QG, where the blue heck do you get “Honour A Divine” from the basic tenets of Buddhism?
…and I note you’ve been careful to say “A Divine” and not “The Divine”. Why is that? A tacit acknowledgment that “The Divine” of Islam is not “The Divine” of Judaism?
And what about Xipe Totec? How were your “Two Commandments” applicable in His worship when His worship made them paradoxical?
So God is an abstract concept now? Well, as an atheist, there’s a God I can believe in. In fact, I already do! I believe that the abstract concept “God” exists, fo’sho. Well, that was easy.
Alright. Then why stop at “a Divine, and generally be nice”? Let’s go even higher still, to “generally be nice”. Then my morality gets to be included, too. So hey! Basically, we all believe the same thing. Isn’t that nice? Oh, except for all the Christians and atheists and everyone who don’t. Because you still haven’t shown that these are indeed the “common precepts”.
The bigger picture is still a matter of interpretation, mon ami. No amount of “pulling back” removes your personality from the picture.
I love this argument. Hope is a feeling. Feeling hope is in and of itself proof. Can I give you empirical evidence of it? Not really, no. I don’t believe you can recognise hope on any brain scans of any kind (although there may be a pattern associated with it; no idea, though). So why do I accept this feeling which has no empirical evidence? Because the only characteristic necessary for hope’s existence is that it be felt. I can feel it. Ergo, it exists.
God, on the other hand, is not just a feeling, but a being. I can’t say “if you feel God, God exists” since feeling God and God existing * can be two entirely seperate things. You could be mistaken when you feel God. Could you be mistaken when you feel hope? No, because the feeling itself* is hope.
On the subject of unanswered questions, you seem to be missing quite a lot of them by now. I’ve answered yours - could you answer ours?
Something/one metaphysical exerts effects on people and their world. What you complain about, I’m sure, is the way humans thought they should honour that metaphysical being. That’s where humans goof it. They know Somebody’s (or Something) is looking out for them but then they try to figure out how to make the Somebody/thing happy. Humans ain’t too bright so they don’t often do the best job of figuring it out, I suspect. They make their ham-handed offerings the best way they can, kind of like your little guy bringing you home a ceramic ash tray when you don’t even smoke and the thing is ugly as sin. He meant well, he just didn’t quite get it right.
An art critic looking at the ashtray would say it was junk but that wouldn’t negate the kid’s sincere intention at doing right.
Note the sacrifice in the story; the god flayed himself - sacrificed himself - to feed humanity and humans, in their turn, emulated that. Even today, people behave the way their heroes do in tribute to them even when it seems crazy to do so.
You want a modern example? Hazing - in which people allow themselves to be mistreated in order to align themselves with and belong with a group they emulate. And that’s just people doing that to please other people, not even a god. So don’t be going on about what people have done to please the gods they revered; it’s a human tradition to equate sacrifice and pain with some sort of ritual. Take the Samoan pe’a tattoo, for instance - performed without any sort of painkiller. There’s plenty of examples.
Sort of; it’s a bad analogy. There’s only one constitution per country; there are many religions, with many interpetations. And constitutions tend to be more coherent and consistent.
There are religions that don’t have a “divine”. And the Ten Commandments are hardly restricted to “be good to others”; “worship no other god” and “honor the Sabbath” have nothing to do with being good to anybody. Nor are they the universal values you claim. And then you have religions that call for people to be cut up on altars or ritually strangled.
You have the proof if you have experienced them. Unlike a claim to the existence of something external, a purely internal experience doesn’t require external proof. Or, as the phrase goes, I think therefore I am.
A brain scan with the proper equipment and techniques will get you the picture. I’m afraid finding a volunteer to have the relevant brain chunks flash frozen, cut out, and mailed to you so you can hold them in your hand might be a little hard.
It’s more abstract; not a personification but more a universal consciousness/oneness concept.
Well they are. Don’t know where you get that they aren’t. You do realize that Mohammed is not considered a god, do you not?
See hazing and tattoos above.
The point was that speaking to some adherents won’t necessarily give you a true picture of the nature of the thing.
Note; not as person.
No, they are the ‘honour the Divine’ part.
You keep dropping out of meta. And, really, please name the religion whose entire body of adherents practice these rituals. Today.
And there, my dear DT, is precisely where the proof of religion exists. You cannot accept that your own experience is the only valid experience for all humans; however if you accept that ‘proof’ can be had by personal experience alone, then you have zero leg to stand on in your claim that God does not exist. None. Bupkus.
All a brain scan will do is show you that the brain lights up or that blood and/or oxygen are flowing to certain regions. Which means nothing; it’s not a picture of ‘thought’. It’s a picture of what is happening to the brain during ‘thought’. You’re not going to be able to show me a photo or brain scan or anything else of an actual thought.
Bzzt. You seem to be missing a rarther important point.
Hope is entirely a personal experience. That’s all it is; a personal feeling. I accept that proof of an entirely personal experience can be found by having that experience.
Gods are not a personal experience. There may be some level of personal experience involved with them, but that is not what they are. I am perfectly willing to accept that feeling that God exists proves that you feel God exists. I’m not happy to accept that feeling God exists means he does. There’s the difference, mon ami.
Exactly right. So ignore how I interpret it. Ignore how Der Trihs interprets it. Educate yourself and form your own opinion from your own perspective.
Or not.
But don’t tell me to give you “facts” after I’ve indicated that that’s not my purpose.
I get so tired of intelligent people being hostile to me for actions that I don’t take and beliefs that I don’t hold just because I am a Christian.
Sounds fair to me – as long as the challenge is to Quiddity and not to me!
Nor, surely, will speaking to you?
I have read your arguments in this thread with increasing irritation. By asserting the similarities, you are in direct contradiction to a huge number (possibly the majority) of adherents of those very religions you seek to defend. You don’t realise that yours is a fundamentalist view, too.
Your appeal to a search for common ethics fails. Where’s the common ethic between Islam and the cargo cult that worships Prince Philip? Prince Philip is not divine, and I suspect even the Queen would agree with this.
IMO in actual fact, with your “honour the Divine”, you’re actually acknowledging a human frailty that ascribes that which cannot be comprehended, to something magical. As the cargo cults prove. What you’re seeing there is the birth of a religion. “What’s all this crap falling from the sky? Must be magic.” All else follows from there.
Another Doper posted this at one time. I’ve kept a copy on my wall ever since. This is an excerpt:
It’s nice, but it’s the debating equivalent of glurge emails.
This is a non-answer to my question - what does their worship have in common with JudeoIslamiChristian worship? The nett effect that is exerted is “go flay slaves in My name”, so what are the similarities? “exerts an effect” is no pointer to commonality when the effects are wildly disparate.
“By their fruits shall ye know them” and all.
At least kanicbird would have simply tell me the Aztecs were worshiping demons, not God. I find that a lot more believable than your nebulous “A Divine” that mysteriously, metaphysically makes some people go to church to pray and others go to pyramid to flay.
You know nothing about Buddhism and are speaking out of your ignorance - there is no “Universal Conciousness/Oneness Principle” AS A CENTRAL TENET of Buddhism. If I was still a Buddhist, I would find your presumption quite insulting. No,scratch that, even now, I still do.
I get it from you saying “A” rather than “The”. But of course, since you say they are, I have to believe you :rolleyes:
I’d submit to you that flaying someone else alive hardly equates to submitting yourself to hazing or tatooing, and that no worship that embraces human sacrifice can be said to have “be good to others” as its other central tenet.
Heh. I knew you or your fellow believers would try to twist and distort what I said like that. To quote myself : "Unlike a claim to the existence of something external, a purely internal experience doesn’t require external proof. " That’s external as in a god, as opposed to internal like an emotion.
It’s a picture of what a thought is on the hardware level; not a very good picture, because our scans aren’t that good yet. It doesn’t look like a thought because we don’t know how to translate it. That doesn’t make it not a thought, any more than a paper with unreadably coded orders isn’t a set of orders because we can’t read it.
My bolding:
Oh, so not only is it abstract, but “The Divine” is temporally-dependent?
Sure, but when I look at a tree, a certain pattern of activity occurs in my brain - that doesn’t mean the tree is a figment of my imagination - my experience of the tree happens inside my head, but it’s not ultimately caused there - the theist argument here is that, similarly, the pattern of activity that represents a religious experience does not necessarily demonstrate that the cause of the experience is internal.
Of course it’s fairly easy to demonstrate the existence of the tree (unless you get into philosophical arguments about the nature of existence itself) and so the analogy breaks down a bit, but still, It’s not necessarily a sound argument to say that activity observed in the brain means the totality of the attendant experience is caused internally.
I’m sorry, but I was gone for a few hours. Has Quiddity Glomfuster(or anyone else, for that matter) come up with what the top twenty religions have in common yet? Has he even shown that he understands what the basic tenets of the top twenty religions are?
Remember, to keep on topic, we have already established that all atheists have one basic tenet that we all share: We have not yet seen any objective evidence that there are any gods.
Assuming atheists are all singing from the same unhymnsheet, why does it need to be the case that theists need to all get aligned with each other?
Certainly if it were the case that people were saying “all of us theists are right, and because we’re all in agreement, you guys - the atheists - are wrong”, there would be a need for consensus, but as far as I’m aware, that isn’t the case. Why should any given theist have to be in agreement with all or any other theists in order to present and argue their own viewpoint?
I could be wrong, but no-one’s actually supporting that (well, except Valteron, but he seems to have abandoned this). We aren’t arguing that theists actually disagree with each other a lot, therefore they shouldn’t criticise atheists; just that theists disagree with each other quite a lot. Either way, criticism of atheism is fine (as long as it’s reasonable, of course 
).