Uh, Hoyle’s theory. :smack:
My little girl is asleep now, so I really can’t ask her. She did however say that “rational” means “it makes sense.” You appear to have altered her definition by adding a personal sense of perspective to it that she did not include.
She said rational means “it makes sense” not “It makes sense to Czarcasm.”
So no. Your personal perspective does not make an irrational act rational. So don’t kill anybody. ok?
Like my Daddy told me:
“Don’t listen to the voices in your head. They’re not on your side.”
It’s good advice. 
Creationism was taught in school as part of the history of science when I went to school - but that was before the recent resurgence, and in New York. I absolutely agree that it should, along with phlogiston and spontaneous generation. It was a scientific theory 250 years ago. Back then, there was no known mechanism for allowing the Sun to burn as long as would be necessary for evolution and geology.
When YEC got falsified, through geology in large part, many scientists abandoned it. In fact the only reason it is now a controversy again is that the fundamentalists started to try to call it science in order to allow it to be taught in schools. They’re the ones who put it in the realm of science again, so they have to accept the methods of science.
Anyone who considers the creation symbolic, or a myth, is indeed considering it a religious belief, and thus don’t have to worry about scientific consideration. Any supposedly true statement about the natural world is up for falsification, any statement purely about the supernatural world isn’t.
- Who does it have to make sense to to be rational? You? Your little girl? The neighborhood? The general community?
- “Don’t listen to the voices in your head. They’re not on your side.” Would this include God?
No, I actually have criticized everyone so far who went so far as to imply that their opponent lacked an elementary school understanding of the material by running off into a rambling and incoherent (and inaccurate) rant about the (mis) use of adjectives. That’s right, every single such person. You can go and check!
That would be incorrect. A person can rationally conclude that they don’t want to die based on making a rational measured assessment of their life to date, and deciding that by and large it was nicer to be alive than not. Based on this, they can rationally determine that avoiding death is something to put on their ‘to do’ list, if they have a rational expectation that their live will continue to be nice for whatever duration of time they feel is necessary to justify not slashing their wrists. See? It can be a rational conclusion.
Excepting that fatalism is not generally rational. Sure, maybe if you’re being physically tortured all the time and being prevented from enjoying life in any way, maybe then it’s rational. But my life isn’t like that. How about yours?
It seemed a reasonable leap to assume that you were speaking as a theist with the opinion that “without god, how can life be worth living!” Only with the (mis)conception that life is in general arduous for all rational persons could you conclude that the only rational assessment of life is fatalism. That sort of ignorance about the way a rational person can enjoy life speaks of the perspective of a person outside that sphere, speaking pejoratively of the people in it. The only reliable source of nonrational people I know are people who embrace faith as an alternative method of guiding their lives: that is, a theist with misconceptions about atheists and their ability to enjoy live without eschewing rationality.
It is possible that I was mistaken, and you are not a theist. If so I don’t know where you got your misconceptions about rational living, though.
I assume that by “rational being” you mean a “purely rational being”, since all humans are at least a little bit rational, atheist or not.
Being an atheist does not make you a (purely) rational being, but being a (purely) rational being probably does make you an atheist. And depending on how you define faith, you can easily find atheists who don’t entertain it. I myself don’t have absolute certainty in anything that lacks at least some reasonable evidence for it. (Heck, I don’t have absolute certainty in a lot of things that do have reasonable evidence for them.)
No, you did that to be insulting, by attempting to imply that it was your debate opponents who needed obvious things pointed out to them. (Go ahead, deny it. I don’t mind.)
Oh, I understood you. (So did Apos.) The problem is, you’re wrong. Specifically, you seem to misunderstand the meaning of the word “can’t”. If you can’t do something, then you can’t do it. If something is merely difficult, but you still can do it, then you can do it. See? A = A, and Not A = Not A. Simple.
If something is merely extremely difficult or unlikely, then it is not impossible and if you think it is, then you’re wrong. Not A != A.
If something is really impossible and you think it isn’t impossible, then you’re wrong. A != Not A.
So you’re right that there’s two categories of things that you “know” you can’t do: The things you actually can’t do, and the things you can do and have incorrectly decided you can’t. Faith can’t help you with the first case; impossible is impossible. And faith doesn’t help you in the second case, except for the trivial impetus of getting you to start moving. It certainly doesn’t make the task possible, since it already was possible; you were merely mistaken about the task’s impossibility.
I suppose you make a case for faith being somewhat useful if you have a chronic inability to determine the doability of things, and you need a goad like faith to get you to try everything (even truly impossible things, like flying unassisted) in order to assist you in succeeding at something. Fortunately for me, I’m don’t have that sort of extreme problem in assessing whether things are possible.
A rational person will not view the lottery as a viable investment scheme, no. But a rational person is capable of playing the lottery for entertainment value, and a rational person who had two bucks left and (for whatever reason) no possible chance of survival if they did not turn that two dollars into ten thousand within a few days, and they had no other way of doing that than winning the lottery…that person would play the lottery. It would be the rational choice, by virtue of there being no other viable choices.
Success does not have to be guaranteed for a choice to be rational. It merely hast to be the best choice among the options available (by the reasoner’s best assessment of what’s “best”.)
Let me repeat that. Success does not have to be guaranteed for a choice to be rational. It merely hast to be the best choice among the options available (by the reasoner’s best assessment of what’s “best”.)
What you of course fail to do here is demonstrate in any way why reckless teenagers are a boon to society, thus collapsing your whole point into “it’s good to be stupid becuase…uh…we need teenagers to take stupid risks and maybe die.”
However I’ll be nice and pretend that you actually made your point, and actually had presented an example where somebody needed to do something “stupid” to save the tribe. The problem is, such an act then isn’t stupid, assuming you value the success of the tribe. A rational person who cares about the tribe would step forward and take up the dangerous duty (assuming nobody else did first), out of the rational interest in protecting the thing that he values: the tribe.
See, this is what you completely fail to grasp about rationality. Rationality is when you use your brain to figure out what you want to do. Preferably without making mistakes or basing your decisions on things that aren’t real or true. You’re pretty close to the mark when you contrast it with stupidity. Like, it’s stupid to not take a short-term risk if failing to do so guarantees bigger problems down the road. It’s rational to try and do things that protect the things you value. If you happen to value something other than yourself, then it’s even rational to die to protect it (if you happen to value it that much). This is what rationality is. It’s not some dumbass thing where you’re like “No, there’s a 51% chance of failure; I cannot attempt it and instead must die horribly.” Great mother of cheese, that’s so wrong.
You’re quite certain of a lot of things. Congratulations.
(And I seriously hope you don’t mean that link that stated that that “rationality” is “the state of being rational”? Oh yeah, that was quite a link. It certainly captured every subtlety of your use of the term.)
No, it’s not, unless you happen to like dying. Assuming you are correct in your assessment of the odds (which of course you would be assuming), you are four times as likely to survive if you go out and face the bear. Gee, that’s a hard one. Other obvious problems with your assessment:
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A rational person would likely realize that starvation is a suckola way to go. Much worse than being mauled by a bear. At least that’s moderately short.
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A rational person would realize that you can write the notes and put your affairs in order before you go out and face the bear. Have cake, eat too.
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If you value life so little that you think your family would benefit from finding a dessicated corpse in the plane with a note “I decided not to bother trying to survive”, as opposed to merely finding a note “I’m going to try and live! See you next week, or hold a memorial service. Serve cookies” then it would be rational to stay. But as previously noted, a rational person can easily like living, or actually want to see that family again.
Very, very poor, if the best you could to was make a simile out of it. Goalpost move much? Sorry, no, it seems that even you can’t coerce “obese air” into being a coherent concept; the language does not bend to your whim in this manner.
(Keep in mind, before you attempt to turn this into a prolonged debate or something, that if your sentence references actual obese air, then “she was round, like a jelly donut” means she was a jelly donut.)
As is usual when you attempt to falsely attribute nonsensical ideas to others, this is where you go off the rails. A rational person may possess irrational desires, since such desires are, you know, irrational; however being a rational person, the person is able to recognize all the problems with chasing his dreams, and refrains. This happens a lot. I mean, how many people do you know who would like to have a million dollars? A lot? How many of them have attempted to rob banks? Not many? Was it because they had faith that they would get the million dollars another way? No, probably not. It’s because they rationally decided that it was best not to pursue that particular fantasy that way, for various rational reasons. This is not so hard to understand.
Look, even you know that chasing the aging prostitute is irrational. Why then do you claim that the rational person is the guy who does so? Are you that desperate to try and make rationality seem stupid, to make faith sound less stupid by comparison or something? No, wait, you stated yourself above that stupidity is the contrast of rationality, and that faith is there to make otherwise rational people act like stupid people. Man, I just don’t know what you’re trying to prove!
You’re pretty sure of a lot of things. The proof in is the pudding, I suppose.
There’s two ways to answer this question: as if you’re not trying to distort my point, and as if you are.
If you’re not trying to distort my point, then if my thought processess are “I’m going to get cookies by going to the store and buying them”, then I’m using a rational method to satisfy my irrational desire. If my thought processes are “I’m going to get cookies by jumping up and down and clapping my hands, because I’m sure that that will make cookies appear” then you are not being rational in your methods for getting the cookies.
To answer your distortion of my point, I will answer with a paraphrase from the movie Stranger than Fiction: Scylla, if you pause to think, you’d realize that that answer is inextricably contingent upon the type of life being led… and, of course, the quality of the cookies.
Ah, trying to undermine my position by pretending I’m stupid! How very ad hominem of you! It’s good to see that I’m getting the benefit of the full gamut of your debate skills.
And to take a page from my little sister, when she was in her teens, “I’ll rational cookie you!” (She, of course, did recognize the absurdist amusement value in using words in a nonsensical manner. She’s is quite smart, though.)
Aw, I’m crushed.
Perhaps it will help me understand your viewpoint if you answer the following questions:
What specifically do you think should be taught about creationism?
Do you think that there is a difference between “science” and “non-science”, and, if yes, what specifically is the difference?
(Also, are you saying that, 250 years ago, creationism offered an explanation for why the Sun has burned as long as would be necessary for evolution and geology?)
Are you putting creationism “in the realm of science”?
Are those the only two choices: statements about the natural world, and statements purely about the supernatural world?
Isn’t creationism about the natural world *and * the supernatural world?
Is creationism a “statement”? If yes, what is that statement?
And, how about your statement about statements? Is it falsfiable?
BTW, perhaps you missed my earlier question: “Where [in this thread] did you mention that you’re Jewish?”
I would appreciate an answer from you. Thanks.
Did you notice that when you described this subset and their non faith reasons you immediately went to speaking of evidence? As if that factor
indicated it was not faith. Faith is not always a leap. It can indeed be small steps forward in continued faith while processing new evidence.
Fair enough.
Belief that God wants you to feed the hungry, help the poor, care for the sick, love thy fellow man, even your enemy, is also unfalsifiable. It’s not a perfect world and people use all kinds of reasons to justify their actions. If a religious fanatic bombs a clinic it’s because religion is bad. If a non religious person commits some horrible deed it’s because he’s a nut. How do we weigh what is done wholly, or partly for religious belief, against whats done for other motivations? If we stick to faith that puts new evidence to use then Christians would not be calling the Bible the inerrant word of God and pulling out select verses to justify their bigotry. We would be considering the historical evidence we have about the Bible, and the data we have about homosexuality. If we stick to faith using available evidence the dialogs would be quite different and less people would be manipulated by leaders who misused and misinterpreted Holy Books.
Even just a cursory count you say? You haven’t even done that. A cursory count would include a reasonable attempt to tally numbers on both sides. Like most people who use this argument to show how bad religion is, you ignore or dismiss and minimize many on the positive side and stress the negative side as if it’s a slam dunk that you are correct. It’s not. Furthermore I think it’s a glaring example of extreme bias when someone makes this kind of argument. And yet you can call my argument useless. Think of hundreds of small soup kitchens and homeless shelters all over the US. Thats just the US. Think of hundreds of religious programs offering medical services to the needy in our country and in others. How do you measure the cumulative effect of those programs on human lives? How many lives have they saved? How many have they turned around and greatly improved. How about AA? Over the years of it’s operation how many lives has it saved and improved. Not just the alcoholics themselves but everyone close to them.Would you like more examples of how the faithful day in and day out year after year have a positive effect on society? It’s so easy to dismiss and ignore that and say, “yeah but look at the crusades. religion bad” I don’t make excuses or dismiss the evils committed in the name of religion but what I do dismiss is the kind of glaringly bias and one sided argument that you and others make about the effect of religion on society. It’s childish and unworthy of your intelligence.
My point here is generalized to the extreme but I don’t find it illogical or unreasonable. If the division of believers and non believers was 60/40 then it might be tricky. The division is more like 90/10 isn’t it?
Regardless, since you see fit to dismiss my argument rather casually I’ve decided to be more direct in telling you what I think of yours. Personally I don’t see any realistic way to measure the two sides accurately or meaningfully. What I have seen are offhand examples like yours that haven’t made any serious attempt to reasonably consider both sides of the argument. I don’t find your obviously biased assessment in any way accurate {even cursory} or meaningful.
Scylla, amazingly, you’ve managed to drag out a phenomenally silly argument with yourself to some pretty amazing lengths. Congrats. I guess your argument is one of those things that could never happen unless you discard rationality and just take it on faith that babbling incoherent nonsense constitutes some sort of response. In the hopes that maybe you’ll reconsider this premise…
“What makes sense” is a pretty good start for discussing rationality, but you seem to have missed the follow up question, which is “given what?”
In the case of wanting to live, “given what” is “I want to live.” Given that, there are all sorts of things that are rational to do (like, not drinking bleach), and irrational to do (like drinking bleach). But it isn’t irrational to value living against all odds and to keep on striving even though there is vanishingly tiny hope. It might be irrational IF your premise was “conserve energy so that I can die thermodynamically superior!” All of your rebutalls simply contain a host of covert assumptions and premises. That’s how you can pretend that such judgments are “reasonable” without really thinking about what that means or whether those assumptions are not, in fact, values, as I argued.
It might have helped, I guess, if I had said that bare desires are not themselves rational or irrational: perhaps that would have avoided the bizarre, masturbatory tangent you took, but probably not, since apparently only the very silliest and bizarre interpretation of anyone’s words will do. I should have thought that was obvious, and frankly, I sort of expect that it was obvious to you as well, but your desire for rhetorical flourish overtook any sense of honesty.
The point is that merely desiring something is not itself reasonable or unreasonable by itself. It’s just a fact. Things become reasonable or unreasonable only in light of something else: some other context or fact by which those desires are then held to be unreasonable. Yes, you can call a desire irrational, but only sensibly because there is some other underlying judgment that defines what standard or goal or value it’s being held up against.
That’s so because reason, rationality, reasonable things: they aren’t just a bunch of disjointed conclusions from out of nowhere.
Well, Scylla pretty much blew his credibility with this exchange:
How can you have a reasonable debate with someone who doesn’t understand the statement “Desires and values and hope are not rational or irrational”? (And spends so much time and energy belittling someone who presented the statement …)
Very similar to what is taught about other incorrect theories. The hypothesis, the reason they believed in it (to show scientists 250 years ago weren’t stupid) and the evidence against it that caused mainstream scientific opinion to reject the hypothesis.
I don’t for the moment doubt this would cause all sorts of problems. I’m talking what should be taught, not what is politically feasible to teach.
I don’t think that can be answered in a sentence. You might want to start a thread.
In some cases, yes. I assume you are aware of the major problem the Sun posed in the 19th century? Since most people believed in God, including scientists, offering a god of the gaps explanation in the absence of any other was not unreasonable. You didn’t have to be a staunch Christian to do so. Tom Paine did exactly that in The Age of Reason, not about the sun but using God to explain the structure of the solar system.
Which creationism do you mean? If it is the nypothesis that the world was created 6,000 years ago, sure. If it is the ICR flavor, which mandates that the Bible overrules all evidence, then no.
You might have to break down the clauses of a statement. If I say “God caused a rose to appear on my desk” and you see there is no rose, you can reject the rose part, but that doesn’t say anything about the god part. The statement god is omniscient, omnipresent and omnipotent can be attacked logically, but not scientifically. God causes the wind to blow is slightly different - we know the wind blows, we have an alternate explanation, but we can’t rule out the god explanation - we can just make it unnecessary. Science doesn’t rule out god, it just makes god not required. That’s enough for me.
It depends. “Scientific” creationism claims, say, the Flood happened, and gives some “scientific” mechanisms for it. Even the most casual examination shows these to be impossible. If they had just claimed the flood happened, and that God had magicked it, they would eliminate half their problems - but then they wouldn’t be able to teach it in schools. As it turns out even the natural statement about the flood and its affects is incorrect, so they can’t teach that either.
Think of intelligent design. That tries to make statements about development to show structures are impossible without a designer. Even if true, though, no supernatural entity would be required - the Raelians like space aliens. So it actually is a purely natural thing - just a wrong one.
Creationism consists of a series of statements, obviously. My statement about statements is not a scientific hypothesis. It is something that would require a philosophical proof, and if statements in philosophy are falsifiable, I’ve never noticed anyone doing so.
I did miss it. For some reason all your sentences run together, even around quotes. Do you have line feed turned off for some reason?
In any case I mentioned that my great-grandfather spent all his time studying the Torah, and seemed to be one of those people the community supported. That’s where I mentioned it.
For those fond of not giving subjects very much thought, certainly.
Again, I am skeptical that you know what ‘God’ is.
No, I stated the opposite in fact. However, “Everything” or at least the cause of “Everything” is a pretty standard attribute in all major religions that believe in such a thing as a supreme ‘God’. i.e. Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Bahai, Taoism. In Taoism ‘The Tao’ represents God. Have you read the Tao te Ching? Any of it? I recommend rereading Spinoza’s Ethics. Particularly the first definition ‘Substance’. Read the first chapter where he lays out his groundwork the rest of the book.
No, this is actually quite simple. A ruler is a measurement of a finite size. It is relative to a base measurement that kicked it off. They are culturally specific, a normative size that is based on common sizes that are useful for that culture. A ‘foot’ for instance was derived from the size of someone’s foot. This varied as the size of feet varied. Empire itself is an excercise in standardization. Look at ancient empires and how they standardizes weights and measures. Why would they do this? So that they could actually have a reasonable hope of commerce being relatively uniform. The same principle is applied to a Big Mac. Now of course, as God cannot be related to the size of the big Mac or the size of the King/Emperor/Duke/Presiding Officer’s foot. We do not have enough water to measure how much he displaces. (I am using ‘he’ generically not meaning it as a unit of measure of gender.) As God is the size of the aggregate of all possible synergies in all of existance, aka the ‘Supreme’ Being, it is not possible to measure him by its limited subsets.
When you can tell me how you measure infinitely large or infinitely small, with a ruler that will denote it using finite chunks, get back to me.
Again, we must be clear on the definition of God before we debunk the notion. People apply properties to God based upon what they are capable of perceiving as the supreme being.
People spend their whole lives devoted to the discipline of knowing God. To hear you talk, you’d think that you knew precisely what that word means, and that it is meaningless. I already agreed with you that "goddidit’ is an unsatisfactory answer. I feel the same way about “BigBangdidit”. So within our finite frames of reference, we have some common terms to describe common experiences. Our language of course does not have the facility to adequately describe uncommon experiences. That doesn’t mean at all that the experience is invalid or has nothing to do with what the person describing it says.
Creationism has yet to be falsified.
Er, so? Until you actually define god it doesn’t matter. You won’t, you just talking about events or the universe or whatever, even saying people can pick what they want god to be. Until you nail down what god is, and can prove it of course, then the subject doesn’t matter.
And I recommend that you go back reread both of those. The Tao is not worshipped as a god. Taoism has lots of gods in its pantheon, but the Tao is not one of them. And Spinoza’s Ethics, as I stated before, starts out with a bunch of handwaving as its basis. He uses a bunch of bad logic so he can say god exists, and then bases everything off of that. It’s even worse than Aquinas’ 5 ‘proofs’.
Really? You sound awful confident of this. Maybe you could give some kind of evidence for it.
When you can explain how an infinite being fits into a finite universe, get back to me.
Yes, why don’t we be clear on it. Go ahead, you haven’t been clear yet.
I do know what the word means. See, we have these things called dictionaries now that tell us the definitions of words. It’s you who is using a different definition than what most people use. And you still haven’t said what that definition is.
You think ‘goddidit’ = ‘bigbangdidit’? Wow. I really don’t know how to respond to this, other than to say you need to learn more about the big bang theory.
It also doesn’t mean that the experience was valid or has anything to do with what the person describing it says it does. That’s why we look for evidence to support it. If someone says something happened and they attribute it to god, it doesn’t mean that god it, or that god didn’t do it, until it can be shown one way or another. But, since nothing has ever been shown to have been done by god, the default position should be that god didn’t do it. Just because an experience can’t be shown to be not something, doesn’t mean it automatically is that something.
Creationism has yet to come up with a single shred of objective evidence. To date, all creationism has is pseudo-science and bad logic, mostly trying to attack evolution. It doesn’t need to be falsified, it needs to be verified before anyone should even bother falsifying it.
Hotflungwok One of the reasons I find these debates so intriguing is because supposedly learned people will argue so vehemently as to why they should be allowed to maintain their ignorance, and why it should trump the attempts of others to allay theirs. I don’t think you’ve understood a word I’ve said. That’s probably why you found Spinoza’s Ethics to be a bunch of ‘Handwringing’. Your inability to comprehend what someone is talking about does not amount to objective anything. It’s merely a willful assertion of ego.
As for the infinite being inside a finite universe thing. That’s easy. An infinite being does not fit inside a finite universe, a finite universe exists inside an infinite being. Infinity does not necessarily require a ‘size’. As a friend of mine once said, “Infinity exists between the decimals”. A centimeter is infinitely wide, it is also 10 millimeters wide. It is infinitely wide because theoretically, you can divide it infinitely.
Come back to me when you know the difference between a pagan deity, and YHVH. Then we’ll talk about the Tao again. There are some basics of theology at play here that are learnable if the person has any desire to, which you clearly do not, you just want to assert that you are correct, and yet I keep telling you we’re playing baseball and yet you continue to insist on kicking your soccerball around the field while telling me we don’t have any goal posts. When you are capable of understanding even the rudimentary semantics, then we can talk.
So far your entire argument can be boiled down to, “Prove to me that the word means what you think it means using a completely inadequate symbolic toolset.” I’ve given you a pretty widely accepted definition of God, and you’ve ignored me time and again. God is ‘Supreme Being’. How is that moving it around saying it can mean anything I want it to mean? See when we are dealing with really big concepts there are ways of seeing it from many perspectives. Let’s say I go skiing on Sandia Mountain in Albuquerque. I describe the mountain only in terms of the ski slope. I talk about the runs, I talk about the lifts, the clubhouse, the restaurant, the view, all that sort of thing. I refer to it the entire time as a description of the mountain. Now of course it is not a description of the entire mountain, it’s not even a description of the entire ski resort, it’s little snippets of my experience of that mountain. Because you have a frame of reference for a ski slope and a mountain you accept the explanation. You read Spinoza’s Ethics, and you dismissed it. I believe you dismissed it because you didn’t understand it. It was a bunch of handwaving, and yet, Einstein is on record as saying he believed in Spinoza’s God. Now why would a man as intelligent as Einstein allow himself to be hoodwinked by a bunch of nonsensical handwaving?
As far as ‘Bigbangdidit’ you explain to me how elements came to have the properties that they do and how as a result of that they ended up clustering together in the configuration that they did here in this solar system and galaxy. If you can do that, I am fairly certain that you will have dramatically altered my perception, I might even consider you one of the most influential people in my life. But please, don’t waste my time talking about valences, positive and negative charges, and isotopes. I want to know why a gold atom is a gold atom and why a hydrogen atom is a hydrogen atom, why they exist in the proportions that they do in the universe, and most importantly how choice is derived once they configure into a sufficiently complex pattern.
I was just thinking this for some odd reason.
And I thought you were trying to debate. I gave you the reasons I thought that, and you’re trying to say I didn’t understand. Why don’t you try to refute my argument, rather than just slapping on more handwaving?
So god is bigger than the universe? Can you prove this, or are you making things up to fit your preconceptions?
What? You’ve got to be kidding. You claimed that the Tao is a god, and that is plain wrong. Period. There are gods in the Taoist pantheon, but the Tao is not one of the them. And you’re telling me that I need to learn?
‘Supreme Being’? That’s it? And you’re trying to say I don’t know anything about god? Some might just say that ‘Supreme Being’, even with the capital letters, is just a tad general. You said:
and now you’re saying ‘Supreme Being’? Well, if you can see it in purely mechanical principles, then how can an inadaquate symbolic toolset work? And if god is ‘the universe’ then what’s the problem measuring it? We’ve already done lots of that. You can pin anything to ‘Supreme Being’ that you want, any attribute, any powers, anything. ‘Supreme Being’ doesn’t define squat.
Cite please. This smacks quite hard of the fallacy of false authority.
See, there you go again presupposing. There doesn’t have to be a why. The how is because of the nature of the universe. Elements exists because of the forces of the universe, etc. There simply doesn’t have to be a why, you’re the one creating one where so far there isn’t one.
Hotflungwok God means ‘Supreme Being’.
So Loki, Thor, Athena and Ares are all supreme beings?
Again, I think the basic understanding of theology is a little too light on the con side for there to be a decent argument here.
Greek and Norse Gods are anthropomorphizations of primal concepts. Very few people actually worship pagan deities like these anymore. Categorizing monotheistic deities in the same way as Pagan tribal deities is a mistake. Yes, God has different meanings in different contexts just like most other words in the dictionary. The way I have been using it has been as ‘supreme being’. However, I think you and everyone else in this argument knows that the article preceding the word God makes all the difference. ‘a’ God vs ‘the’ God. For instance in terms of Hinduism, the Gods are faces of the supreme being.
I am beginning to wonder if the interlocution here is in good faith. Are you at all interested in understanding the point of view I am trying to explain or should we continue to make the rounds about inanities such as ancient pagan deities from dead cultures? I am not interested in going the rounds with the prepackaged arguments, I’ve heard them all before.
I notice that any questions I’ve asked that don’t fit on the rails of the standard argument have been roundly ignored.
Dogma, it’s not just for the religious anymore.
But if we just accepted your definitions for all things religious and philosophical, there wouldn’t be any argument at all, would there? The reason we argue is that we disagree in the first place.
You do know the history of your god, don’t you? Originally, he was a tribal god that served the Jewish people. Later, as older religions died out, he became the most powerful tribal god. Later still, the most powerful among the gods, and now religious history has been “corrected” to show that he is the only god.
I’ve seen this type of misunderstanding before-you seem to think that the only reason we have to disagree with you is because we don’t understand you. Wrong. I fully understand what you are saying and still disagree with it.
But they still excel at it.
So you disagree that the word God means ‘Supreme Being’?
Yes that is the history of the Jews. The Jews were not the original monotheists.
Show me evidence that you disagree. State that you disagree. Tell me that my definition is unacceptable, then I have something to work with. So far all I see is a lot of side-stepping and reiteration of the same old arguments. I want evidence that I am not arguing with rote automatons. Another explanation of Natural Selection as though I didn’t learn it in the eighth grade, or some variation on “You don’t believe in other people’s Gods, I just believe in one less.”, just aren’t going to cut it.
You have to accept the definition in order to argue against it. If people accepted it on those terms then we could actually argue rather than go into a recursive loop trying to come to a mutual understanding of the rules of engagement.
They aren’t the only ones.