Does God make sense?

[SiXSwordS]

@MrDibble

I answered your questions seriously.

You answered in the same manner as my son answers on his first pass through his homework on a sunny day.

1. Yes
2. No
3. Maybe so
4. Davy Jones at the Alamo
5. I don’t know
   “Can I go out and play?”

Whatever thought there was went into devising a strategy to win the thread by attacking an opponent and making it personal and emotional.

Show me what there is “thought-free” or “an insult”. Cite…

If you can’t remember what you posted, there is a way to see everything you’ve ever posted. I leave you to work that out.

…or shut up.

Hmm, I’m not sure how to handle that. Let me consult my debater’s handbook… Here it is, under Juvenile and cross referenced with King of Spain.
Says here my counter curse is, “Why don’t you make me!”
That does seem a little infantile…

So why bring it up, then? Do it or don’t - but it’d look mighty cowardly if you give up replying to me.

You are a little needy when it comes to thinking these things through, but I’ll give you a hand. You have no valid expectation that anyone should respond to any post you make. It says nothing about me, my posts or this thread that I read the first sentence of your first post and immediately skipped to the next post.

As to cowardice, is that an idea that you picked up from being a devotee of Buddhism, that if someone is haranguing and pestering you and you ignore them then you are a coward?

And you still haven’t answered my questions, or addressed my reply about Buddhism. Just insulted me repeatedly. So I’ll stick with “not debating in good faith”, and I’ll keep asking for answers. Confrontationally, yeah. since that seems to be the only way to get you to reply to me.

Please don’t foist your debating style on me.

The only concept worth replying to is that of “fucking” with people by reintroducing the Aztec religion. The Aztec religion functioned very well within that culture.

Some posters in this thread have expressed the opinion that the entire collection of sociopathic monsters should be eradicated. Maybe an Aztec-like religion would be an improvement on that.

Say one third of the society chooses another third of the society to act as human sacrifices and the remaining third act as witnesses. Then, after the sacrifice, the people are relieved of their neurotic inability to lead normal lives and all is good.

Two thirds of the society survive rather than facing complete annihilation.

[SiXSwordS]

@hotflungwok

Um, why? Why would turning to a made up, even if believable, being be better than facing reality and dealing with in a healthy manner? How would that be any better, or make any more sense, than a person having an invisible friend?

I guess I am drifting a little, and I apologize. I got caught up in playing with Dibble.

I’m not sure that it would be any better. But I do think that, in some cases, having an invisible friend can be functional.

To overstretch an analogy, ingesting Lithium is not a generally healthy thing to do. However, given the consequences of mania, a doctor might prescribe Lithium.

Facing reality and dealing with it in a healthy manner sounds great… I have been working at it for years and I still haven’t gotten there. And I miss my invisible friends.

[mswas]

@MrDibble

Right - no problem there.

Would you also agree, though, that there are values expressed in the Gita that are antithetical to those considered normative to Christianity?

Well the notion of multiple faces of God is sort of antithetical to Christianity except that it is handled in a way by Angels.

[mswas]

@Voyager

Rewinding to before the shouting.

By values I assume you mean ethics and morals. Atheism has none, but atheists necessarily do have ethics and morals. If an Abrahamic value is “thou shalt not kill,” and an atheist has this same value, if for different reasons, is it in conflict or not? Except for the first commandment, it is possible that an atheist can hold to all the 10 commandments - how much of a conflict is that? I reject God belief as a moral or ethical belief, since it has no direct impact on others. It is possible that god belief inspires someone to hold an ethical belief - but so can other reasons, just as absurd.

So atheism conflicts with belief systems (in rejecting them) but not with value systems

I mean essentially that you have to claim space. You stand somewhere, and rather than it being a linear progressive continuum of values, it’s more a plane. There isn’t a neutral spot, everyone stands somewhere in relation to where everyone else stands. So even if you and the rest of the atheists don’t have a shared value system, you are still as an individual claiming space on the grid.

[hotflungwok]

@SiXSwordS

I’m not sure that it would be any better. But I do think that, in some cases, having an invisible friend can be functional.

Like when? For how long?

To overstretch an analogy, ingesting Lithium is not a generally healthy thing to do. However, given the consequences of mania, a doctor might prescribe Lithium.

Ingesting Lithium is not generally healthy for a healthy person. But for someone who needs a chemical imbalance in their brain corrected, it is healthy. In what situation would an invisible friend be healthier than any other choice?

Facing reality and dealing with it in a healthy manner sounds great… I have been working at it for years and I still haven’t gotten there. And I miss my invisible friends.

Um, that… didn’t sound right. Maybe you should talk to someone about it.

[SiXSwordS]

@hotflungwok

Like when? For how long?

Sticking with the idea of belief in God as the belief in an imaginary friend (which is my interpretation of your post) any time is “healthy.” (I do not think belief in God is unhealthy.) And there is no real time limitation. I know people in their nineties who believe in Guardian Angels.

In what situation would an invisible friend be healthier than any other choice?

I’m not sure this is what you’re looking for, but I think it would be a function of what options are available. Imaginary friends, in my untrained opinion, are self-created. They are not prescribed by a professional. So, if someone does not have resources that are based on trained professional opinions and they respond to a stressful situation by talking to their friend rather than burning down a house, the imaginary friend is the better option.

I will have to plead ignorance when it comes to the idea of “treating” imaginary friends. I do not know when having an imaginary friend becomes dangerous. I would think the line would be based on what the imaginary friend “tells” you or talks to you about and how “real” the friend is to the “patient.”

Um, that… didn’t sound right. Maybe you should talk to someone about it.

I have. Thank you for the concern.

[hotflungwok]

@SiXSwordS

Sticking with the idea of belief in God as the belief in an imaginary friend (which is my interpretation of your post) any time is “healthy.” (I do not think belief in God is unhealthy.) And there is no real time limitation. I know people in their nineties who believe in Guardian Angels.

Yes, I am saying that. And belief in god isn’t necessarily unhealthy all the time, but can be. And when there are options that work better, why bother with it?

I’m not sure this is what you’re looking for, but I think it would be a function of what options are available. Imaginary friends, in my untrained opinion, are self-created. They are not prescribed by a professional. So, if someone does not have resources that are based on trained professional opinions and they respond to a stressful situation by talking to their friend rather than burning down a house, the imaginary friend is the better option.

So what if someone talked to their imaginary friend instead of getting help? Or thought that their imaginary friend would take care of things and not expend any effor to help themselves? And since when is self diagnosis and treatment of mental conditions the best way to go? I’m pretty sure that any time an adult has an experience that results in them talking to imaginary people then something is wrong.

I will have to plead ignorance when it comes to the idea of “treating” imaginary friends. I do not know when having an imaginary friend becomes dangerous. I would think the line would be based on what the imaginary friend “tells” you or talks to you about and how “real” the friend is to the “patient.”

It becomes dangerous when the imaginary friend substitutes for other things in the person’s life that the person needs and isn’t getting. The imaginary friend is just a facet of the person, they are basically talking to themselves. Like I said above, any time an adult is handling problems by talking to invisible people something is wrong.

[Voyager]

@mswas

I mean essentially that you have to claim space. You stand somewhere, and rather than it being a linear progressive continuum of values, it’s more a plane. There isn’t a neutral spot, everyone stands somewhere in relation to where everyone else stands. So even if you and the rest of the atheists don’t have a shared value system, you are still as an individual claiming space on the grid.

That’s an excellent model. While where people are on the plane might be influenced by their religion, I’d say that the Cartesian distance between an atheist and a liberal Christian is probably much less than that between the liberal Christian and the fundamentalist Christian. I’d say further that there is an area on the plane where we roam, as our values change, and that to a large degree the perimeter and position of this area is genetically determined, with culture moving us to one part of it or another.

[begbert2]

@SiXSwordS

If you can’t remember what you posted, there is a way to see everything you’ve ever posted. I leave you to work that out.

Not that you should necessarily care what I think, but this reads as though you can’t find a cite for your claim either - that is, that the accusation was not based in fact. This is why pejoritave accusations are best accompanied by illistrative quotes.

@SiXSwordS

The only concept worth replying to is that of “fucking” with people by reintroducing the Aztec religion. The Aztec religion functioned very well within that culture.

Some posters in this thread have expressed the opinion that the entire collection of sociopathic monsters should be eradicated. Maybe an Aztec-like religion would be an improvement on that.

Say one third of the society chooses another third of the society to act as human sacrifices and the remaining third act as witnesses. Then, after the sacrifice, the people are relieved of their neurotic inability to lead normal lives and all is good.

Two thirds of the society survive rather than facing complete annihilation.

In case you were wondering, the main reason that you’re not getting serious debate is that your OP reads like a bait-and-switch -that is, a trick or a trap. You’ve created this bizzare, totally unrealistic scenario where “religion” is a magic, quick-acting fail-safe remedy for this inexplicably horrible, irrational species-wide disease that you have provocatively named “atheism”, based on a loose reading of a strawman OP from another thread.

In reality, of course, there’s no sign whatsoever that atheism is bad for your morals, and precious little evidence that religion would improve the behavior of a former atheist in the slightest.

So to me, it sounds like you’re fishing for quotes from the atheists of this board saying that religion is good and atheism is bad, just because the “religion” in your Op is in defined to be the cure for defined-to-be-bad “atheism” in your OP. Which smells fishy to me, at the very least. Are you trying to hook a few quotes where atheists on the board are saying that atheism (or rather, “atheism”) is bad?

Perhaps if you had arbitrarily chosen terms that injected less of the insulting falsehood element into the debate, you’d have gotten more actual debate out of it. Like, supposing if there were a group of people whose only available food source was Soylent Green, but if they knew they were eating other people, they’d go psychotically insane. Would it, in that circumstance, be justifiable in telling them that there was an Island, er, rather, that there were kelp farms supplying the foodstuff? Answer: probably, though depending on how reprensible you found the thought of these people eating other people, perhaps not. Perhaps it would be better to let them die then to live a life corrupted by the lie, and the ills that the lie was covering up and condoning.

Or, perhaps you just wouldn’t care enough about these people to waste a lie on them, as some of us felt about the pejorative cartoon “atheists” of the OP.

[Der_Trihs]

@mswas

I mean essentially that you have to claim space. You stand somewhere, and rather than it being a linear progressive continuum of values, it’s more a plane. There isn’t a neutral spot, everyone stands somewhere in relation to where everyone else stands. So even if you and the rest of the atheists don’t have a shared value system, you are still as an individual claiming space on the grid.

The problem with that argument is that atheism doesn’t put you in any particular place “on the grid”. Atheism is all about what you are not, not what you are. You can say “Statistically, atheists are more likely to be over here, and Catholics over here, Hindus over there, Jain up there . . .”, but there’ll be an awful lot of overlap. Simply knowing someone is an atheist doesn’t tell you much.

[MrDibble]

@SiXSwordS

You answered in the same manner as my son answers on his first pass through his homework on a sunny day.[…]
Whatever thought there was went into devising a strategy to win the thread by attacking an opponent and making it personal and emotional.
If you can’t remember what you posted, there is a way to see everything you’ve ever posted. I leave you to work that out.

You mean like this? . Anyone can see that your characterisation of my answer is self-serving bullshit

@SiXSwordS

You have no valid expectation that anyone should respond to any post you make.

Actually, I think I have a perfectly valid expectation to have points of the OP clarified.

Does anyone else think asking the questions I did was unreasonable? They’re just requests for expansion on your own premises - I was asking you to delimit the powers I had in your scenario. Not asking you to defend it or anything.

@SiXSwordS

It says nothing about me, my posts or this thread that I read the first sentence of your first post and immediately skipped to the next post.

If you think that, you’re sadly mistaken. I’m sure others can see how seriously you’re taking your own debate, then. If I post a thread, especially a controversial one, I make sure to read all the replies fully, even if they are just drive-by jokes or lekatt posts. I may not reply to each one, but I do read them.

That’s called simple courtesy. But you may not know that, I can tell.

@SiXSwordS

As to cowardice, is that an idea that you picked up from being a devotee of Buddhism, that if someone is haranguing and pestering you and you ignore them then you are a coward?

No, it’s something I picked up here on the SDMB. Place is full of bad debaters who think browbeating ad hominems beats logic, and insult trumps courtesy. I’ve been civil to you, and you don’t repay the great effort that takes me by answering some simple requests for clarification? What am I supposed to make of that?

Plus, you don’t know much about Buddhism, do you? Many’s the monk who’d have hauled out the Zen stick on your ass by now. I’m being a model of restraint by comparison.

@SiXSwordS

Please don’t foist your debating style on me.

Answer my questions, then. I don’t think “clarify your op” IS A PARTICULARLY HARSH DEBATING TACTIC, ACTUALLY. yOU MUST HAVE A SOFT SKIN.

@SiXSwordS

The only concept worth replying to is that of “fucking” with people by reintroducing the Aztec religion.

That wasn’t one of my questions. Answer my questions.

[SiXSwordS]

@hotflungwok

And belief in god isn’t necessarily unhealthy all the time, but can be.

Under what circumstances do you think belief in God could be unhealthy? I think there are certain mental illnesses — schizophrenia for example — that might have a hyper religious component, but I do not think faith, by itself, can be unhealthy.

And when there are options that work better, why bother with it?

I’m definitely not advocating that anyone should.

I’m pretty sure that any time an adult has an experience that results in them talking to imaginary people then something is wrong.

Carrying forward the idea that prayer would constitute talking to imaginary people, do you believe that whenever someone prays, there is something wrong with the person praying?

The imaginary friend is just a facet of the person, they are basically talking to themselves. Like I said above, any time an adult is handling problems by talking to invisible people something is wrong.

And if someone is talking to themselves, without the illusion of another person being there, is there also something wrong then?

[SiXSwordS]

@begbert2

Not that you should necessarily care what I think, but this reads as though you can’t find a cite for your claim either - that is, that the accusation was not based in fact.

I understand that position. I just don’t think that the demand for a cite makes sense when the information is in this thread.

In case you were wondering, the main reason that you’re not getting serious debate is that your OP reads like a bait-and-switch -that is, a trick or a trap.

I don’t post often in GD and I find it nearly impossible to gain any insight from threads in this forum because they generally seem to have this same arc. Very little content and a lot of invective and bickering.

You’ve created this bizzare, totally unrealistic scenario where “religion” is a magic, quick-acting fail-safe remedy for this inexplicably horrible, irrational species-wide disease that you have provocatively named “atheism”, based on a loose reading of a strawman OP from another thread.

I don’t mean it as a bait and switch. I read the OP from the other thread and found it to be passive aggressive, for want of a better term. ("Fine! I’ll accept atheism! But I can’t love you anymore and I don’t respect the President either!)

I do not believe that atheism is realistically associated with the negative characteristics implied by that OP.

So to me, it sounds like you’re fishing for quotes from the atheists of this board saying that religion is good and atheism is bad, just because the “religion” in your Op is in defined to be the cure for defined-to-be-bad “atheism” in your OP. Which smells fishy to me, at the very least. Are you trying to hook a few quotes where atheists on the board are saying that atheism (or rather, “atheism”) is bad?

No. At the outset I thought that the sticking point would be the assertion that the existence of God could disproved.

Or, perhaps you just wouldn’t care enough about these people to waste a lie on them, as some of us felt about the pejorative cartoon “atheists” of the OP.

Yes, I included a premise that atheism caused all of the failings of the other OP and that God would automatically cure them. It is an overly glib premise.

[SiXSwordS]

@MrDibble

Are you saying that I’m the only one who knows what this window-cleaner-maker discovered?

No.

Basically, that I actually have an option to hide the truth from everyone?

Yes.

Or that once out, this evidence might not convince the majority of people?

Yes.

Does my being any of those things change my powers under this premise?

There is no premise that grants you “powers.” The ability to influence religious thinking is not a power like the ability walk through walls, it is a prosaic ability that contemporary, real people have.

And may I point out a logical flaw? If premise 1) holds, then I, upon discovering the truth of premise 2) and with the power of premise 3) , would be a sociopath myself, and in a position to fuck with people like no-one since L. Ron Hubbard. So you can’t trust anything I say about what I’d do - I might resurrect the Aztec religion just to fuck with people. Or reveal the truth just to watch civilization break down.

Can you imagine any characteristic that might mitigate your urge to fuck with people? Any that might exacerbate it?

[MrDibble]

There, that wasn’t so hard, was it? All that silliness and insult for nothing - you came around in the end. Don’t you feel better now?

Of course, I don’t see how the first and second answers are consistent with each other (unless I’m immedialtely going to kill everyone else who knows), but at least it’s a answer

Can you imagine any characteristic that might mitigate your urge to fuck with people?

I can* imagine* such things, yes - a conscience, morals, an awareness of game theory. But your OP already discounts any of that in Premise 1. by making me a solipsistic, immoral, anarchic nihilist, so all I could do is* imagine*.

Any that might exacerbate it?

You mean worse than already being a solipsistic, immoral, anarchic nihilist? Maybe if I was a paedophilic cannibal too. Maybe.

[Der_Trihs]

@SiXSwordS

Under what circumstances do you think belief in God could be unhealthy? I think there are certain mental illnesses — schizophrenia for example — that might have a hyper religious component, but I do not think faith, by itself, can be unhealthy.

How could it NOT be unhealthy ? Making up a fantasy and taking it seriously is always unhealthy.

@SiXSwordS

Carrying forward the idea that prayer would constitute talking to imaginary people, do you believe that whenever someone prays, there is something wrong with the person praying?

Yes.

@SiXSwordS

And if someone is talking to themselves, without the illusion of another person being there, is there also something wrong then?

Yes, if not as much; it’s a waste of time. Which is why it’s pretty much a nonissue, since few people will bother.

[hotflungwok]

@SiXSwordS

Under what circumstances do you think belief in God could be unhealthy? I think there are certain mental illnesses — schizophrenia for example — that might have a hyper religious component, but I do not think faith, by itself, can be unhealthy.

Anytime a person is making decisions in their life using data that isn’t based in reality, there can be problems. Choosing to use faith in god instead of medicine, for example.

Carrying forward the idea that prayer would constitute talking to imaginary people, do you believe that whenever someone prays, there is something wrong with the person praying?

Depending on the degree it’s carried to, yes. I think something is definitely wrong if they think they’re hearing a response. At the very least, they’re wasting time.

And if someone is talking to themselves, without the illusion of another person being there, is there also something wrong then?

Talking to yourself (a little bit, anyway) and talking to imaginary people are two different things. Just compare someone talking to themselves in a grocery store about what kind of lunchmeat to get and Tom Hanks talking to Wilson.