I see. I suppose it comes down to who wants to insist their concepts must be the correct ones or at least more correct. People may sincerely be promoting their concepts as true and still be wrong. They are likely not aware of the subconscious motives they have for clinging to faulty concepts. So, fooling others is interpreted as teaching, educating, or sharing a personal conviction.
I have no problem with people rejecting god belief. There are plenty of problems with the concept. I tend to think that non believers and believers are both pursuing truth from different paths. {That is, to the degree our egos and agendas allow us to.} Of course I may be deluding myself about that
No doubt revenge plays a huge role in our concept of justice. Part of my point is that the refining of our concept of justice or more importantly working to improve and maintain a society where more people do get equal consideration is part of what propels mankind forward generation after generation.
As far as religion being a factor, I think we need to work toward a system where religion cannot be an excuse to avoid personal responsibility. If someone truly believes X is a sin then we can expect that to be their moral position. They must own that opinion as their own rather than attempt to speak from some higher moral authority. Studying the Bible or the Koran doesn’t give you a higher moral point to judge from. Each person must be personally responsible for their actions and attitudes regardless of their belief system.
I’m not sure I follow you here. I think most people see sexual attraction as a pretty normal human thing. IMO there’s a difference between thinking, “Wow that guy’s wife is hot!” and " Wow she’s hot and I really want her" No doubt there are religious people who see morals as more absolute and strict but I wouldn’t say they are the majority.
We have our feelings and then we decide what to do about them. We can’t really blame our actions on our feelings. I agree there’s nothing wrong with seeking security. However if some man or woman dumped his spouse to pursue a relationship with someone who had money we probably wouldn’t think too highly of them. There are a lot of feelings that get mixed up and confused for love in relationships especially the romantic kind. I think there is a love that transcends lust, security, our ego, what we think we want or need emotionally. YMMV.
I agree. Perhaps you could remain open to the possibility though. We all have things left to learn and experience.
IMO love is a constant that moves us in certain ways. There aren’t different kinds of love but there are many things we mislabel as love. Add the complication that lots of emotions occur simultaneously and it’s difficult to sort them out.
I think we’ve gotten pretty off track from the OP though but thanks for your input.
Agreed. More than that I think we need to work toward correcting our guidance systems. That will inevitably lead toward some confrontation which is part of the process.
It would have to be somehow demonstrated that people are getting picked on out of proportion to the old saw that things are not swell already–thus God does not care from His Country Club perch in Heaven.
There is an old joke where the optimist says we live in the best of all possible worlds.
The pessimist responds by quipping “gosh–I’m afraid you’re right!”
“Bad things happen to good folks” is a critique that can get blown out of the water for argumentation because there is no fine line of demarcation for such an argument and can simply mean you’re having a bad day or your bank account is thin—
This is the Problem Of Evil, and has been answered many times, generally to the effect that it is a poor way of objective realization of God if we take into account the Fall and that man’s ways and nature’s ways fall short.
Also, since we can’t know good from bad without the contrast as an example, the mix is vital in the first place to understand “what is the “bad” of things”?
In a perfect realm in what way would be understand fully if not by example and only via remarks and guesses. So if Heaven is perfection, then what would we hold earth to be from a loving God?
Peter Kreeft among others has remarked that God loves us enough to not make us into automatons that automatically do His bidding. So there is also the element of free will…
It has been answered poorly many times. Very poorly. Usually by pointing a finger at anything in sight and saying, “It’s that thing’s fault!”, as if God needs scapegoats to prevent him having to take accountability for his works.
Good is good even without evil. I don’t need to eat garbage to appreciate the taste of good food; I don’t need to watch crappy movies to appreciate a good one. The argument that one needs to know evil to appreciate good is flawed to the core.
Heh, not only is it another topic, but we’ve got threads on it going as we speak. Specifically, chewing up the notion that we have free will at all.
I think getting drowned in a tsunami or killed in an earthquake would count as a bad day under anyone’s reckoning.
Sure, you can argue man’s ways. But nature’s? Who set up nature anyhow? Did God make the earth to kill us originally, or did he change things to kill us after the supposed Fall? He’s a putz in either case.
And by the same calculus, he might be an evil god who allows good things to make the bad things worse. (Already mentioned above.)
Understand what? Anyhow, a world where people have free will will never be perfect. But don’t you agree that this world could be just a tad better? Maybe a few more innocent babies would survive flood and tornadoes? Maybe just a tad fewer would be born with handicaps.
Free will doesn’t account for the problem of natural evil, which is far more interesting - unless you think the earth has free will, that is. I don’t think there is a place on earth where you can’t get killed by nature is one way or another, so don’t tell me people bring it on themselves by not moving.
And, btw, if God wanted something out of us he can tell us in a far more reliable way than he supposedly has. Hiding an important message in a book full of myths, contradictions and absurdities is not very clever. He can tell us some way, and not play the little god who wasn’t there. Given the state of the world, I find the no god answer far more comforting than the god answer. I’d rather die from impersonal geologic forces than from the all knowing, all loving creator of the universe being a dick.
Well, people have tried to answer the problem of evil many times, but I don’t think any theodicy has been even remotely successful. Take, for example, the one you suggest in your first paragraph–that evil results from the Fall. Anyone with even the vaguest sense of justice will recognize that it is horribly unjust to punish us for something someone 6,000 years ago did. Thus, your theodicy fails.
Or take the theodicy you suggest in your second paragraph–the obvious reply is that to understand the difference between good and evil, we only need a small to moderate amount of evil; we don’t need as much as there actually is in the world. In other words, your suggested theodicy fails.
So you see, it’s not so easy to answer the problem of evil.
What if there were no problem of evil? Would you call a small child evil for hitting someone, or stealing a toy. Would you believe this child’s life was destined to be evil. Even though we grow in physical stature, we don’t grow much in spiritual stature. This world is a school for spiritual children. Can one look beyond good and evil and see love?
Then we wouldn’t be living in a world at all like this one, OR there would be no benevolent God ( or no God at all, like the real world ). A world like ours, with it’s suffering and injustice, automatically gives you “the problem of evil” if you believe in a benevolent God. Which is why the idea of a benevolent God is nonsense; we can see that there’s no such thing just by looking around.
Love is just another emotion. One doesn’t need to “look beyond good and evil” for it. And there’s nothing all that profound or special about it. Really, this fetishization of the word “love” is positively creepy.
Well, if you don’t think that there is moral evil, then I don’t know what to say to you. I think John Wayne Gacy did evil shit, but hey, if you want to compare murdering 27 boys and burying them under your house to a childish scuffle on the playground, then I guess we don’t have much common ground for argument.
But you also merely talk about human behavior; you don’t mention so-called natural evil. I don’t see how a baby dying of smallpox trains the child spiritually. No, it gives the child huge festering boils and makes the child die in agony. Not my idea of a positive educational experience.
But like I said above, you would only need a little evil to understand the contrast. If the entire universe were red, we might not have a word for ‘red’ and might not understand the concept. But how much non-red stuff would we need in order to form the contrast? Just a speck. Do you think there is just a speck of evil in the world?
ETA–Also, some philosophers (like John Mackie) have argued that the idea that you need evil to have good places a limit on God’s omnipotence–it amounts to saying that God is *unable * to create good without creating evil.
Why? If death is just going through another door then it wouldn’t be.
I don’t think the question is death but what we might see as unnecessary suffering.
Again, I don’t think death is really the issue if we consider it a door we pass through. If we don’t then the whole God issue is moot anyway.
IMO it’s suffering that creates a real hurdle and difficult to understand.
What efforts should we make to relieve the suffering of others? If we think god is a dick for allowing such suffering what does that make us?
Granted the fear of a painful death is great among most of us. But it rarely happens. Say you are scheduled to burn at the stake for heresy. You are tied up to the stake with wood and coal oil everywhere, now when the pile is touched off it is doubtful you will feel anything. Your spirit will exit your body and you can watch the whole thing taking place from a distance. When your spirit knows your life is over it exits from your body immediately. This is common in near death experiences. I will leave a link to one.
Every time I think you have dumped the biggest conceivable load of shit in this forum, you back up the truck and deliver an even larger one. Do you think burn victims don’t suffer? Visit a fucking burn ward, buddy. Do you think people with river blindness don’t suffer? That probably explains why they kill themselves rather than continue living with the disease. You can’t rearrange the facts to fit with your fucked up theology. The facts are what they are. People suffer horribly, brutally, intolerably. The baby Jesus doesn’t fly down from Heaven and take their soul from their body to rescue them.
???
Smallpox? Polio? Cancer? Crohn’s disease? Hurricanes? Earthquakes? These are bad things to suffer from. They may not be ‘evil’ in the sense that the word ‘evil’ implies an intention, but they are bad. Do you think these things are good, or neutral? So if I intentionally gave your kid cancer, that would be okay, right–not a bad thing, right?
Do you want red and not red to be the only colors? Since good and evil can be subjective perhaps we need the spectrum to gain perspective.
John and I disagree.
God belief does prompt the question of why are we here and why is the world as it is? If we aren’t able to answer these questions completely that doesn’t change our need to address the world as we find it.
Lot’s of spiritual beliefs teach that the trials of this life forge us into better beings. IMO it’s not hard to see that many of our problems are created by our own bad choices. The process of making those choices and dealing with the consequences is the fire that forges us.
