@brianjakub,
Don't know if this applies to you or not, if it doesn't, meh..
Quote:Why is that an absurdity?
It is absurd to me if this is a traditional Christian idea of reward and punishment viz a viz your traditional heaven and hell. It is absurd because the Christian says that their God is love, yet nothing about this idea of heaven and hell and a loving God fall into my purview of what love is.
And if God's idea of love is not my idea of love, why not? Under the Christian model, i'm supposed to have been made in God's image, i take that to mean my understanding of emotions, love, hate and states of beauty etc..are analogous to that God's properties of the same. So, my idea of love should be the same as God's.
And if its not, then why would God do that? It is handicapping me from being able to understand and therefore accept that God, because otherwise it is a contradiction to me. The Christian's typical answer is to have faith, but that's putting the cart before the horse. Faith (as trust) assumes i believe already, unless that definition of faith is 'blind faith' - belief in something because i don't have a good reason - and i'm pretty sure that God doesn't want us to blindly believe - it would make it too busy selling us lots of bridges..
Don't believe there is a God(s), but there might be a God(s) of some sort who created all this stuff, but pretty sure it isn't a personal God and certainly not some Jewish God a la the Bible.
Quote:If the vast complex system we are living in was made for things to live in then it can be assumed that living should be considered good.
We can also assume that it was not made for the 'good' (we can also have a hell of discussion on what is meant by 'good' by itself - but that's for another time). Maybe this God is a real bastard. A patient bastard who gets his jollies on any kind of emotional state. Your assumption is invalid because there is no outside standard to put what is likely. God could have made all this be true in (almost) the way that Christian's say it is, but when we die, this God gets his maximum jollies sending those who believed it to hell because he loves to see their faces when they find out they've been wrong about it. And maybe those who didn't believe get to hang out with it at six flags. Or maybe it sends everyone to hell. Or maybe everyone goes to heaven. Maybe it rolls a dice. Stuck inside our subjective world, there is no way to know what is a 'safe' assumption.
Tell you what, when we both die, you can tell me i told you so, that your assumption was safe. I don't ridicule it, but neither can i logically abide that it is 'safe' without further verification.
Quote:It is also reasonable to assume that none of that is true, and that our ability to make these assumptions randomly appeared in the matter of our body, and that matter randomly appeared out of nothing, according to processes that randomly appeared in nothing, out of an explosion initiated by gravity in the Big bang.
Randomly? Now that's interesting. Maybe it wasn't random. Maybe nothing is random? Maybe things just have to be the way they are. In talking about beginnings, i don't think random is the correct word, that is absurd, because, again, there is nothing to compare with to understand what random might mean in that context. Absurd simply means our brains have reached their limit in finding concordance or congruence between ideas.
And your comment about gravity. Yeah, don't really understand much about that, but it seems logical to me that the answer is: "I don't know" and any attempt to 'know' this stuff is doomed to camp side chatting on some serious shroomage.
Quote:Is it more absurd to assume there is an yet unknown process to initiate matter and gravity out of nothing or some sort of intelligent god with a purpose.
See above. Two things: Again, 'more' absurd implies we have a standard to compare. We don't. Second thing. The concept of God is just as absurd anyway. What caused (if it can be said to be truly caused) all of this is absurd in the sense that it doesn't make sense to any of us. Timelessness is absurd to us, we cannot fit that into our meagre brain pan. However, one thing isn't more absurd than another, because we have no valid,
objective point of reference to make such a judgment.
