a latent potential of the universe before humans ever emerged as species; or do you disagree with that?
No issue per se with it - though as you practice avoidance so much, perhaps you would be better off providing more of a response up front, to show you aren't avoiding facts.

You're avoiding my point.

Quote:

Quote:
That's like arguing Captain Kirk doesn't exist in the way William Shatner portrayed him.
You realise this example of yours, used for comparison, actually supports what I said, right? The creation of Captain Kirk matched the human minds ability to attribute, and to give coherent attributes to a 'being'. Secondly, we know he was invented by the human mind, from nothing. There's more issues - but after these two, there's not need for further.

The point is that the human mind's ability to fathom God is itself evidence of God's existence, i.e. because God exists as a latent potential in the universe to know itself through the manifestation of human awareness/knowledge.

Quote:

Quote:
Regardless of what people find beautiful or ugly, the aesthetic experience is universal because people perceive sensory information in correspondence with emotions and other feelings.
Everything that follows this avoids what was actually being discussed - subjective truth as relates to truth itself. That said - outside of the discussion of truth - you appeared to otherwise agree with what I said.

Why are you ignoring my deeper point, which is that the experience of beauty is universal, even if the things people consider beautiful differ superficially?

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After you do that, if you still hold that view, then I'm wondering what you think I'm trying to 'win'? Seeing as most of my posts to you are usually aimed at poor behaviours not recurring.I guess you could call that trying to win - If they stopped, then it wouldn't be a win in any normally understood sense of the word.

I think you've just put yourself in opposition to things like universalism and God-belief, because you're an obedient student of secular higher education.

I think you, like many people, are afraid to dissent from standard secular dogmas like anti-universalism/relativism and atheism because you go through college trying to win the favor of professors, which you think will win you favor in job-seeking and/or further academic achievement.

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@livinglava,

Quote:

You're avoiding my point.

Uh, there is nothing for me to avoid. Your points:
- don't in any way invalidate the fact I presented (in other words, there is nothing for me to avoid), and
- are another discussion in themselves (not being about the fact there is no physical being of God that we can touch, see etc, but rather, about what you can infer from what is around us)

They are purely a diversionary attempt by yourself to avoid acknowledgement.

Quote:

The point is that the human mind's ability to fathom God is itself evidence of God's existence, i.e. because God exists as a latent potential in the universe to know itself through the manifestation of human awareness/knowledge.

"I can come up with the idea of God, therefore God must exist" is erroneous logic - unless you want to add 'in my own mind'. The latter concept can once again be attributed to the inventiveness of the human mind. It is impossible to get away from such an accusation. You obviously believe in faith, but don't seem to comprehend it - that faith exists in this space because it accepts/believes despite doubts.

The problem here isn't many of your ideas, but your belief that God must be 100% evidenced in some way. Faith doesn't require that. Having faith then - the things I say (re physical being etc) should not be something you have to avoid. Acknowledgement of such, and faith, can coexist. I have to wonder then, why you have such difficulty accepting what is so very obviously factual.

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@livinglava,

Quote:

The point is that the human mind's ability to fathom God is itself evidence of God's existence, i.e. because God exists as a latent potential in the universe to know itself through the manifestation of human awareness/knowledge.

Voltaire inadvertently put it better when he noted that if god didn't exist man would have had to invent him.

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@knaivete,

knaivete wrote:

Quote:
The point is that the human mind's ability to fathom God is itself evidence of God's existence, i.e. because God exists as a latent potential in the universe to know itself through the manifestation of human awareness/knowledge.

Voltaire inadvertently put it better when he noted that if god didn't exist man would have had to invent him.

LOL

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@vikorr,

vikorr wrote:

Quote:
You're avoiding my point.
Uh, there is nothing for me to avoid. Your points:
- don't in any way invalidate the fact I presented (in other words, there is nothing for me to avoid), and
- are another discussion in themselves (not being about the fact there is no physical being of God that we can touch, see etc, but rather, about what you can infer from what is around us)

They are purely a diversionary attempt by yourself to avoid acknowledgement.

No, my point is that your materialist negation of the possibility of God existing rests on your definition of what God is, what constitutes an 'entity,' etc.

I'm saying that if you would closely examine biases you have about what constitutes an 'entity' or 'agency,' you would see that the universe is the sum total of all subsystems that make it up, and that all supersystems that exist through the interaction of subsystems constitute 'entities.' So in that sense, the universe as a whole is an 'entity' and the fact that it is an entity that manifests consciousness, sentience, agency, intelligence, etc. in at least some sub-systems/entities means that it contains these things as a latent potential, the same way an apple tree contains within its DNA the latent potential to make apples whose seeds sprout into nascent apple trees, given the right soil and conditions.

In short, humans are manifestations of God because all our traits must express themselves from a latent potential that allows them to manifest within the universe we emerged/evolved from.

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can come up with the idea of God, therefore God must exist" is erroneous logic - unless you want to add 'in my own mind'.[/color] The latter concept can once again be attributed to the inventiveness of the human mind. It is impossible to get away from such an accusation. You obviously believe in faith, but don't seem to comprehend it - that faith exists in this space because it accepts/believes despite doubts.

The human mind is not an original source of anything. The mind is a collection of patterns that form within neural networks. The mind has the capacity to identify patterns it observes as analogous to patterns that exist/occur outside the body. E.g. we can imagine an apple and recognize that the imaginary apple in our mind's eye corresponds with the fruit that grows on a tree outside our mind.

So with God, you have to identify what it means to fathom power, consciousness, conscience, love, discipline, etc. and how these things can come from sources other than human beings. Pets can love you, for example; and a heavy rainstorm can discipline you for not patching the holes in your roof when the leaks damage your furniture. As you go through life, you interact with all these different parts of the universe in a way that comes together to shape your life path as a whole. So the same agency that punishes you for failing to patch your roof before the rainy season also gives you love and mercy when you trip but catch yourself before falling, or when you get home and realize you forgot to buy something only to see you forgot that you already had some at home and thus didn't need to buy it in the first place.

You could attribute all these different interactions with the non-human environment separately by saying there's one god of roofs and other of shopping and another that helps you catch yourself when you lose balance, or you could say they are all angels working for the same God (or Satan).

There's nothing artificial about attribute the experience of agency to such unseen entities. It's just a way of describing/narrating reality.

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The problem here isn't many of your ideas, but your belief that God must be 100% evidenced in some way. Faith doesn't require that. Having faith then - the things I say (re physical being etc) should not be something you have to avoid. Acknowledgement of such, and faith, can coexist. I have to wonder then, why you have such difficulty accepting what is so very obviously factual.

Faith is fundamental to all knowledge, even sensory knowledge because you can't technically know that what you perceive through your senses actually exists outside your senses. You have to have faith to believe in what your senses are telling you, because you have no way to check them that doesn't also involve using your senses. So, for example, you can take a photograph to test whether something you see also shows up in a photograph, but you then have to trust your senses that the photograph you see actually exists. It all comes through your senses, so you have to have faith that even the most mundane things you perceive, think, etc. actually exist.

What's more, even if everything you perceive only existed in your mind, that would still be a mode of existence. Thoughts exist, dreams exist, memories exist. They might all just exist as patterns in your brain, but what exists outside your brain except as patterns of subatomic particles and energy? Everything ultimately just amounts to patterns of energy and 'pixels of existence,' whether it is inside or outside your mind.

You might be able to experience emotions, pain, pleasure, joy directly; but you have to exercise faith to project those experiences onto other people or animals. Some people deny that animals even feel pain or joy despite the fact that we can easily empathize with our pets and other animals. Empathy, however, is based on faith because we can't directly experience what other beings experience. Faith is foundational to all knowledge thus.

1 Reply

@livinglava,

Quote:

I think you've just put yourself in opposition to things like universalism and God-belief, because you're an obedient student of secular higher education.

I think you, like many people, are afraid to dissent from standard secular dogmas like anti-universalism/relativism and atheism because you go through college trying to win the favor of professors, which you think will win you favor in job-seeking and/or further academic achievement.

LoL I grow up when religion was shove down our throats even to the point of daily bible readings in school.

An atheists was next to devil worshipers and the most hated woman in the US was the famous atheist was Madalyn O'Hair.

Now some of those on this thread have the nerve to pretend that anyone is fearful to not be an atheist at the college level or anywhere else.

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@livinglava,

Quote:

No, my point is that your materialist negation of the possibility of God existing rests on your definition of what God is, what constitutes an 'entity,' etc.

If that is your point, then it is no wonder you think I ignored it. Where on earth did you get that, from what I wrote? You asked what the difference between God and Maths was - I provided an answer that is utterly factual. Those facts don't rule God out of existence.

It again makes we wonder why you are so desperate to avoid such obvious fact that you would reach this conclusion (as such erroneously negative jumps are usually based in fear)

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The human mind is not an original source of anything.

In which case:
- free will doesn't exist (because if it cannot come up with anything original, then it cannot make decisions outside of its programming)
- the techonology we have doesn't exist (because we've never seen it before)
- the ability to associate, and meld ideas doesn't exist (because that is outside the factual parameters of what it has already experienced)
...oh wait, your religion says we have free will...and techonology does exist, and we can take what we've seen before and turn it into something we've never seen or experienced before...

...wait, that means we can invent..new things...(utterly obvious from technology)

.... And in inventing, melding, and interpreting we can attribute...and oh wait...everything else that I mentioned the human mind is capable of doing, it can do.

Quote:

Faith is fundamental to all knowledge, even sensory knowledge because you can't technically know that what you perceive through your senses actually exists outside your senses. You have to have faith to believe in what your senses are telling you, because you have no way to check them that doesn't also involve using your senses. So, for example, you can take a photograph to test whether something you see also shows up in a photograph, but you then have to trust your senses that the photograph you see actually exists. It all comes through your senses, so you have to have faith that even the most mundane things you perceive, think, etc. actually exist.

What's more, even if everything you perceive only existed in your mind, that would still be a mode of existence. Thoughts exist, dreams exist, memories exist. They might all just exist as patterns in your brain, but what exists outside your brain except as patterns of subatomic particles and energy? Everything ultimately just amounts to patterns of energy and 'pixels of existence,' whether it is inside or outside your mind.

You might be able to experience emotions, pain, pleasure, joy directly; but you have to exercise faith to project those experiences onto other people or animals. Some people deny that animals even feel pain or joy despite the fact that we can easily empathize with our pets and other animals. Empathy, however, is based on faith because we can't directly experience what other beings experience. Faith is foundational to all knowledge thus.

See - you can make good arguments without avoiding facts...though you used the secular use of faith, while I was referring to religious faith (they have small differences in use)

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@BillRM,

Hi Bill

Livinglava has been creating / attributing so many varying motivations for my posts that I've lost track of them. I even pointed this out to him, mentioning that he can't seem to make up his mind on what motivation I supposedly have...

...what's one more made up motivation?

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@BillRM,

BillRM wrote:

An atheists was next to devil worshipers and the most hated woman in the US was the famous atheist was Madalyn O'Hair.

I have it as Madeline Murray, but she was my hero either way.

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Why do you suppose Jesus never condemned slavery?

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