All I know is that if the humans don't group together around here, they will be eaten by the bears.
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All I know is that if the humans don't group together around here, they will be eaten by the bears.
That's for sure.Quote:
Originally Posted by G L Wilson
We're not sure if He is a "good God" and we cannot prove scientifically that there is a God. Given that, the best we can say is that suffering exists for reasons that cannot always be controlled by human beings or that are prompted by the same.
The world is the Devil's, only we in it can oppose him.Quote:
Originally Posted by ralfyman
It is wonderful how much time good people spend fighting off the devil. If they would only expend the same amount of energy loving their fellow men, the devil would die in his own tracks of ennui.Quote:
Originally Posted by G L Wilson
- Helen Keller
Just a random quote that came to mind.
It is not always possible to love our fellow man, but it is possible to love ourselves always. That we must do.Quote:
Originally Posted by cl154576
It's not always possible for SOME to love another. But for others you cannot judge how far reaching their love is.Quote:
Originally Posted by G L Wilson
Jesus doesn't love me, BienvenuJDC. I can't see his love as being all that far reaching.Quote:
Originally Posted by BienvenuJDC
First of all....stop with the Jesus bashing. I was speaking about people in general. There are many people who are loving and show it. Jesus was one of those, and I'd disagree with you. The Jesus that I've come to know, well, HE loves all people, which would include you as well.Quote:
Originally Posted by G L Wilson
Well, from a neutral standpoint, since suffering is not inherently evil, we should probably decrypt the meaning of pain in the natural world to understand the kind of values that a God would promote by promoting pain. For example, let's say that pain exists to lose individuality, then the goal of suffering would be to show us that individuality is not a consistent way of survival, that losing your own face and going through pain is actually cool. Let's say pain exists to keep you away from dangerous experiences, then you probably need to go towards dangerous experiences, you need to learn, risk yourself and understand the universe.
Once you buy that, then rape seems like a favor. 2 + 2 = 5. Be careful when that sort of thinking starts to make sense to you. Especially when some'one' is after your individuality. And it can cause you pain.Quote:
Originally Posted by Arrowni
I'd argue the issue is not anything like 2 + 2 = 5, but then you'd probably believe I actually care about the reasoning I wrote.Quote:
Originally Posted by billl
billl, I read Arrowni's post again and it seemed logical to me on a second reading.Quote:
Originally Posted by billl
About the devil, I give the same point in my previous message.Quote:
Originally Posted by G L Wilson
I believe God is mad, not malevolent by habit.
I find it a bit funny that so many half-clever atheists feel compelled to antagonize theists in a forum concerning religious texts.
As for the question at hand, you've got it all wrong. First, the original question from which your "moderation" is derived is: how can a good God exist with or have created a world brimming with evil? The fairly decisive answers to this question are called theodicies, of which my favorite is Keats's soul-making theodicy. But the most effective one has probably been the free will argument, which says that for humans to have freedom of choice they must be capable of doing evil. Earthquakes and disease, while unfortunate, are hardly 'evil,' which clearly implies intent. Theologians have been spanking atheists on this subject for years, so the atheists decided to moderate the question into one of suffering, which is a logical fallacy (begging the question) because it presupposes there is some fundamental incompatibility with goodness and suffering, a fairly vapid, modern notion. The original poster actually commits an additional instance of begging the question when he presupposes that God is directly "promoting" such suffering. If you expect a rational response, you must first pose a rational question. Therefore....
If you want someone to rationally answer your original question, you must first demonstrate how a "good God" and a world with "suffering" are necessarily incompatible. Second, you must demonstrate how God must necessarily be "promoting suffering." To save all the weekend atheists the trouble of more sophomoric incoherencies, let me just say that the New Atheists have largely failed in this task.
What I don't think most adherents of popular atheism understand is that, though there are quite a few atheist philosophers, there are very few concerned with explicitly arguing about the nature or existence of God, whereas there have been major religious and academic efforts to make the arguments in favor of God for centuries. Few academic atheists are concerned with refuting, say, the ontological argument for God, whereas nearly every theist is interested in defending it. The end result is that when a few crackpot popularizers of atheism emerge with a bunch of wacky non-arguments, they are neither prepared for nor even acquainted with the opposing literature, and because there isn't much serious academic literature that is explicitly atheist, they are generally uninformed about the topic period. This is why people like Hitchens get thoroughly eviscerated in debates by people like William Lane Craig and why people like Dawkins spend so much time avoiding people like Craig that even other atheists start calling them cowards.
This relates to this post in that the poster is so obviously unacquainted with the subject that he poses a question that wouldn't pass muster in a high school debate class.
By the way, my favorite criticism of New Atheism came from Terry Eagleton, former Oxford professor. "Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology."
For non-arguments, no-one can beat a religio. Heaven hates us so much that the bile fairly drips from it. As they say, jealousy is a curse.Quote:
Originally Posted by stuntpickle
It makes no sense to be an atheist and discuss about God, it would be more logical to be an antitheist or something like that, which frankly sounds kind of like just being a jerk.
As an atheist I see the Bible as a book that people decided to take more literally than other books. To my knowledge I am allowed to criticize characters in other books, even if other people like these characters. What is so wrong, then, about criticizing this character known as God?Quote:
Originally Posted by Arrowni
NOTHING, and I am a believer.
I think the reason that atheist vs theist exchanges keep popping up around here is because people find it entertaining to antagonize each other.Quote:
Originally Posted by stuntpickle
I think I agree. We might as well accept responsibility, collectively, for why things are messed up rather than waste our time blaming some deity for it.Quote:
Originally Posted by stuntpickle
Suffering is a topic that interests me. Buddhists seem to have a desire to go beyond suffering. This, I think, is very different from the atheistic interest in removing suffering or maximizing pleasure.Quote:
Originally Posted by stuntpickle
What puzzles me about suffering is that we are the cause of so much of it for the people who live around us especially when we want to punish them for doing something that gets on our nerves. If we really want to stop suffering we should just stop letting things that those closest to us do get on our nerves.
But, on the other hand, suffering seems like a great learning tool. I'd hate to see it completely eliminated.
I found a copy of William Lane Craig and Quentin Smith's Theism, Atheism, and Big Bang Cosmology in the library tonight as a result of your reference to Craig. I first became interested in the Big Bang when I learned from an atheist, of all people, that scientists not only believe that the universe had a beginning, but it had a beginning out of nothing, that is, out of no pre-existing space-time matter-energy stuff.Quote:
Originally Posted by stuntpickle
I don't see how any atheist can find the thought of that tolerable.
I don't find the thought of that tolerable. I don't think about that.Quote:
Originally Posted by YesNo
Well, that's one way to handle what's intolerable: don't think about it. :)Quote:
Originally Posted by G L Wilson
We suffer for no reason.Quote:
Originally Posted by YesNo
I agree with you that the New Atheists are largely ignorant about and prejudiced towards religion. But, that said, there simply are no robust, irrefutable arguments for God's existence. The ontological argument is weak and has been shown to be such by many thinkers, including Kant and Aquinas. Here's what Hume has to say about it:Quote:
Originally Posted by stuntpickle
[T]here is an evident absurdity in pretending to demonstrate a matter of fact, or to prove it by any arguments a priori. Nothing is demonstrable, unless the contrary implies a contradiction. Nothing, that is distinctly conceivable, implies a contradiction. Whatever we conceive as existent, we can also conceive as non-existent. There is no being, therefore, whose non-existence implies a contradiction. Consequently there is no being, whose existence is demonstrable.
Then there's the cosmological argument, which makes no sense to me, since if the universe needs a cause then why does God not also need a cause?
The weakest in my opinion is the so called "argument from design."
Perhaps the existence of suffering does not neccessarily disprove that there is a God, but it is indeed difficult to reconcile the death of a child with the existence of an infinitely good, infinitely powerful God, especially when said death is accidental and free will plays no part. And if you think of how many children, how many small innocent children have succumbed to famine and disease and natural disasters throughout the history of mankind, I'd say any God who set up such a state of affairs can only plead either impotence or indifference.
If God existed, it would change nothing.
I suspect if God were part of the universe (matter-energy within spacetime) then it would need a cause, but if it were not part of the universe then the idea of causality would not be meaningful since there wouldn't be any time, at least as we know it.Quote:
Originally Posted by Darcy88
Just a guess.
I like to think that since the universe had a beginning it must be grounded in another dimension. One can call that God or whatever. Otherwise, one would have to say that the universe was created by Chance, which I would then call a God. But I think invoking Chance is even more absurd than acknowledging some grounding dimension.
Since you quoted Hume, I doubt that he would have any higher confidence in Chance than I do. Here's a quote from Hume that G L Wilson told me about in a different thread: "...there be no such thing as Chance in the world...": http://18th.eserver.org/hume-enquiry.html#6 Of course Hume lived centuries ago. He didn't know about radioactivity or that the universe had an origin in the Big Bang.
I don't think invoking chance is absurd. Why should it be?Quote:
Originally Posted by YesNo
This discussion provoked me to do some digging. Here's something I found:
Cosmologists Paul Steinhardt and Neil Turok..... theorize that the cosmos was never compacted into a single point and did not spring forth in a violent instant. Instead, the universe as we know it is a small cross section of a much grander universe whose true magnitude is hidden in dimensions we cannot perceive. What we think of as the Big Bang, they contend, was the result of a collision between our three-dimensional world and another three-dimensional world less than the width of a proton away from ours—right next to us, and yet displaced in a way that renders it invisible. Moreover, they say the Big Bang is just the latest in a cycle of cosmic collisions stretching infinitely into the past and into the future. Each collision creates the universe anew. The 13.7-billion-year history of our cosmos is just a moment in this endless expanse of time.
Now if you would please excuse me..... I'll be spending the next several hours gathering the scattered pieces of my blown mind.
There is no longer any good a priori.
Interesting explanation of the big bang!Quote:
Originally Posted by Darcy88
I suspect there are other universes out there so why not have them collide? However, I wonder if entropy would wear this infinite machine down? If so, it would have worn down by now.
The idea of colliding universes does illustrate that the idea of the universe having a beginning is an intolerable idea. Either come up with a cause, collisions in this case, or acknowledge some other dimension from which a choice was made to create it.
Whether or not one is a believer in a supreme being, and whether or not one is a Buddhist (a different thing entirely), either philosophically or religiously, one option is to strive to find enlightenment and thus escape suffering by embracing life as including pain. The beginning of this is understanding that pain and suffering are two very different things. If one is a believer, one can perhaps find that there is a God given grace in such an aspiration.
Lest this seem Pollyannaish drivel, I don't believe it is necessarily something achievable, much less easily so. None of us is Buddha. But the idea is comforting. And perhaps, placed in a cosmology that allows for many earthly lives, it provides greater meaning and dimension.
God suffers little in his little kingdom and is therefore not noble.
If I understand the difference between pain and suffering, one can escape from suffering through enlightenment, but not pain. Right?Quote:
Originally Posted by joelavine
I do think we go through many earthly lives simply because others seem to have experienced this and reported on it, although I do not recall any of my own.
Pain is inevitable, suffering is not. That's what I was told.
According to the Buddhist view, pain is a bodily response, and is part of gross suffering referred to in the 4 Noble Truths, of which the first is The Truth of Suffering.
Suffering includes pain, but is more focused upon the existential suffering that we all experience through dissatisfaction, impermanence, not getting what we want, getting what we don't want, death etc.
I have heard that upon realising a stable Emptiness, a practitioner is able to overcome bodily pain. This is a by-product though, as the aim is to strive for Enlightenment. Overcoming bodily pain is not an aim because there is pain relief in medicine etc.
Are you suggesting that Buddhists believe in a creator God? In the Wheel of Life, there is a "God" realm, but no Creator God/ ultimate God. It is said that life and the universe are perpetual - never ending.Quote:
Originally Posted by joelavine
How do Buddhists view the Big Bang? That would be a beginning of the universe, I would assume.Quote:
Originally Posted by Paulclem
Buddhists and Christians are both indifferent to suffering and both equally useless.
I don't know of any specific reference to the Big Bang, just that life has been ongoing. for example it's said that beings have had countless lives. They refer to time in eons described as the amount of time it would take to wear down a 100 mile high lump of rock with one wipe of a piece of silk every 100 years.Quote:
Originally Posted by YesNo
The Buddha did say that it wasn't very productive to spend time investigating the distant past, and that a person should focus upon their current condition. he used the analogy of someone shot by an arrow where you wouldn't take time to find out where the arrow had come from, and who shot it before you had dealt with the wound.
Paulclem... I tried hard to track down the passage/sutra where that position is put forth, the arrow one. Thanks for bringing it up. I am really only that familiar with Zen Buddhism and it indeed does seem in Zen that such philosophical speculation is considered unimportant if not wholly irrelevant next to the urgent and absorbing task of attaining enlightenment.
:biggrin5:Quote:
Originally Posted by G L Wilson
4 Noble Truths:
The truth of suffering
The causes of suffering
The cessation of suffering
The path to the cessation of suffering
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Noble_Truths
One man's useless is another man's useful.
Soundbites are a good way to communicate when you don't want much of a conversation.
I'm sorry - what does this mean?Quote:
Originally Posted by Darcy88