To MarketandChurch about his sig...

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M&C. Here is my version. Thou art weighed in the balance, G-d and are found wanting.

I do not deny G-D. I have my doubts about His competence.

ruveyn

What is commanded:
I do not know of one instance in all of the Torah where belief in God is demanded so you are just fine. Even if one does not believe in a creator, or the Jewish creator, it is commanded:

1.) we still love this thing we don't believe in -- for our sake. (The same for Prayer)
2.) we still credit this thing we don't believe in as the author of his commandments.

What is commanded is only commanded for our sake. You can't hurt Gods feelings by cursing him or telling him you don't believe in him or else God wouldn't be God, but an immature butler in heaven out to service egos. My concern is the belgian moral philsopher, Hercule Poirot's, which is: what does it do for you? Consider the heart of one who prays daily, it is not only a therapeutic experience where you emote some of your frustrations to something that may not be there, in doing so you hear your own frustrations spoken allowed, you acknowledge your losses even if mournfully so, and it is a great instiller of a humble attitude and gratitude. The secular answer is a shrink, which I also recommend and have no problem with. But not everyone sees a shrink, or has a friend or family member where they can openly and honestly confide their victories and their frustrations in, let alone, some sort of act that will make you grateful for what you have. I am also saying all of this as one who doesn't pray often, and, as one who gets very little from the act "spiritually", but when I do do it, I do reap all of the above benefits. The same is true of the after life. If you live as if your behavior will count towards one of two possible realities following this life, and one of the two is an attractive option contingent on ethical behavior, you will behave more ethically. Sam Harris says we can get all of the benefits of religion without religion and has never once offered up a practical way to do so. What is the great daily instiller of gratitude for an atheist? What practices do atheists do daily to get their daily required dose of vitamin G? I am concerned about this then about their belief in God.


God On Trial
I guess in some ways, I do not believe God is competent for the simple existence of the mosquito. It will be the first amongst many questions I will ask him in the afterlife. The question of natural suffering is the only question I have for God. Why do you allow hurricanes to rip up coastal towns or for cancer to metastasize in an innocent child. I do not put God on trial, ever, however, for human evil. I do not fault God for the holocaust or for allowing a creation capable of such accomplishment. If he made us all good, we would not know goodness without evil as a contrast. Just as if our reality consisted of one shade of blue, we would have no concept of color.

What would make me question his competence is if the path to him is by faith. I don't have faith, it is something that has never come naturally to me and therefore I am an atheist by default. And it would make him a lousy God simply for the fact that not everyone has had the chance to hear the good word. That is why I cannot take Christianity seriously at this moment in time.

But then I am reminded of his competence by knowing that if I so choose to shoot someone up, gravity won't fail me, my bullets will not continue traveling until it hits an object, it will not stop mid-flight and fall to the ground, I find solace in knowing his laws are constant as he has fixed them to be, regardless of which side of the ethical fence I choose to be on.


My Faith.
What little faith I have comes to me for two reasons: I have absolutely no faith in humanity(but I, as we all do, have faith in individuals), and, there is no way brilliant people could have written the torah on their own. I am even more ready to accept that the Jews could be alien transplants from another galaxy because at least then there's an explanation for the genius non-human construction of the text. But I am spiritual in the awe I have for the natural world and the cosmos waiting to be discovered.

All the good I have ever received in life has come from other people.

As to your other hypotheses I have speculated that G-D was really an alien presence that was on the earth 6000 years ago. Alien but still of the natural order of things. About 6000 years ago humans in various parts of the world not in contact with each other started to get smart. The idea of an order in nature emerged. Mathematics was invented about 6000 years ago in Sumer, Babylon, Egypt and even in parts of the New World. Could alien visitors have been educating the locals? WHo knows?

ruveyn

Well that's rubbish. If everything was blue, we would know blue. Likewise, if there was no suffering, we would know "not suffering". We might not appreciate it as much, but we would know it, and we would be better off through a lack of suffering.

The fact remains that God allows children to be treated badly by their parents. Frankly I think any good I get from knowing that I am lucky to have parents who aren't Joseph Fritzl is outweighed by the suffering of his children, and other victims of child abuse, and is scant consolation to those poor people.

Can we have a discussion about MarketAndChurch's profile picture as well?

I want to post a lead farmer .

The Ancient Astronauts Hypothesis. A legitimate idea that has unfortunately been tarnished by the sheer amount of crackpots who explain everything away with "aliens."

You would know IT, and even if you termed IT the one shade of reality that exists as Blue, you would be simply defining nothingness.

Replace blue with black. If your reality consisted of nothingness you wouldn't call it black in the way WE understand black. Reality just IS and you accept it as such but there is no such thing as black. You might define sound, you might define textures, but you wouldn't have a contrast to know that black truly exists as we know the color black. If this is a bad analogy, please let me know and I'll try and think up another one.

Goodness is the same way. You wouldn't know goodness without any gradations in the opposite direction to contrast it with. You would merely be functioning in one mode, essentially a programmed robot.

Suffering comes from awareness of our unfortunate circumstance. A newborn who is killed does not suffer. Intelligent animals who understand you are getting ready to slaughter its children do suffer. Awareness gives you suffering. I don't fully understand or grasp what you just said with regards to suffering, can you restate it or give an example?

I will explore the concept of man-made/unjust suffering later on tonight. But do you at least acknowledge that most of our suffering is not natural suffering, from disease or the weather, but rather, man-made?

That is why I have said that I have faith in individuals. All of the good I have ever received in life has also come from other people. I do not have any faith in the collective humanity. I might have faith in my community, and even my society, but that is because we all for the large part affirm and adhere to an elevated set of values.

I have never heard a resounding case from humanists as to why I should trust or have faith in humanity. I can sympathize with the fact that one has no other choice or options, because one does not believe in a God. I actually respect that acknowledgment. But the little observing of history and my limited life experiences so far has come to the conclusion that an unreformed humanity is one that cannot be trusted. Values found in some places are not respected in others.

I am willing to entertain the notion of aliens, its no more fun then fun theological arguments such as What Created God or What Was 10 Minutes Before The Big Bang, but it is very interesting. Something happened at Sinai that convinced a group of people to go through what (now with hindsight) we can call a suicidal mission that would then reshape humanity. If it is God then it is God, and if it was aliens, then I have no trouble with that either. None. I am troubled by those who have he hutzpah to declare that brilliant men wrote the torah. We have a little more then a month left to go in 2012, and with all of the available resources afford to us, I'd like to see someone create the greatest repository of wisdom PART II. And even if one could construct such a text, you still have to live with the fact that 4000 or so years ago, some turban heads in the middle of nowhere knew it all along.

The lead farmer is more attractive take then elf from a scifi series, or whatever Master Pendent was referring to. I only see the beautiful aline weber in costume.

I don't like them either, but it is far better to outsource it to the unprovable aliens then filling in the immense gaps of what may or may never be fully knowable with an anecdotal truismistic house of cards. If science could just say, "we have all this evidence that we've found so far, we have some hunches but don't fully know what it suggests considering all that hasn't been discovered, and there are still a thousand other questions about our assumptions and hunches that at this point, this is either the best we can come up with, or frankly, we just don't know" -- That is not only respectable... its TRUE. And I'm not even getting into evolution, I am speaking about the physical, measurable, testable hard sciences.

Evolution IS a physical, measurable, testable hard science. That's the part you keep misrepresenting in addition to lying about what evidence exists. I say lying because this evidence has been pointed out to you many times, yet you continue spewing falsehoods about it so ignorance is not an excuse for you.

Much of our perception of reality is in terms of what Alan Watts called "polar opposites" that may have a hidden unity in the sense of being two sides of the same coin, two ends of the same stick, or opposite poles of a magnet. All we can detect of the universe is musical in structure, a series of vibrations of various things and various frequencies. Because of this, Watts called the basic game of the universe a game of hide and seek. All waves have crests and troughs. You never find a wave that has a crest without a trough or vice versa.

Good cannot exist without the existence of evil, and vice versa. Some want everything to be all good, but that is as silly as trying to arrange everything in a room so everything is up and nothing is down. The eastern philosophies grasp this concept of polar opposites quite well, but some people especially in the West ask questions that are as meaningless as trying to draw a square circle. It can't be done because the question is meaningless. Trying to resolve questions that cannot be answered because they are meaningless is the cause of much human frustration and suffering. Part of what gurus do is lead their students further down that path to the point of reductio ad absurdum until the students realize their error. Blake said "If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise."

The background is something many people miss too. We are hardwired to notice what stands out. Alan Watts would draw a circle on a blackboard and ask his audience what he had drawn. The common responses were "ball" or "circle," but the answer he was looking for to demonstrate his point was "a wall with a hole in it." The sound "Om" has four components, starting in the back of the throat, moving to the middle, and ending at the front of the mouth, but what the Hindus appreciate also is the silence that is there before, during and after the sounds we hear. The silence represents the void out of which everything comes and back to which it returns.

Presumably a fish is not aware it is in the water since it is immersed in it at all times, and by that reasoning perhaps humans also are not aware of consciousness. A basic difference between east and west is that in the east the brain is seen as a function of consciousness, while in the west consciousness is thought to be a function of the brain. Perhaps both are right, in the way that the whole universe is inside your skull in one sense, yet your skull is in that universe. Another comparison is in turning the steering wheel of a car, as one side goes up the other goes down but it is the same experience even though described differently.

I am leaving evolution out of this because you cannot test macroevolution. That doesn't mean it didn't happen, I am greatly skeptical of it, but it happening or not is not contingent on your belief or my skepticism. What it is contingent on, however, is evidence THAT we can test to prove the theory and its assumptions true. We have evidence, but what if that evidence is or will paint a completely different picture once we find more and more and more evidence.

We have no proof of a primordial soup. If you would just simply step back and be awed by the suggestion that everything came from evolution, from a logical and factual stand point, the evidence you have is 1/100,000,000th of the evidence that is missing maybe more. Explain the nervous system to me from an evolutionary standpoint? Explain it to me and how it changes and evolves from one species to the next, and how the environment, random variation, and natural selection affects it? The evidence is too small to know what we are dealing with. It is the same way in physics that assumptions of string theory suggest something that is unprovable, and you can't even construct a test to test the possibility of many universes, but you don't see a physicist go bat s**t crazy over the issue.

The only hard sciences are physics and chemistry. Both are used in biology to deconstruct a cell, but biology absent chemistry and physics is no more a hard science then political theory. It is inevitable... nature is coded in numbers, what we see is a physical simplistic facade but on a molecular level, its all numbers man.

"macro" evolution (all evolution is "macro" evolution) is tested the same way and with the same degree of likelihood as the atomic hypothesis. We not only don't see atoms, we -can't- see atoms. They are smaller than the shortest wavelength our eyes can detect. Be we know they are there. Ask any survivor of Hiroshima or Nagasaki and they will tell you the same thing. We know our scientific theories are true by inference from individual facts, experiments, and measurements. Microbes reproduce the same way as did the mamouth and the dinosaur. DNA and RNA. All live on this planet has the same basis. We have observed variation (genetic cross linking and mutation) and survival of the fittest (which is how we get resistant microbes) and in real time at that. The theory of evolution is a well based as any theory in physics. The chances are these theories are right -as far as they go- but incomplete as we shall we when we tease out more facts using advance technology.

G-D did not fashion man from mud Sept 28, 4004 b.c.e.


ruveyn

Well, when you talk of human goodness, you contrasted it with the suffering caused by natural disasters. The better direct comparison (because after all, what is evil?) is the suffering caused by humans.

Frankly, I see no non-superficial difference between suffering caused by "humans" and "the environment". Saying you don't understand some evil/suffering but realise that other evil/suffering is necessary in order to give us a sense of perspective doesn't make much sense to me, could you elaborate?

Why does God allow the suffering of billions of people, totally unimaginable suffering? Why do those people have to die in agony so that I have some "sense of goodness"?

Basically, the way I see it is that the amount of evil in the world is greater than the amount of goodness. Additionally, whilst goodness can be cancelled out by evil, it is very hard to cancel out evil with goodness (the happiness of a billionaire who has everything he desires is scant consolation to a poor man who has watched his family being sadistically murdered, but the billionaire will probably be saddened if he learns of the fate of the poor man).

So what I am saying is that even if you are right and we can only experience goodness (or kindness or lack of suffering or whatever) if evil or suffering also exists, then God would still have been better off designing a universe without goodness or kindness, as the net goodness in the universe is negative. It would be more loving of God to not give us the capacity for suffering or happiness.

Our Heavenly Father is both senile and incompetent. Any G-D who can fashion the lumber region of the human spine as it is or the male prostate gland is a flat out dunce.

ruveyn