If somebody is that desperate to have every good deed be punished and every evil deed be rewarded (by some arbitrary standard of good and evil, presumably their own personal one), I’d say that they’re probably not going to be able to truly accept the RPG model as I’m presenting it. Even if you went back to the ‘leaderboard’ version of the model that I originally proposed way back then, where the avatars are tacked to a scoreboard once the Players are done with them, that still leaves the Player, who was the one actually responsible for the deeds, entirely unpunished and unrewarded.
A person might attempt to use ‘apologetics’ to force their morality into the RPG model (levels, anyone?), but at it’s heart, the RPG model proposes that our world is a game that possibly eternal and maybe already perfect beings play for fun, not because they have to play or for some reward. If a person wants sticks and carrots and brimstone and harps, then there are other, different models available for them to choose that will provide them those things.
Exactly. He has a section in their where he says he believes in a deity who created the universe because he saw no way the solar system can be so well ordered through natural processes alone. He specifically rejects the western God, because the Bible is so full of nonsense, but he accepts some sort of a god.
He did get called an atheist (so did Jefferson) but that was because he didn’t believe in God, not that he didn’t believe in any god.
I read a science fiction novel that wasn’t about religion (it was about old people living forever by getting new replacement parts, thereby ruining it for younger people in some way cuz they’d never go away, let traditions change, new ideas evolve, etc.) but anyway in the book planets are colonized and space travel is routine.
One of the planets mentioned, in passing, is the Vatican planet.
It cracked me up but it got me thinking that belief in god can’t be explained away. Science, it seems to me, generally explains the ‘how’ of things even if you go back to origins but only explains the ‘why’ in evolutionary terms, which I think leaves some people cold and they’ll always want there to be a god no matter how advanced knowledge gets; because philosophically speaking, one can always absorb the new scientific discoveries into the belief as was done with the world being round and is now done with theistic evolution.
I used to think that a huge amount of new knowledge could change a paradigm at its roots and cause people to rethink everything from scratch instead of just trying to mold the new information into the original religious notion they have.
That doesn’t seem to necessarily be how it works though.
Once these people die, however, and new people are born I wonder if the god idea would resurface again if it somehow was completely culturally squashed with the death of all believers (which is obviously an abstract notion since they’re raising the next generation) but even if that was theoretically possible, I guess it would pop up again. After all, it popped up in the first place.
The fact that now, unlike when it first popped up, there’s greater scientific understanding strikes me as not necessarily destructive of god yearnings to the extent that there will always be things, presumably, that we don’t yet understand in the present and one can always go back to wonder about the original beginnings of the whole thing, like theistic evolution does.
What I did was point out my meaning and how I was using unknowable within a certain time frame. That may be an improper use. I’m still unclear on that. It seems to me without any time frame reference at all almost everything becomes unknown rather than unknowable. regardless, my meaning was clear given the rest of my posts. My purpose was to show that this statement by you.
was incorrect. Even after I pointed that out you refused to acknowledge it and instead focused on a grammatical error to make your point rather than the meaning I was conveying.
It doesn’t just teach kids god’s love, it teaches us all. I’m not saying I don’t have questions about god’s divine purpose but I didn’t make the rules, sex starved repressed old men did. Cite the passage that specifically condemns pedophilia… you’ll find it is seldom mentioned in the bible. But there is a story involving Moses ordering the rape of the Midianite virgins for the purpose of marriage (Numbers 31:7,17-18). (these nuts claim said virgins were as young as 3!)
And then there’s Psalm 137:9 O the happiness of him who doth seize, and hath dashed thy sucklings on the rock! (You know what rhymes with rock and how god is hung up on naming your privates directly).
Except that nobody made that argument in the first place, and it wasn’t the point of the OP. The point of the OP was whether or not Flew’s logic was sound. Flew doesn’t posit anything about whether or not there is a god due to death or suffering.
Flew is deconstructing the logical validity of the believer’s assertion. It isn’t logical.
You aren’t one of those that asserts that about god’s love, apparently. Fine.
“The statement “God loves us, but his love is inscrutable”, is completely unfalsifiable. It is therefore not an assertion at all.”
NO! The church sanctioned baby raping shows us that god loves us I can’t help it if you can’t understand that. I’ll pray for you, “Oh Lord may the spirit give 9thFloor the eyes to see and the ears to hear so that they might understand your wisdom, Amen”. The cites show that god does not condemn pederasty as a matter of fact his top generals were allowed to kill everyone in the rapee’s family before they were put to the “rock”. If the Catholic Church kept this tradition they wouldn’t be having any problems right now. (God is wise)
Hey I’m sorry prayer is like ordering something out of the back of a comic book it takes 6 to 8 weeks for delivery and when you finally get it it’s nowhere near as cool as it look in the book. (At least I tried). Maybe a local rectory would be the place to find enlightenment don’t let them dissuade you remember they’re a little gun shy.
