Religous people are literally "immature" (not a flame)

Great Debates
61

Getting back on track, last year I read a pamphlet entitled “Where was God on 9/11?”. It basically said, “sometimes God uses evil for his own purposes” but was at a loss to explain what these were. It did point out, though, that a number of people were “miraculously” saved from the fall of the Twin Towers as a result of being stuck in traffic or other circumstances. Never mind that given the thousands of people working there, a certain random percentage will be kept away on any given day, and never mind that some people were coincidentally in the WTC on 9/11. Some people insist in believing that prominent events are always engineered by God despite the lack of any logical pattern and in defiance of Occam’s Razor.

I think the Santa Clause analogy is an apt one. When children question how Santa is able to do the things he is claimed to, the all-purpose answer is “magic”. Likewise, if bibilical claims appear not to square with the real world, God is using magic to make things appear real for whatever silly reason.

Lib:

What’s that mean? Hard to hold down? :confused:

62

Sqweels wrote:

If the universe is amoral (and I believe that it is), then morality has a spiritual context. In that case, nothing real was destroyed that day; and what was living still is.

63

Sqweels wrote:

What is the “real world”? Do you mean the physical universe? The world that you verify with your senses? What is real is what you see, and what you see is what is real? Do you have a calliope for that merry-go-round? :wink:

64

Who could come up with the concept of beer but God? And not to mention all the other goodies I dare not mention for fear of DEA scrunity…Live and let live. If some one garners their hope from a precept of a higher power so what. I myself as a confessed evolutionist and athiest just hope they’re wrong…(Because of all the nefarious crap I’ve commited in my life time I’ll be sizzling for a couple of eternities)…Einstien was a devoutly religious man, although not in the hypocritically annal and puritanical sense of the shit that haunts the airways today. Intellectuality is relative and I doubt that anyone could argue the intelligence of a William Blake or Saint Francis…And I still get a definant charge when some one tells me I’m still loved despite myself.

Rand…stood all day in line for this freaking cracker, and it tastes like holy crap!

65

Always reason. Love is a word for lazy people to validate their continual contradiction of themselves in order to achieve any success in life. Love is considered an undefined term, and as such serves only the purpose of violating consent through non-transparency. The use of the word refers to a human being who subsists their ego off of unaccountability between behavior and rationality.

False belief and damaging belief are the same thing. If one decides differently, then they are negating any rationality to belief. When someone negates rationality, then they don’t believe that their stomach is really hurting; they certainly don’t believe that this non-belief food will do anything for their non-belief selves and their non-belief pain in their non-belief stomach. They die of starvation and/or dehydration.

Do you want to live longer than a month?
Hmm… it might be a good idea to eat some food and drink some water then.

Actually reason DOES tell people what they are required to be doing in order to be using a particular word within the context of a general language. Reason tells you that “I want to make this pain go away” solves one of two ways:

Commit suicide.
Neutralize it without trying to commit suicide.

Religious individuals require the basics:

“Ok, ok… so you don’t want to eat food. But you say you don’t understand that suicide is real… that it is a choice, that I’m making it up to coerce you by explaining that not eating food is ‘suicide’ to any rational human being. Hmmm… do you understand that you are alive? Do you understand that, even though you didn’t say it in your request to relocate your pain, you are still implying that you exist and that there is something else which exists outside of you to which you are dependant?”

I think it is quite striking how much basic talk is required to address a religious person. It’s literally like talking to a little child.

“Do you know your name?”
“Does difference exist? Is there any sense of otherness that you percieve?”
“How many fingers am I holding up?”
“Can you walk this line please?”
“You’re thirsty? I have water in one hand and battery acid in another… make your choice.”
I find that the most glaring objection of mine to your line here is that you somehow have come to convince yourself that good and evil are necessary, or that they take precidence as meaning and value over non-contradiction. “evil” is always detected as contradiction; good as non-contradiction. Without rationality, you wouldn’t even have the presence of mind to formulate these absurd uses of these words. The problem lies in individuals who discard rationality and in doing so, have disabled the only system capable of determining that standardization, consent and transparency even exist.

How? Why?

Because without axioms, words like good and evil are undefined terms. Undefined terms serve only one purpose; to violate consent without accountability. Rationality has defined good and evil in a meaningful standardization:
Good: Non-Contradiction
Evil: Contradiction

No matter how much you want to believe that the word “coffee” means “fellatio” in english (for example), doesn’t actually make it true. Your entire arguments about your perception of life as a result of your coffee habit, sound absurd to those who quite simply see you as a very slow human being.

“Dude, just TRY saying “coffee” once at the Coffee Shop and see what happens!”

“You speak of sexual relations!! These are acts bound of this earth… the “Coffee Shop” is only an earthly representation, it is not transcendant like fellatio… You are trying to tempt me with the flesh like everybody else, I just wish you would know the truth like I and others do. We have found great satisfaction in fellatio… stop drinking that coffee!”
This example uses defined terms; it becomes a different matter when terms become undefined - I had the person use ‘coffee’ to replace ‘fellatio’ at the end of the last one to illustrate how religious people are observed to communicate. Religious people start to use their undefined terms to label more and more things when rational validation isn’t leaving them much more room.
They squirm like bugs from the light, dashing off to the nearest shadow of someone elses mind of ignorance which they can find comfort and refuge in.

-Justhink

66

Empiricism is not defined by individual experience, Lib, it is only valid insofar as it constitutes a commonality of experience with other people. The physical world is not what I see, per se, but what we see collectively and predictably as a species. It is true that absolute epistmological certainty is unattainable through either logic or experience, but this is, practically speaking, a moot point. Whether or not our “reality” is the real “reality”, it is the only reality that we can know and function in. To suggest otherwise leads to solopsism and madness.

Cartesian doubt does not invalidate empiricism. Empiricism is a process not a belief. It is a system for acquiring knowledge only through the most reliable and mutually agreeable means available to us, i.e. our five senses.

Reality is only the sum of our senses, this is true, and as such our perception of reality is not a complete apprehension of all that is. It is, at best, a paraphrase, a sensory impression of the universe. Nonetheless, it is still perfectly rational to say that we should only accept as knowledge that which is available directly or indirectly through our senses. To postulate the existence of a higher or external “meta” reality (God) with out being able to produce any repeatable or communicable sensory experience of such is still empirically meaningless. Those who assert that such a reality exists based on a personal experience are not logically wrong, (and their experience may indeed be an experience of some transcendent truth which is unavailable through the physical senses) but their assertions are not helpful to those who trust only those experiences which can be transmitted or verified through empirical methods.

To put it bluntly, some of us just don’t have any faith in faith. I don’t want to think or to hope something is true, I want to know it in a manner which is emotionally satisfying.

I would say, however, that the difference between those who are willing to believe without proof and those that are not have nothing to do with either intellectual or emotional maturity. They are just a manifestation of the diversity of the human mind. Both types of minds, and the myriad types in between, are all equally capable (or incapable) of contemplativeness, compassion, mercy, responsiblity, love, hate, rage, jealousy, selfishness and selflessness.

Personally, I like this arrangement. I’m glad there are people who see the world differently than I do. I could never grow without them.

67

Justhink…love is a verb…

68

When I was thirteen years old, I would have agreed with the OP. Then I grew up.

69

Diogenes, we’ll have to agree to disagree about the Shroud. But what say you about Titulus Crucis ? Is this compelling evidence or another midieval conspiracy?

70

The lowest common denominator of the human condition is physical deterition…dust to dust, bla bla bla, We all know it as the eventuality of all living species…sensate or otherwise… But why dispell all the poetry of the religious as ass smoke when it compells us to improve the lot of the human condition, wether it is based whithin the mythological or not …It gives you a reason to give a fuck…Other wise we are born waiting to die…I am not an advocate of the pigeonholling religious right, but I can very well see the value of the hopefull, and I am glad they share this brief spat of existence with me…otherwise I’d just hate…Rand

71

The Titulus Crucis is a medievel relic which was alleged to be a piece of the title plaque which was nailed to the cross of Jesus. Such relics were commonplace in the early middle ages, and Jerusalem merchants did a thriving business in selling such things as pieces of the “one true cross,” or vials containing drops of the “Savior’s blood.”

Any church worth its salt had to have a relic of Jesus or a saint which they could put on display to attract business. European churches were rife with bogus relics from the Holy Land. The relic in question here was said to have been discovered in the fourth century by Queen Helena, the mother of the Emperor Constantine. According to the legend, Helena, on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, just happened to find the Titulus Crucis at the bottom of a cistern near the site of the Holy Sepulchure. She supposedly divided the plaque up into three parts, gave two of the parts away and kept the third for herself. This part was eventually lost and supposedly rediscovered in 1492 during a restoration of the Church of the Holy Cross in Jerusalem. It has remained in that church ever since. It should also be said that this church claims to include a large number of other “relics of the cross” including the three nails allegedly used in the crucifixion, thorns from the crown of thorns, and bits of the cross itself.

In 1999, Michael Hesseman, a freelance jornalist and prominent UFOlogist took some pictures of the Titulus Crucis to three different paleographologists (basically handwriting experts) and paid them to say that the inscription “could have” been written in the first century. Hesseman did not make any attempt to carbon date the relic or perform any other tests. He simply took his paid expert testimony and then wrote a book claiming to have “proven” that the relic was genuine. The fact is that the existence of the relic cannot be definitively assertained before the late fifteenth century. The association of this relic with the legendary one of Helena is really nothing more than speculation. The relic has never been subjected to radiocabon dating so it’s impossible to say if it’s old enough to be genuine.

Even if the most extraordinary conclusion could be supported, however, (i.e. that this is the genuine title plaque from the crucifixion) that would still prove only that Jesus had been crucified, an assertion which is not disputed by atheists.

Did I mention that Hesseman believes in UFO’s?

72

To add to the above post,mrfoi, perhaps a reassignment of terms is in order. Sure, at the surface, many religious institutions tow a surface line, in order to appeal to the majority in the least difficult manner. Political entities do the same. That’s a matter of organizing people, and gaining power.

At the heart, a religious organization is supposed to tend to the spiritual needs of people. Sometimes this gets all whupped up with idols, avatars, and the subsequent division of followers. From my study, most of the leaders of the world’s religions say the same thing, basically: that there is a way of being beyond what most people know, and the way to avoid the pitfalls of suffering all the things we suffer from, it’s best to avoid or transform the negativity that leads to that misperception. I’ve learned most from a Buddhist perspective, but see the same points echoed at the core by Christian and Muslim fine intellects. The faith comes from trusting good minds before you, and following their path. The best have no contradiction with rationality.

If it’s a frustration with religious institutions, and a simple interpretation of God, I sympathize. That can be demoralizing to an astute person. But, if you dig way deep into the crux of all religions, I’ve found there is a beautiful jewel of truth to them all, and that it has to do with the beauty of the human heart. I do hope that’s not a myth.

And, read Libertarian’s “Immaturity Is” post over and over. I have, and it’s a nice eye-opener! Thanks much for it, Lib!

73

I wonder … you see, although not formally an atheist, due to the tilt of my mind, the pendulum of my agnosticism does tend to swing in that direction. I admit that desolation does sometimes find me open. And I wonder who could look up at the distant stars in their drift into the outer dark and not, on occasion, feel filled with an unutterable emptiness?

But myopia, sir? I wonder … surely no human eye can fathom the true depths of the vastness into which we stare?

Yes, I wonder. For at other times, I look up at those stars and I marvel that they burn, that they could burn so perfectly, so hot, so long and brightly in spite of, in the blank face of the constant cold.

Those stars, what a fire of wonder they can light in my mind. A fire which sears stark images of beauty and lines of poetry into me; images and lines that remain almost satisfactory when I get them unto paper, or at least retain enough of their shapes to hint at their lost perfection.

And this fire warms me, too, against the grass damp with night, against the cooling, midnight sands of autumn as the waters of the Gulf of St. Lawrence crash and crash against the shores of this Island, my home.

That those stars burn above me exhilarates me, and lying alone I laugh as they swing around me in the night. And my laughter changes nothing about them – they still remain in their silent courses as they have since long before I first saw them, as they will remain after these eyes have closed the final time. With this glimpse of certainty comes a peace that is almost enough to stop thought, almost enough to quell the constant, churning, restless search of mind amongst its memories, desires and fears, its plans and plots and permutations, its efforts to finally define itself. And perhaps – who knows? – to refine itself into something resembling purity. Who can say – antithetical as the thought may seem – whether an atheist and a believer do not come in the end, in their own ways, to the same, unseparate peace? To something like the transport Emily Dickinson reached and reached for with her recurrent image of the blank? I wonder.

74

Justhink wrote:

You’re aware, of course, that undefined terms underly all of reason. Peano’s axiom set, for example, uses the undefined term “successor”. Without accepting the undefined term as understood, we can’t prove that 1+1=2.

Without accepting undefined terms in general, we open a Pandora’s Box of recursion. And in fact, it was the recursive nature of reason itself that set Godel to thinking about formally undecidable propositions. Not undecided, undecidable. Incidentally, he also used “successor” as an undefined term.

For any deductive system, he concluded that if it is consistent, then it is incomplete, and if it is complete, then it is inconsistent.

So which attribute of reason — its incompleteness or its inconsistency — do you think places it above love as a standard of living?

75

Diogenes wrote:

I’m afraid that an expansion of scope by ad populum won’t help you. Are blind and deaf people included in the species? They do not see or hear your empirical evidence.

And yet I, aware of a reality that is eternal and spiritual, am neither solopsistic nor mad. If you posit that I am, merely because of how you yourself interpret reality, then you are assuming your conclusion and arguing in circles.

But not everyone has five senses. Some people are even comatose.

And for those whose every sense is keen, are not their senses themselves a part of the physical universe? Aren’t you the least bit queasy about the circulus in demonstrando?

You would rightfully discard this circular argument in a hearbeat: God exists because the Bible says He does. But if you do, then to avoid hypocrisy, you must likewise discard this one: the universe is real because my eyes say it is. Neither God and the Bible, nor the universe and eyes, may validate each other if it is presumed that the Bible comes from God and that eyes come from the universe.

I’ve always found it interesting that the commonest fallacy among believers is affirmation of the consequent (A implies B, B is true, therefore A is true), while the commonest fallacy among nonbelievers is denial of the antecedent (A implies B, A is false, therefore B is false). Don’t you find that interesting?

So you say. Yet, what do you offer in the way of compelling proof?

Aside from that, you’ve neglected analytic knowledge altogether, knowledge that you cannot have acquired by your senses. Materialists believe that it “must have developed at some pre-rational, perhaps pre-linguistic phase - perhaps even before the dawn of thought.” Ah, materialism. The most mystical of man’s religions. :slight_smile:

Well, of course it is! But you haven’t gotten away with sneaking in empiricism as the one and only valid epistemology. Perhaps knowledge of God developed at some pre-rational, perhaps pre-linguistic phase… :wink:

As neurosurgeon, V. S. Ramachandran said, following experiments with spirituality and the brain’s limbic system:

“Why is the revealed truth of such transcendent experience in any way “inferior” to the more mundane truth that we scientists dabble in? Indeed, if you are ever tempted to jump to this conclusion, just bear in mind that one could use exactly the same evidence — the involvement of the temporal lobes in religion — to argue for, rather than against, the existence of God.” (Phantoms in the Brain)

Well, yes. A low-cut blouse is not helpful to a man with a foot fetish. But so what? His tastes are not superior to someone else’s.

I know you probably didn’t mean it this way, but I grimmace every time I hear the “Let them have their tar-tar sauce” condescension from materialists. It is like when Meher Baba said, “If American’s believe in vitamins, let them take them.”

I assure you that it is not the case that the faithful are clueless children who have run along to play in some metaphysical plane somewhere beneath you.

Would it surprise you to know that I feel the same way?

More unintended condescension. Do I seem foolish and intellectually naive to you? I do not believe without proof. I believe with absolute proof. God is not my imaginary friend. He is real, and has made Himself manifest to me. It is nothing that He will not do for you if you only will open your heart. Is it not reasonable that if we perceive that which is physical with our physical eyes, we should perceive He in Whose image and likeness we are created with our innermost selves?

You will grow immeasurably more when you become glad that what they see with their hearts is as valid as what you see with your eyes. :slight_smile:

76

Ok. so you believe with proof. That is a lot better than just believing, without question, what you have been taught to believe.
I remain sceptical, however, of the proof you seem to have ‘seen’ with your heart.
Would you mind expanding on how god has manifested himself to you exactly? As this is your proof, may we examine it?

I’m simply just wondering, did you perhaps ‘see’ with that part of the brain Ramachandran identified? Does saying that you see with your heart just make it more poetic?
How do you know your experience is what you think it is and not just a quirk of the brain?
It may be that I’m asking you to explain sight to a born blind but I would like to hear about your encounter with god.

77

In this thread I’m not interested in the Ultimate philisophical questions, but rather the obviously bogus religious claims used to explain common occurances or dismiss scientific evidence which contradicts the Bible. For example, the light from a galaxy 2 million light years away isn’t 2 million years old, it was either created en route by God or the speed of light was much faster 6000 years ago.

Another example: A friend of mine was adopted from Korea. When she was a little girl her parents got really sick and put her up for aboption. She says that God answered her prayers and gave her a family to take her in. “But isn’t it possible”, I asked her, “that your name was on a list of available children, and your new parents were on a list of couples looking to adopt, and the adoption agency simply matched them up?” I didn’t take much more than that for her to start complaining that I was “attacking her beliefs”.

78

Latro wrote:

It’s a very long story, and whether it would mean anything at all to you is dubious. But it might. We each have our own private moral journey, just as we each have our own consciousness that no one else can experience. No two people have ever shared the exact same experience from the exact same perspective at the exact same time; thus, each of us is a unique and free moral agent.

I cannot tell you the mechanics of how it happened (is happening), nor can I share the experience with you in the sense that I can pour into you what I am.

When I use the word heart, I mean it in the same sense that Jesus does, or as Merriam-Webster says, “the central or innermost part : the essential or most vital part of something”.

In any case, here is my (necessarily abridged) testimony as I’ve related it elsewhere. Take from it whatever you will.

It was a lengthy sequence of events over time.

One evening, about 1:00 in the morning, I walked into a hotel where we [Satanists] regularly met. One of the infrequent participants suddenly accosted me in the lobby. He reached behind his back and drew out a 38 revolver and began speaking incoherently about himself, and how I had robbed him of his rightful place.

He ordered me to leave, and marched me to my car, where he stood with his gun aimed at me as I got in. To my great relief, it started up. As I pulled away, he said, “Don’t ever let me see you again.”

To this day, I have no idea what he was talking about, but while I drove along the road to go home, I was under a huge adrenaline rush as I considered over and over that by all rights I should be dead. He was crazy, and murder would have been nothing to those people.

In my mind, I reviewed my activities over the past two years, and I don’t know why, but suddenly I felt enormous shame and helplessness. “Oh, God!” I cried out, “Please rescue me from this.”

Instantly, my whole being filled with His voice, “Find my word.”

As I came out of my semi-conscious state, I realized that my turn was only a few feet away. I swerved across two lanes, and after a blur of screeching tires and blaring horns, I found myself plowing headlong into the parking lot of one of the churches that we had desecrated some time back.

I stopped just a foot or so shy of the sign outside the building. My unreliable car choked a few times and died. Ahead of me, in the dim grayness of a streetlight, I saw written, “Come learn of God’s holy word.”

I stared in disbelief as I recalled the voice, “Find my word”. Nervous and shaking, I walked to the familiar door on the side, and to my astonishment, it was unlocked. I made my way to an office with bookshelves, and there was a Bible on the desk. As I picked it up, I heard a voice from behind me.

“Do you need a Bible?”

Startled, I dropped the book and turned around and saw a man with a white collar, obviously a pastor. “What are you doing here?” was all I could manage to say.

“I was about to ask you the same thing,” he said with a friendly smile.

“You scared the hell out of me,” I protested.

“You surprised me as well,” he said.

We talked until nearly dawn. He found out why I was there, and I found out that he had heard me and my car from the house next door where he lived. Tearfully, I told him nearly my whole story, and he listened attentively, giving me counsel and advice and, most remarkably to me, forgiving me for what we had done to his church.

As I left, he gave me a hug and said, “Don’t forget what you came for.” He gave me the Bible that I had found on his desk.

Over the course of the next several days, I began earnestly reading the book. God created this. God destroyed that. Mumbojumboabraham begat Hardtopronouncejehosaphat. Great armies fought. Great armies perished. God was jealous, and vengeance was his. The Pharaoh’s children had to die. I am, that is who I am.

The more removed I became from the urgency of that fateful night, and the more I read from those scriptures, the more I came to believe that I must have been crazy. After a couple of weeks, I put the book away and basically forgot about it. Nothing in it meant anything to me. It was dry, empty words about wrath and envy.

One day, as I was leisurely browsing in a bookstore, my eyes were captured by a prominently featured novel, called The Word. “Find my word,” I heard in the back of my head. I picked it up and read the synopsis: the Catholic Church was suppressing the discovery of an important ancient scroll that was bound to turn Christianity on its ear.

I bought the book and read it. It was an intriguing mystery novel, in which the Church deliberately mistranslated the scroll. And it got me to thinking that perhaps the scriptures were not even the correct ones. Maybe God’s word was yet to be discovered! It was in that reading that I learned the New Testament had been written in Greek.

Time passed. In defiance of both God and Satan, I became an atheist. A hard atheist. An arrogant and almost militant intellectual who delighted in mocking people of faith.

It was during this period of time that I met a man whom we called The Reverend Doctor Doctor. He was an ordained minister and held two doctorate degrees, one in English from the University of Chicago, and one in theology from Harvard.

Mine was a love-hate relationship with him. His debating skills were formidable. I therefore loved debating with him, but I hated that I could never achieve anything more than a stalemate. He seemed to anticipate every argument I could muster. I had never met anyone so well read and well versed in Christian apologetics.

One day, I recalled the book I had read, and presented to him the notion that perhaps the scriptures were tainted. Perhaps they had been mistranslated, or perhaps the Church had altered them.

At that, he smiled and pulled a very small book from his very large stack of books that he always carried. “Why don’t you see for yourself?”

It was almost a pamphlet, really, and when I opened it, it was all in Greek! “What is this?” I asked.

“It’s what you’ve been talking about,” he said, “You mean you haven’t read it?”

I flipped through the pages and looked up at him. I interpreted his grin as a challenge. I had always had a keen interest in linguistics, and if nothing else, this impressed me as something of a mystery puzzle and an opportunity to learn a new language. This couldn’t be the Bible; it was too short. And now my interest was piqued.

I went out and bought three books: an introductory Greek primer, an intermediate book on Greek grammar, and a huge two-thousand page tome that specialized in New Testament Greek and had multiple transliterations of scripture in interlinear columns.

After several weeks of study, I opened his pamphlet and, mustering my research materials, instantly recognized the first few words: “The word was in the beginning, and the word was with God, and the word was God.”

Wow! Wasn’t this an interesting coinkidink! “Find my word.”

I continued because the first several verses had a simple vocabulary, and were easy to translate. “…and the word became flesh and lived with us.”

Weird. And kind of icky.

I worked feverishly over the next few days, taking every moment I could spare to do my translations. It was some time before I discovered, or else it dawned on me, that what the Reverend Doctor Doctor had given me was the book of John. I was seeing that, in every single instance, the scriptures as translated by me were substantially the same as how they were translated in the interlinear text.

One day, I got a call from a friend asking if I would like to go to the Fiddler’s Convention. I told him what I was working on, and that I really didn’t have the time to spare. He asked whether I couldn’t work in the van on the way, and I decided that yes, I could. Besides, I had been cooped up now for months with this project, and I could use a break.

My friends and I were enjoying a ride to the mountains in a VW microbus that the driver had owned since the hippie days. We were, let’s just say enjoying the atmosphere, and listening to a blue grass tape.

I was on the eighth chapter near the end. Jesus was wrangling with the legalists (again), and I began to decipher verse number fifty-eight. Little did I know that in a few moments, my world would turn upside down and inside out.

I settled down and put the pamphlet on one knee, and my pad on the other. I looked at the verse.

…word was… …to them… …Jesus… …truth… …truth… …my word is… …to you… …before… …Abraham… …existed… …I… …am…

Translating is not just a matter of word for word transliteration. You have to sort of put it all together, because different languages use different idioms, syntaxes, and word order. So I began the task of arranging it all.

Let’s see, “Jesus said to them, ‘With all truth I tell you, before Abraham existed, I am’.”

I blinked a moment. That couldn’t be right. I had messed up the tenses somehow. You can’t mix past and present. I checked again. “Genesthai”. Yep, existed. Or was. “Ego emi”. Yep, I am. Dang. Must be a misprint in the Reverend Doctor Doctor’s pamphlet. Frustrated, I flipped through my interlinear until I found the verse there. No, it was the same. No misprint.

I looked out the window at the beautiful scenery, and turned to look once more at the verse. Suddenly, understanding rushed over me like the mighty Niagara.

I am, that is who I am… Before Abraham existed, I am… In the beginning was the word… And the word was God… And the word became flesh and lived among us… Find my word…

When I looked up, everything and everyone was indescribably beautiful. They were all looking at me, as later I was told that I had jumped or jerked visibly. I had never seen these people this way before. Every person in this ragtag band of former hippies was beautiful to me! And I loved them! I loved them as I had never loved anyone in my life.

And I felt love as I had never felt it. I felt a profound and gentle peace. A thousand questions I had had my whole like were at once answered. I was not who I was a moment before, and I knew it. I saw everything now through new eyes. I interpreted what was around me with a new mind. I felt compassion and love with a new heart.

I was positively giddy with excitement. I looked at one of the beautiful faces. It was the friend who had called me and invited me to come. His quizzical look made me laugh.

“My God!” I cried out, “He’s God!”

My friend’s expression didn’t change.

“Don’t you see!?” I said, leaning forward toward him, “Jesus is God!”

He smiled at me, nodded his head, and said, “Cool!”

The concert was wonderful. Everything was wonderful. Everyone was wonderful. I had found His Word.

When we returned home, I immediately sought out the Reverend Doctor Doctor. He knew instantly when he saw the glow on my face. We said not one word, but embraced and cried on one another’s shoulders. We both praised God, me with childlike enthusiasm, and he with mature reverence.

“I want you to teach me everything you know,” I told him through my tears.

“I already have,” he said. “Now I pray that God go with you always.”

From that day on, I have used the words he gave me to encourage people or comfort them. They are very familiar words to my Straight Dope friends, and they are words that I offer to any who seek to escape meaninglessness.

God go with you in your search for truth.

79

With regards to love: its arbitrary nature. When one is compelled to analyze reason, it becomes blatantly obvious that using the term love as a descriptor is only logical if one is looking to achieve consent without transparency - as such it is a socially acceptable form of abusing others without known means of assuring accountability, and ultimately creates the conditions necessary for human slavery. There is literally nothing that I cannot otherwise articulate by not using love as a word. Instead of using this word, I can simply define the word without ever using it. In this means, I’m not allowing the existence oif a such a non-standardized term to account for my judgement of phenomenon. I’m also not allowing such a flexible system for my behavior - making it more difficult for others to detect a self-contradicion by being vague with an undefined term. It’s a process of using very lenient fact finding controls, with the well understood assumption that people aren’t privy to controls that actually place pressure on accountability in a more stringent manner with regard to the senses. This allows contradictions, which exist in a ‘more real’ order (another aspect of reality which places pressure so as to make a negative wholly obvious, when many people are still using this experiment of excluded controls to pass positives through an area where the negative is proven given inclusion of that which they are ‘intentionally’ witholding), to pass through the logical centers of validation as not being present, when in fact they truly are present.
With regards to incompleteness:

Incompleteness is what allows us to percieve ourselves. Incompleteness is not a system from which to procure meaning in and of itself. It actually isn’t that logically meaningful to derive a quality of standardization from logical corruption (duh).
The meaning, purpose or value in this instance is calculated with regards to consent of this property of incompleteness.

That property of incompleteness being the belief that free-will and/or purpose exists.

Consent is calculated by mapping territory and understanding that in the last little spot which we cannot map; that there is something there and it does not possess the option to come and go from ‘nothing at all’ as it pleases. In this sense, we form a layer of communication between two incomplete entities, by taking comfort in the knowledge that both of them are completely accountable for everything they proclaim (because they cannot physically escape the rest of the map without destroying existence, and cannot move without being located in a precise means). This is ultimately a system where a person is being tracked based upon a quality they cannot mask or discard and exist at the same time. What this does is to dissolve the resource of trust used to exploit cognitive immaturity against it’s consent. Cognitive immaturity thrives off of this exclusion of known pressures which relate to the validity of believing topics at hand. Incompleteness does not mean that you actually have the freedom to declare that you do not exist, and to make this declaration TRUE. Nobody has that freedom. We know this because of incompleteness.

-Justhink

80

Uh. You already believed in god if you believed in Satan. You merely switched one mythological figure for another.

Hence, no journey, no transformation. You just changed uniforms for the same team that you played with.

Of course, if that isn’t already obvious to you…

I have no reply, really, for you and others like you who have followed up to my OP. When you and your ilk speak of the shroud of Turin and other such patently illogical nonsense such as scholars “proving” the bible to be accurate.

Well, the nicest way to put this is that you folks and I have no common frame of reference. You don’t understand what logic is, or you fall into one of the categories I defined earlier (delusional, cowardly, etc.) Or, if you understand logic, you use it sparingly, only when it does not interfere with your superstitious beliefs.

I have defined mythology previously, and yes, religion and mythology are essentially the same. If you don’t understand that, then it’s like discussing the stock market with a an aborigine who’s never seen money. The only distinction I can see, is that ORGANIZED religion is a business concern based on a particular mythology. Without the organization, they are identical. READ THE DEFINITION OF MYTHOLOGY. (Although, technically, religion need only use certain elements of mythology, like imaginary beings or parables. It doesn’t need to use everything. So in case someone wants to get all excited about semantics, they are not IDENTICAL or EQUIVALENT, but merely the same essence. )

As for Libertarian’s much-praised post, I shall reply to it when I have more time. It made me laugh a lot, think a little, but since it is so lengthy and well-structured (albeit not well thought out), I shall need time to form a reply.

My immediate reaction is that he uses emotional and judgemental arguments in favor of rational ones. Merely slapping a few adjectives from the Thesaurus he got for xmas in a post hardly makes it logical. But religious types respond to such simplistic bombast, corniness, and “Reader’s Digest” type writing.

Remember, religious people like Libertarian are the same kind of people who watch “Touched by an Angel.” He certainly writes for his audience. You know, preaching to the choir and all.

hmmm. It does reads like a sermon. Telling, no? Judgemental, emotional, illogical, authoritarian, accusing others of a sin at the same time you yourself are perpetrating it (whether both parties are guilty or not. I admitted my mistakes in previous posts…)

“Libertarian?” There’s a handle dripping in irony…if ever there were someone who is not free…

That’s just off the top of my head. I’ll reply in detail later…