Do you know what “Celtic” means?
No.
Professional basketball team from the northeast? Fond of the color green? They’ve been exterminated? Sport fandom has become more acrimonious than I feared …
Regards,
Shodan
“Ray Allen first victim in Rome’s new inquisition: confused fans blame heated political rhetoric”?
Many things we do for each other are tertiary: there is little or no evidence they occurred, and if we did see any such evidence, we might not even recognize it.
I lvoe logic, science, analysis, and thought as much as anyone. It takes a Christian mind to truly use these things, and even the intellectual might of Richard Dawkins is onyl allowed to him because of the Christian civilizaiton which created him: he could never exist in a pagan one. The Atheist can only survive by the Christian.
But always recognize these are tools of a man and not the man himself. Our logic is intently fallible, and if the mechanists are right, then they destroy any faith in their own thought processes as well. Yes, faith. A man without faith is a sad and miserable creature. I’ve known men without faith. I’ve been a man without faith. It’s a pointless existence.
The question is not, if never, about whether you have faith. If you didn’t, you wouldn’t be asking any questions about it at all. The quesiton is no, “do I believe?” but rather, “In what do I believe?” The most faithful-seeming churchgoer might in fact be worshipping Mammon at the bank, and the coldest Atheist may be raising up heathen alters to Pleasure or even revelling in his own brilliance. It’s what they really believe in, down at the bottom of it - where they put their money and their hope for happiness.
I in this very thread told you what you need to know, and not just me. It is up to you whether you listen. Either you believe God exists or you don’t. If you do not, then it hardly matters what you think he does. If you do, and only then, does the question of who is right about him matter. And if you like, we can easily point you to a number of good sources on that subject. C. S. Lewis is a good start: he’s no theologian, and is just writing what little he knows for everyday people, and neither talks down nor sucks up to him.
And who told you this, anyway, and why does what they think matter to you?
I would agree with this. I’m not even sure how I can explain it. How do you explain color to a man who can’t see it? It is, but it can’t be logically explained. We can logically poiint to certain conseuqneces of it (and many Christians have, and they are right), but there’s no consequence that black-and-white absolutely can’t exaplin. Matter of fact, black-and-white will explain much of it better than the color, because it is not hampered by so many hues, nor that everyone may perceive the same phenomenon just a bit differently.
Pardon, but isn’t this assuming the consequence? There’s nothing any man has ever done outside of
Or even if you rgant insanity, then you still have a situation where all possible acitons are either selfish or insane. If so, you ahve defined selfish in such a fashion as to render it meaningless: it merely now means, “All actions are selfish or insane,” or perhaps more accurately and more insulting, “All action I cannot rationalize as being selfish are insane.”
You have not defined Selfish. You have simply given up defining Selfish. What action would you describe as “Altruistic”?
It’s an overused phrase, but I really was eating and really almost did spit out my hamburger when I read this.
Maybe this will help you off the fence:
Pretty agile for guy with his hands and feet nailed down!
I was going to chime in and give a Catholic response, but this guy articulated it far better than I could have so, yeah – what he said.
Also, with respect to:
Catholics definately do not believe that (and I might go out on a limb and vouch for Orthodox, Anglicans, and Lutherans as well).
I can describe altruism easily, the same as anyone else. The question is actually whether altrusim exists, if you presume that altrusim must, in order to be genuine, be entirely free of any reward of any description for the person acting altruistically.
By that definition, I don’t think that altruism exists. People who behave altruistically are doing so because it satisfies a deep need in themselves to do so. Otherwise they wouldn’t. We do not voluntarily act in ways that have no payoff of any kind, period. We do what we do, no matter what it is, because we want to in order to satisfy a personal need or desire.
This doesn’t alter the reality that people who act for the benefit of others are doing nice things and may therefore be viewed as nice people, because they get personal reward from doing things for the benefit of others. That’s the best possible definition of what makes someone good, in my book.
This is a rational problem, however, because you are simply shoving the issue onto the word “reward.” If anything which can possibly be a reward counts, them obviously anything you do, do not do, and could possibly do must be selfish. You can always come up with a chain of reasoning which supports it. But no-one else ought to listen to you, just as if you were sure that everyone around you is secretly gay and constantly come up with chains of reasoning to explain the heterosexual behavior they frequently display. You may be using your logic, but you are not being reasonable.
Edit: I also note that you claim you can define altriusm… but did not actually do so.
Question: Is there a possible action a human could take which would not be selfish under your view?
If not, your argument seems to lack a certain unfalsifiability. In any event, I will attempt to do it and see if I can. I have no particular intent on killing myself for your amusement, of cours,e but if there is an action I can reasonably hope to accomplish I am willing to give it a try. If I find I cannot actually do it, then you would seem to be right. If I can, then it would seem people can do something good.
If it all depends on deep psychological factors and is impossible to know in any specific case, then your view would seem to be a personal bit of cynicism and an awful lot of assumptions.
As I’ve argued on this board, as near as I can tell you don’t actually bellieve in the concept of good, or wouldn’t if you examined your current set of beliefs honestly and with due care for the implications. This doesn’t render it incorrect neccessarily, only that you have a neccessarily inconsistent belief. But that’s for another day, I’m sure. In fact, if we take the mechanistic view, then humans can never be selfish or charitable.
Okay, looked up the Nicene Creed:
I got that right:
Ummm… I got that right too. Sorta. Kinda. Seems like there’s a bunch of stuff that doesn’t really add much to “jesus was the son of God and is part of god”
I got this right too, at least that jesus did die to save us.
Not much here one way or another, at least regarding what I thought.
And this looks close to what I said:
So I added some things that aren’t in there, but the fundamentals don’t seem all that different to my eyes:
God created everything.
Sent Jesus to earth to die for our sins.
This allows us to ascend to heaven.
As I’ve said, the earned/free thing turned out to be an unexpected area of debate.
Wiki seems to sum up all that rather nicely, turns out:
Still not crystal clear on the “must believe/don’t hafta” issue, but definitely in the ballpark.
I would agree with all this.
In the sense that (if what I believe is in fact true) we all reach the same destination, that’s so. But in order to let God be present to us, we’ll all have to unwind the sin inside us that we prefer to the grace of loving God and being loved and forgiven in return. And while there is darkness in the hearts of all of us, Hitler surely has a lot more to unwind than Mother Teresa does.
Of course: any action they are forced to take by threat or coercion. But really, even that is selfish, of course: they selfishly desire not to suffer the consequences of the threat or selfishly desire to reap the rewards of the coercion.
Good = that which supports and enhances health, joy, love, peace, happiness, laughter.
Bad= that which supports and enhances pain, suffering, disease, violence, cruelty, hate and other types of harm.
I believe in both good and bad, and can’t imagine why you’d conclude otherwise (apart from discussions of a possible spiritual existence. Within the context of life on earth, I absolutely recognize that good and evil exist!)
I think the real problem lies with your apparent discomfort at viewing selfishness as anything other than a negative. It can be negative, it can be positive, it can be neither. It merely describes that a motive arises from concern for one’s own needs or desires, which I consider neutral until we know what the needs and desires are.
Not a bad job matching up your conclusions with the Nicene Creed. See, it is rather intuitive when you think about it, isn’t it?
About the “must believe/don’t hafta” question, here’s what the Catechism has to say:
Maybe you have to be in the right place, inside yourself, to perceive the reality of the gift. I don’t know, but I expect there’s some of that.
If you don’t want to place your trust in the Lord - hell, if you don’t believe there is a Lord to trust, then I doubt you’re in a place where you can perceive the gift. You think you’re doing just fine without it, and you may well be. It’s got to be hard to see the gift under those circumstances; I’m not sure it would even look like a gift.
One of the things I still remember from that September night, even after forty years, was the sense of realizing how wrong I’d been about so many things - my whole world view at the time, really - but glad to let go of all that as my eyes and heart were opened. If I’d been happy in my life as it was, I don’t know if I’d have seen or felt anything new that night. But I wasn’t: I’d spent all that year trying my damnedest to fight my way out of the box I knew I was in.
And then there was no box.
Indeed!
But how about this possibility: that good and evil do NOT actually exist, but are merely two sides of one coin - perhaps the Chinese concept of yin yang is closer to the reality:
Perhaps we are here merely to experience life, and this is only possible in the balance of good and evil, so some spirits embody the evil, others the good, in the same way that actors may play the good or evil, but when the play is over, it has nothing to do with who they really are.
This actually seems much more likely to me.