I can love you and still admonish you for being an asshole.
yojimbo was throwing the cunt word around a lot in the post badchad was responding to so people are being a little ingenuous at when they seem to suggest the comment came out of the blue.
It’s pretty obvious. He was lied to and it made him so mad he’s on a mission to expose the lie. No need to take it so personally.
Guess you can point out the thread where he gave these other religions a pass? Er, wait. You can’t? Well, your first clue you were full of shit was Starving Artist saying “Good on ya!”
Some comments:
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I do have some clearcut guidelines on how I make determinations about what the religious and moral imperatives taught by Jesus and by Scripture are, and how to separate wheat from chaff in reading Scripture. I attempted to outline them some time ago, but got sniped at to a degree and in a manner that made it unproductive to continue. That was nearly the last post on matters religious I made or will make in GD.
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Civil discourse outside the Pit is something this board is famous for. It seems to have stopped on this subject.
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I feel Duffer was within his rights, and those pseudo-righteously harping on him are being jerks in the strict definition of the term. One strives to meet the standards of behavior Christ taught as a goal; one is not obliged to lie down and become a doormat just because someone who ought to know better has dirty feet and feels you are the appropriate place to wipe them.
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Certain people – badchad and Der Trihs are prime candidates – ought to stop dealing with matters relating to Christianity until they have read, marked, learned, and inwardly digested a book by a rabbi: Everything I Need to Know, I Learned in Kindergarten.
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It might be useful to avoid the fallacy of generalization in these discussions. There are, among atheists, agnostics, Christians, Hindus, Jews, Moslems, and any other religiously-defined groups, people who hold execrable views, and people who hold reasonable and civilly-acceptable views. Stop trying to define True Scotsmen among them, and recognize this.
Hey Badchad, you’re back. Care to asnwer the question I have posed twice now?
What “personal irrationality” were you fucking babbling about here?
Or is it that only you get to challenge dudes with questions?
Oh, and what are your personal beliefs?
Do you beleive in an afterlife?
How about Gun control?
Abortion?
Death Penalty?
Yes, I am aware. What amuses me is you insistence, as a non-Christian, in telling me, as a Christian, how that “love” must be expressed, aotend whether it’s good enough. IMO, I have been remarkably patient in this thread, doing no more than asking you if your blatant misrepresentation of my points is due to lack of ability to see them or lack of ability to meet them honestly. And the best that you can do as a weak defense of your repeated misrepresentations is to bleat that I am not being sufficiently Christian IYO by not allowiing you to do so. Tough noogies, my friend.
Because I have assumed that your apparent intellectual dishonesty, nicely demonstrated by selectively editing my statements so that they don’t mean what they say, did not extent to actual dishonesty. If you would like me to revisit this assumption, I would be pleased to do so.
You are grading me on my Christian faith? That’s hilarious. 
Since you are contemptuous of that faith, I will assume that the worse I do, the better grade I will get.
As a teacher, you inform your students of the meaning of Bartelby the Scrivener? Surely you know that onee the reasons for its continuing power and relevance as a work is that it is ambiguous enough to defy having anyone say definitively what it “means.” What is Bartleby about? The “parable of Christian failure” is one theory of course, but it is just as easily (and just as frequently) read as a commentary on industrialism’s subjegation of the individual, and an early example of existentialist literature exploring themes of profound alienation. So maybe some of your students had a “hard time grasping the point” because they disagreed with it. I would suggest that your own emotional hatred for Christianity should not lead you to tell your students that your preferred meaning is the only one – for this story in particular, which is famous for having no single identifiable “point” – since that seems like it would be a disservice to them.
Well, no. The passage is meant to show that this particular young man or ruler, having kept all the laws, asked the Lord what else he need to do to “to be perfect.” Jesus told him, a rich man, to give away his possessions and follow Him. But the rich man couldn’t do it; he was too attached to his wealth. Jesus then says “It is much harder for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven than for a camel to go through the eye of a needle.” The passage is generally read to mean (a) that we should no be attached to temporal wealth (“Ypu cannot serve God and mammon”); (b) that salvation is not only, or even primarily, the perogative of the wealthy (as almost everything else was) (“The last shall be first, and the first shall be last”) – a proposition that “shocked” his followers; and (c) we should expect that the Lord will ask us to make the hardest of sacrifices to follow Him – sacrifices that many of us, falling short of God, will not be able to make. “Sell you stuff and follow me” is therefore not a commandment; it is an aspiration, and one that Jesus knows most people will not be able to do – including this man, who already followed all the commandments and whom Jesus looked at “with love.”
Since you misread it, it looks like it either isn’t quite so simple, or it isn’t dumbed enough.
Where do you get this stuff? Is it from the voices in your head, or what? You continue to pull shit straight out of your ass and ascribe it to me, or to my faith, when it has no resemblance to reality. Again, how is it possible that you could not be doing it on purpose – i.e., not being intellectually dishonest? I’m having trouble even thinking of another possible excuse.
I think I’m pretty good on recognizing how my professed master explicitly told me to behave – certainly better than you are, which is not surprising given that it’s my faith instead of yours. I don’t always manage to do it, but that doesn’t mean I don’t know it. So you might spend some time shaking your head over your own insistence in forwarding your own POV even in the face of clear evidence against it, whether we’re talking about the motivations of Christians or the meanings of Melville.
If you shot it in the head, I wouldn’t cry. It’s like every other religion thread I’ve ever danced in; nobody ever changes their mind anyhow. That’s why I rarely go in 'em anymore.
Jodi, a deterministic world (actually I should have used the word universe) is one described by the philosophy of determinism. Let me add that determinism, IMHO and unlike some philosophies, is not a guide to living. It has little or no utility for me other than in discussions such as this. As such, I have no problem with either your acceptance or rejection of it. But I do enjoy discussing it. As long as you do too, I’m pleased to continue.
Though I dislike being aligned or associated with him in many ways, I will say that badchad does address this well above.
I am having a hard time proving something doesn’t exist. But I won’t yet admit that I can’t.
These questions were posed in response to AHunter3 but I’m glad you answered them too.
It seems that you use the term will to describe the portion of an evaluation that we are conscious of. If that’s true, I can accept that and we’ll move on to the free part. However, the term will connotes something more than mere processing to me. It entails a spark of autonomy – a force or entity completely separate from biology and context (current and historical). And of course, I suggest such a thing does not exist. We are the sum of our biology, history and environment. What else is there? If we are not “deciding” based on these things, what are we basing our decision on?
For any experiment that consists of repeated tests, we can suppose that either (A) each test produces the same result or (B) the tests do not produce the same result. It does not matter what the results are. They are either the same or they are not. The (C) option is to say we don’t know. In our case here, none of these answers support the existence of free will.
In the babysitting scenario, you supposed that (A) you would baby-sit in each test. If the result in each test wasn’t caused by the state of biologic and context factors that lead to it, what did cause it? If those factors lead to the same result every single time and different factors consistently lead to their results, can’t we say that the factors determine (cause) the result? Or at least the result is inescapably tied to the state the preceded it. Where is the free aspect here?
If you supposed (B) you might or might not baby-sit from test to test then what differentiates these results from random chance? Where is the will aspect here?
If you said (C) I don’t know if the tests give the same results each time, how would you propose to show that free will exists?
(A) describes a deterministic universe. (B) describes a random universe. (C) describes nothing.
So, does free will exist as anything other than the illusion of being able to make our own choices?
AHunter3, this was directed to you and I thank you for the link. I haven’t had time to read it or address your post yet but feel free to comment on anything you find here.
And with that, you can go hang along with him. Hoping someone is damned isn’t just falling short of some pie-in-the-sky ideal.
But hey, it’s my first time being called a jerk on the SDMB. I guess I just don’t know how to deal with the honor.
If by “this friend”, you meant this thread, I’m ambivalent.
If by “this friend”, you meant me, I respectfully disagree.
And Mangetout? I’ll get you for that. And your pretty ducks, too.
I haven’t read it but it is odd that you want to use a rabbi’s take* as the lynchpin of your understanding of Christianity. With your equating Jesus to “other Christ-like people” such as Ghandi did it ever occur to you that you’re jewish and Jesus is just your favourite historical rabbi?
*when I search Amazon, the reviews there say the author is a Unitarian Minister.
ThePCapeman, I am available to respond to questions, but at least one of us is lost here, maybe both.
In this thread I replied to your reply to my long post on free will vs determinism, but I had trouble making sense of your questons (that should be obvious from the post I just linked to), and it leaves me with the impression that you didn’t understand my long post.
Or maybe you were replying to a yet-earlier post of mine, I 'm not sure.
Either way, you seem to be asking questions about free will as it inheres (or doesn’t inhere) in animals, trees, and inanimate objects, and that’s where I’m lost, as I didn’t think I had said anything about every object possessing free will… only a hypothetical indivividual in a context, yes? And you also lost me w/regards to the outcomes being identical. Which implies that I must have lost you. Shall we try again?
No, not really. I’m pointing out one of several places in your holy book where Jesus is asked a plain question and he gives a plain answer. You, like many people professing to believe in Christ and to follow his words, manage to misconstrue his plain meaning and create a contradictory, tangled hash of it.
–Master, what shall I do?
Follow the commandments, love one another, and sell your possessions–
somehow comes out as “Follow convenient commandments, invent others, love those who agree with you, and get as rich as possible as fast as possible,” and I’m intellectually dishonest? Please. Clean up your own shit before catching a whiff of mine.
As to your insipid point about Melville, I was by no means limited to a Biblical reading of the text–my class yesterday touched on the various (Marxist, political, Historicist, structural, etc.) ways to read the text, and as the author of standard reference works on Melville, when I need your help in teaching it, I’ll be sure to let you know.
But your putting yourself forth as a critic of my pedagogy and of my understanding of Melville is comforting, since it’s consistent with your self-satisfaction in deeming yourself a “good” interpreter of the Bible as well. People who know it and understand it far better than you do (I studied it professionally on the doctoral level when I was in Early American Studies, since it was a major influence in the thinking and prose styles of most early American writers) are disregarded if they disagree with your infantile understanding of the Bible or of Christianity. As long as you’re proclaiming yourself to be a “good” interpreter of that text, I can feel confident that your evaluations of others are equally accurate.
Poly, I’m not sure if you’re addressing me here, but if you are I have a question for you.
As a non-Christian, I adhere to no belief system that forbids me to defend myself in any way I choose against my adversaries. I merely follow my own personal guidelines for moral and ethical behavior, some of which I’m quite sure are displeasing to Christians. Are Christians bound by the same loose ethical standards, or does “turn the other cheek” and “love thy neighbor” mean something?
I ask this of you, because whatever other disagreements we may have, I’ve usually found you to set a pretty good moral standard for people to emulate, even to the point of admitting things (as in badchad’s sig line) that don’t serve you in scoring debating points but serve you well in making reasoned and tolerant argument.
I expect (or did at some point in the past) Christians to forbear a little longer, to show more patience and tolerance in calling others names, sneering at their adversaries, acting as self-righteous hypocrites in interpreting texts, etc. yet I see them behaving not much better than atheists in this regard, and rising to small provocations with great fury. If this Christian behavior is to be excused as “merely human,” then how do you expect non-believers to follow their example? I admit, it would be very hard for Christians to show patience and tolerance and understanding and love to badchad and those who agree with him, but if they’re not even going to try, and if you’re going to interpolate yourself into this thread saying “Good for them, they needn’t even try” then have you given up hope for setting an example of Christian comportment?
Isn’t a better response to “Christ is a cunt” to say “Why say that so angrily, brother? Show me where Christ’s word offends you, and I’ll try my best to show you why I think otherwise” rather than “You’re a bigger cunt”? Is it hard? Sure. But if you can’t even show that much forbearance on a message board, where you post at your leisure, what kind of Christian behavior are you displaying in your off-board life?
I am not a Christian, but I would think the huge implication of “judge not, and forgive, turn the other cheek and do not punish” is not merely “Gee, the would would be a better place if individual people in their individual lives tried to do that” (although yeah it would be) but rather if we collectively were to implement that as policy, there could be no formal system of law enforcement.
The equally huge implication of “give what you have, not expecting return of it, and if someone asks your cloak give your coat as well” would not merely be “Gee, wouldn’t it be nice if we tried to take care of each other that way” but would, if taken as policy, especially in conjunction with the “forgiveness” thing, result in an economic system devoid of the concept of ownership, currency, debt, and market.
Implicit in “do not pray in public to show people how holy you are, but rather pray in private” is not just “don’t be ostentatious about what a good righteous upstanding religious citizen you are”, but also the abandonment of the public church and its officers.
People keep visualizing the effect of putting his teachings into practice with the assumption that they’d be surrounded by other people not doing so. And certainly such is at any given moment the case, and individuals who consider themselves so charged have to cope with that and do the best that they can. But it’s silly to go no further than that. When we ask of any other ___ity or ___ism whether its vision and mission is a good thing, we posit for the sake of argument the possibility of its success and ask what success would look like. (Not that there aren’t valid questions about the effects on the world and/or the participating people of the attempt to *make[/ i]the world end up like that, but that’s a separate question that may separately yield valid objections).
As I said, I am no Christian. Leaving aside all the rose-from-dead, died-for-our-sins, virgin-birth, walk-on-water, holy-trinity, etc theological stuff that has absolutely no meaning to me, and going back to the Sermon on the Plains and the Sermon on the Mount, it does seem as if Jesus of Nazareth is focusing on convincing people as individuals to embrace those ideals as individuals. Whether he also intended that those who heard would make the next step in their own heads and visualize the implications of everyone doing so and end up with a vision of a world without coercive punishment and acquisitive competitive struggle over tangibles and paternal theocratic control, indeed without government and authority and ownership as we know those thing… well, there’s no obvious passage indicating that his followers perceived things in that fasion, nor that J of N did so himself.
If, in fact, he did, I would be inclined to say that a better message would inspire more people if it more overtly and explicitly laid out the vision.
Although I suppose one could make the contrary point that while I can type out such things and put them up for everyone to see and not end up with police officers at my door tonight, he didn’t necessarily have that kind of luxury. Subtlety might have been highly necessary. (I’m no scholar of the period and don’t know if someone advocating anarchy would’ve been killed off as rapidly as someone fomenting violent overthrow of the Roman gov or the local Jewish gov-under-occupation or whatever, but it does seem kind of likely that they would not have liked it given the presence of an appreciative audience following him around & all)
All I can say is that I’m really glad that I no longer profess to be a Christian so that I won’t be held to the ridiculous standards of those who taunt others that do. I’ve also seen several here (the first that comes to mind – and has been castigated most for daring to slog through all the shit slung – is Jodi) have far more patience than they should and have been infinitely kinder than their adversaries could ever warrant. And since I have no spiritual path that I follow other than my own conscience, I can add with impunity that some of you are complete and total fucking assholes. I knew that the member named in the title of this thread was, however, it wasn’t until I’ve been reading along that I’ve found out about pseudotriton ruber ruber and RedFury. How pathetic that you let your hatred over whatever slights consume you to the point that you do the same to others that presumably has been done to you. You all don’t even deserve to be called atheists, but some other category solely for small-minded dickheads.
Jesus? Good move, faithfool.
People seem to be actually discussing stuff, so I think I’ll stick my nose in other business and just unsubscribe.
Is that the same reason you gave it up?
Gave what up?
Why religion, silly. I figured it must be something really huge to have scarred you this badly, to make you behave worse than a colicky infant and to have such a hard on for something that (if you really do proclaim to believe there is no God) you shouldn’t give a damn about.
Don’t like what’s legislated? Campaign to change it.
Don’t like individuals specifically? Stay away from this as friends.
And obviously, feel it’s all a bunch of bunk? Leave it the hell alone.
But deriding those whose attitudes you only pretend to know (like can you actually cite where Jodi tells “me not to abort my pregnancies or have gay sex”? or would you rather prove where you’ve consistently bitched her for NOT keeping to a literal interpretation of the bible?) in such a manner as to make you the biggest prick ever certainly does your blood pressure no favors and, undoubtedly, stunts your mental growth.