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.Originally Posted by Arrowni
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.
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.
My blog about literature (in spanish): http://otrasbentilaciones.wordpress.com/
billl, I read Arrowni's post again and it seemed logical to me on a second reading.
About the devil, I give the same point in my previous message.
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.
Last edited by G L Wilson; 08-29-2011 at 05:16 PM.
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.
My blog about literature (in spanish): http://otrasbentilaciones.wordpress.com/
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don't see how any atheist can find the thought of that tolerable.
Last edited by YesNo; 08-31-2011 at 10:44 PM.
I don't find the thought of that tolerable. I don't think about that.
Well, that's one way to handle what's intolerable: don't think about it.
We suffer for no reason.Well, that's one way to handle what's intolerable: don't think about it.
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:
[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.
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