# Why Do People Get Defensive About God? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [December 15, 2007, 11:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-people-get-defensive-about-god/430142 "2007-12-15T23:27:10Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 12\ **Page:** 26
**Author:** ![tomndebb](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/b9e5f3/32.png) [@tomndebb](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tomndebb)\ **Post date:** [December 27, 2007, 2:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-people-get-defensive-about-god/430142/501 "2007-12-27T02:02:37Z")
[QUOTE=9thFloor] Tom had made that accusation once before in another thread and had been proven wrong. [/QUOTE] The accusation that I have lodged against you on two occasions is that you have responded to separate posters with claims of deliberate insult when no insiult was offered. In the ensuing imbroglio, you have made a number of further accusations, none of which have been demonstrated to be true. If you wish to keep dragging me into discussions when I am staying out of them, you will need to be aware that I, too, will defend myself from your accusations. Now, you can keep making snide remarks about me or you can leave me alone, but as long as you keep picking at me you invite me to participate. ---
**Author:** ![9thFloor](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/9/b487fb/32.png) [@9thFloor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/9thFloor)\ **Post date:** [December 27, 2007, 4:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-people-get-defensive-about-god/430142/502 "2007-12-27T04:34:46Z")
[QUOTE=tomndebb] The accusation that I have lodged against you on two occasions is that you have responded to separate posters with claims of deliberate insult when no insiult was offered. In the ensuing imbroglio, you have made a number of further accusations, none of which have been demonstrated to be true. If you wish to keep dragging me into discussions when I am staying out of them, you will need to be aware that I, too, will defend myself from your accusations. Now, you can keep making snide remarks about me or you can leave me alone, but as long as you keep picking at me you invite me to participate. [/QUOTE] Knock yourself out. You jumped into the conversation between me and **cosmosdan**. ---
**Author:** ![9thFloor](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/9/b487fb/32.png) [@9thFloor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/9thFloor)\ **Post date:** [December 27, 2007, 5:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-people-get-defensive-about-god/430142/503 "2007-12-27T05:00:33Z")
[QUOTE=tomndebb] The accusation that I have lodged against you on two occasions is that you have responded to separate posters with claims of deliberate insult when no insiult was offered. In the ensuing imbroglio, you have made a number of further accusations, none of which have been demonstrated to be true. If you wish to keep dragging me into discussions when I am staying out of them, you will need to be aware that I, too, will defend myself from your accusations. Now, you can keep making snide remarks about me or you can leave me alone, but as long as you keep picking at me you invite me to participate. [/QUOTE] Oh, and that’s not true. I never accused \*\*cosmosdan \*\*of insulting me in this thread within this debate about what that founder said. That’s absurd. The accusation you lodged in this thread was, specifically, \*\*not \*\*that I had made claims of deliberate insult. The accusation you lodged in this thread is that I \*\*deliberately misread the linked text. \*\*Which was shown to be false, as you’ve admitted. I wasn’t even \*\*referring \*\*to the linked text with my quote of ‘supreme manifestation of god’, let alone deliberately misreading it. That was the accusation you made. And it was false. And you admitted it. Now, please have the last word and maybe try to stick in another false accusation because I’m done with this foolishness. ---
**Author:** ![tomndebb](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/b9e5f3/32.png) [@tomndebb](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tomndebb)\ **Post date:** [December 27, 2007, 5:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-people-get-defensive-about-god/430142/504 "2007-12-27T05:57:06Z")
[QUOTE=9thFloor] Oh, and that’s not true. I never accused \*\*cosmosdan \*\*of insulting me in this thread within this debate about what that founder said. That’s absurd. [/quote] So what? I have not said you did. I have made no claim that you accused **cosmosdan** of anything. Nice attempt at misdirection, however. > [@9thFloor](#): > > The accusation you lodged in this thread was, specifically, \*\*not \*\*that I had made claims of deliberate insult. The accusation you lodged in this thread is that I \*\*deliberately misread the linked text. \*\*Which was shown to be false, as you’ve admitted. I wasn’t even \*\*referring \*\*to the linked text with my quote of ‘supreme manifestation of god’, let alone deliberately misreading it. You are not even paying attention to your own conversation. You were the first one to [lodge an accusation](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=9279596&postcount=141) that any misunderstanding of any sort was deliberate. I only noted that some of your hostility was deliberate [after you inserted an insulting adjective](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=9284086#post9284086) to a description of others’ feelings. I later noted (after a week of your open hostility in two threads and several vituperative e-mails), when it became obvious that you were twisting my statements to your own ends, that you had deliberately [twisted my statements](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=9303748#post9303748). I have not said that you “deliberately” misread the linked text. My statement was that I had initially given you the benefit of the doubt that you had “[misread or misunderstood](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=9303748#post9303748)” the primary text, (with no claim that such misreading or misunderstanding was deliberate), only to discover, later, that you had not even bothered to read it. So, having, over my protests, initiated a personal feud, you are now ascribing statements to me that I have not made. I have no idea whether you are malicious or simply easily confused, but you are certainly unnecessarily hostile, taking offense where none is offered and giving offense where none was earned. You also get enough of your “factual” claims wrong to call into question the overall quality of your posts. So if you are going to have a “private” conversation with another poster (on an open board) and you are going to malign me in the process, I will very likely feel compelled to respond. if you do not want me to post, invoking my name is the wrong way to achieve your goal. ---
**Author:** ![cosmosdan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/a6a055/32.png) [@cosmosdan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cosmosdan)\ **Post date:** [December 27, 2007, 12:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-people-get-defensive-about-god/430142/505 "2007-12-27T12:00:33Z")
[QUOTE=9thFloor] I really don’t want to go over this ad infinitum, no disrespect intended. [/QUOTE] None taken. Neither do I. It’s a minor issue. > [@](#): > > I “claim” that I never intended to provide a link, and I didn’t intend to provide one at the time I referenced the verbatim expression from the primary document. > > I provided the link not, as you suggest, to “enjoy catching someone” but in defending myself from a false accusation by Tom that imputed motive of “deliberately” misreading something. I hope you can understand that if I feel (as I did) that I’m being set up and accused of “deliberately misreading” something, I have to then defend myself from that false accusation. Tom had made that accusation once before in another thread and had been proven wrong. To me, it seemed he was on a warpath and trying to build a case for me continuously “deliberately misreading” things in order to lead to my eventual banning. (And I have good reason to believe that from private accusing emails he’s sent me). > > So, my reason for providing a link was to defend against a false accusation. Did Tom accuse you of _deliberately_ misreading the Bahai site? Not that I saw. He made that comment in reference to another thread. What’s curious to me is why you didn’t provide a link on a board where that’s the norm, even when asked a direct question about the term. I’m fine with dropping the issue. > [@](#): > > I’m afraid I don’t see there was any “pattern” of behavior as you state; to me, that implies some kind of motive or strategy on my part and there simply was none. I didn’t say there _was_ a pattern. I said there wouldn’t be a pattern {since there was no gotcha game} > [@](#): > > You appear not to believe me. Maybe I’m wrong. Either way, I am not lying, wasn’t lying, and wasn’t engaging in any pattern of gotcha conduct. It doesn’t even make any sense because you never made any false accusation to me about which “gotcha” could even have been played, nor did I have any reason to think you would. You handled yourself, as far as I can tell, with honest confusion which was ultimately cleared up. If I was playing some game of “gotcha” then I’d have had to expect that you were going to jump in with some false accusation that I could then “get” you about. You didn’t, I didn’t think or expect you would, and doing something that stupid and pointless was never my intention. That’s just the truth. And I’ll take your word for that. It’s conceivable that you were waiting for me to respond as Tom did , assuming you were referring to the link I provided, which is a normal assumption. Instead I asked you a direct question which you avoided answering. An oversight I guess. Regardless, consider the matter dropped. ---
**Author:** ![cosmosdan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/a6a055/32.png) [@cosmosdan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cosmosdan)\ **Post date:** [December 27, 2007, 12:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-people-get-defensive-about-god/430142/506 "2007-12-27T12:48:00Z")
[QUOTE=9thFloor] The reason it does have more than ‘zero’ to do with your comment is because, as I understood your comment, you were suggesting – as was Tom – that it had been “pointed” out to me that it’s seemingly PLAIN what is meant by the ‘supreme manifestation of god’ phrase in the primary text. All I’m saying is that if Wikipedia and I \*\*both \*\*(and yes, I did read the primary source before posting it – the primary source is linked right from the Wiki quote) disagree with you and Tom, then it’s \*\*not \*\*“hard to read that see that it points to the founder.” You and I disagree on the meaning. You may very well be right, you know more about the faith than I do. But don’t say it’s “hard” to read it the way I did as if it’s completely unimaginable that any “reasonable” person could come to that conclusion. Wikipedia came to the same conclusion I did! [/QUOTE] When you presented it you offered no such option. You presented it as fact. I do think it’s hard for a reasonable person to read the chapter and assume that phrase must refer to the founder since he is not mentioned at all in the chapter and given the other content. For the sake of accuracy, when there’s a big question mark it’s best not to present it as fact. > [@](#): > > That doesn’t mean I’m right. It doesn’t mean Wikipedia is right, obviously. I’m simply stating that it shows that it’s not true that it’s completely ludicrous or “hard” to come to the conclusion that it refers to the founder and the fact that Wiki came to the same conclusion demonstrates that it must not be THAT hard to come to that conclusion. > > So, in closing, I’m not saying that I have the ultimate interpretation of that phrase. I’m simply defending against the idea that it’s obvious what’s meant or that it’s “hard” to come to the conclusion that both Wiki and I did. I think it’s a reasonable conclusion to come to, and so does the article. Yes but what _specifically_ is reasonable about it? What in the original text seems to indicate the founder? I asked you to be specific about why you thought that phrase referred to the founder. You haven’t done that. Your defense is “if it’s good enough for Wiki it’s good enough for me” Okay. I’ll consider the nature of Wiki and their own rating of the article. > [@](#): > > And, by the way, regardless of whether it’s referring to the founder or a coming theophany as Tom intereprets it, it still makes me conclude that it’s lunacy so my larger point remains unchanged. That’s your perspective. I think all humans have some ideas that are irrational and unfounded. The nature of the beast as it were. When looking at religion I try to get the larger picture. What is the essentials of their teachings? Are they making a positive contribution as a group? Do they sincerely try to live their teachings or is it lip service? How is the money handled? Humans are flawed so any religion will be as well. I still think I can judge whether they are moving in a positive direction. So far, with limited knowledge, I find the Bahai pretty refreshing as religions go. Just an opinion. Moving on. ---
**Author:** ![Liberal](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/848f3c/32.png) [@Liberal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Liberal)\ **Post date:** [December 29, 2007, 2:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-people-get-defensive-about-god/430142/507 "2007-12-29T02:34:51Z")
[QUOTE=Sophistry and Illusion] Seriously, though, where is **Liberal**? His last activity was yesterday (Friday) at 8:20 AM. I hope nothing happened to him. It’s not like him to be away from the Board for so long. [/QUOTE] We visited my wife’s family in Phoenix for Christmas, and I’ve been gone and off-line for a week. Thanks for expressing concern. I’m too far behind now to catch up, but if you have a specific issue you’d like to engage me in or that you’d like me to address, just list it and I’ll do the best I can to jump back in. 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![Sophistry\_and\_Illusion](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/b3f665/32.png) [@Sophistry\_and\_Illusion](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sophistry_and_Illusion)\ **Post date:** [December 30, 2007, 3:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-people-get-defensive-about-god/430142/508 "2007-12-30T15:01:12Z")
[QUOTE=Liberal] We visited my wife’s family in Phoenix for Christmas, and I’ve been gone and off-line for a week. Thanks for expressing concern. I’m too far behind now to catch up, but if you have a specific issue you’d like to engage me in or that you’d like me to address, just list it and I’ll do the best I can to jump back in. 🙂 [/QUOTE] Good to know that the earthly **Liberal** , and not just the spiritual **Liberal** , is still with us. I was a bit concerned when you quit posting quite suddenly. Actually, I was very much hoping to get your response to my post #363 on page 8. I’d quote it, but I’m posting through my television in a hotel room, and the interface sucks. ---
**Author:** ![Liberal](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/848f3c/32.png) [@Liberal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Liberal)\ **Post date:** [December 30, 2007, 5:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-people-get-defensive-about-god/430142/509 "2007-12-30T17:02:19Z")
> [@Sophistry and Illusion](#): > > Liberal–I admit to some confusion. I cannot reconcile some of the things you are saying. The point of my previous post is that it is incompatible with goodness and love to set up an amoral or indifferent environment for your ‘loved’ ones, an environment that might very will injure or kill them. Now you seem committed to the following claims: > > 1. God is good and loves us. > 2. God voluntarily created an amoral universe for us to live in. > 3. By it’s nature, an amoral universe will often inflict terrible suffering on its sentient inhabitants; in many of these cases, this suffering is not the result of any exercise of free will on the part of these inhabitants. > 4. Suffering and pain are tragic. > > Forget about evil; if you want, we can restrict evil to human intentions/character/whatever. But still, aren’t the above 4 claims inconsistent? Evil is a moral claim. My position is consistent because without the spiritual metaphysic, there is no evil. The loss of a loved one, for example, is tragic, but tragedy is not evil. We feel pain and suffering in the brain whenever we or someone we love is harmed or disappears (as you did to some extent with me). But as we both know, that is essentially no different from the sadness a loyal dog feels when its owner walks out the front door and appears to vanish. You and I share the evolutionary process that all animals have shared. As physical beings, that is. The duality of man is important and so central to the teachings of Jesus that I think mapping your four claims in those terms would help clear up some of your confusion. Let’s restate them in the proper context. **1) God is good and loves [the spiritual] us.** Note that it makes no sense to use love as moral edification with respect to the physical us because that would lead to a contradiction since the physical us is amoral. This helps clear up an equivocation, splitting out love as the faciliation of goodness from love as an emotion. Unlike the universe, God is a moral being through and through, and so we cannot assign to Him an emotion (which would require a physical organ). **2) God voluntarily created an amoral universe for [both the spiritual and physical] us to live in.** Just as we did with love above, we need to differentiate the two kinds of life (qua “live in”). There is an eternal spiritual life that inhabits a temporal physical body, which in turn inhabits a temporal physical world. The physical body, just like the universe, is amoral (otherwise, it wouldn’t be physical). As already stated, the mechanism that holds the identity of these pairings is unclear at this point, but science seems to have discovered some relation between the brain’s limbic system and spiritual experience. As already documented, science does not describe for us the cause and effect relation — whether the brain is conjuring God or God is contacting the brain. Owing to the nature of science, we can confidently assert that it will never tell us this because, scientifically speaking, all analytical statements are nonsense. Science is an empirical epistemology only, and cannot address such claims as whether God exists or whether one plus one will always equal two. **3) By it’s nature, an amoral universe will often inflict terrible suffering on its sentient [physical] inhabitants; in many of these cases, this suffering is not the result of any exercise of free [moral] will on the part of these [spirtual] inhabitants [or free motor will on the part of these phyiscal inhabitants].** We can discard free motor will (free will of the brain) as irrelevant spiritually, because whether it exists and what it is if it does is a part of the universe and a question for science to address. But free moral will is a different matter. One can easily deduce two important consequences of free moral spiritual agents interacting in an amoral physical world: (1) there will necessarily be ambiguity with respect to spiritual existence, and (2) there will necessarily be no bias with respect to moral aesthetics. These are just incredibly important because in the first case, faith emerges as the only connecting bridge between awareness of the physical and awareness of the spiritual. Were the ambiguity not to exist, faith would be unnecessary. God’s existence would be a synthetic claim, something that we could examine from a synthesis of knowledge gained empirically. I could point to God and say to you, “See, there He is.” But Jesus teaches plainly that that is not the nature of God. When asked where this kingdom was that He kept talking about (His Father’s kingdom), He responded that it could not be found either “here” or “there”, but was “within you”. And He told Pilate that His kingdom was not of this world. The necessity of faith eliminates the moral coercion that would otherwise exist if there were a moral element to the universe’s universal set. That is to say, without faith there would be no moral free will. Likewise, the second point is just as important. If the universe were biased either way, then our spiritual selves would have an easier time or more difficult time making good moral choices, depending on how the bias went. If the universe were itself good, then we could pretty much do nothing — make no choices, and good things would happen, making us quite the unnecessary entities from God’s perspective. On the other hand, if it were evil, then we would be battling evil constantly, unable to edify one another morally without enormous strength of will (if at all). The necessity of moral neutrality eliminates the moral bias that would otherwise exist if there were a moral element to the universe’s universal set. Or, without moral neutrality, the exercise of free moral will would be problematic. And so, as it happens, the way the universe works — an amoral context with spiritual ambiguity and neutrality — is exactly how it needs to work for there to be free moral will. That is why I often say that whether or not God created the universe, it serves His purpose all the same. **4) Suffering and pain are tragic.** Yes they are, but again, suffering and pain of the spiritual us is a whole different ballgame from the suffering and pain of the physical us, though they are related anologically. There are people (Buddhist monks, for example) who are as meticulous about the suffering of a grasshopper as they are the suffering of a man. And frankly, if anyone holds to a unary worldview of ontology, then his valuing the suffering of a man over that of a grasshopper would be a moral contradiction. He would feel the same sense of tragedy in losing his house-rat as he would in losing his child. On a spiritual level, suffering and pain are very different concepts (as you would expect by now after wading through all this). The spirit suffers when it is unable to pursue that which it values most. The tragedy of brain damage on a physical level is the loss of the person we used to know, or the burden of caring for a person who might not even know who we are. But the tragedy of brain damage on a spiritual level is the spirit’s inability to command the brain. It is a frustration of intent. Of a willing spirit, but a weak body. The yearning to reach out and love someone combined with the inability to express that moral choice by the manipulation of amoral limbs or mouths or what-have-you. It is on the spiritual level that the rewards Jesus teaches about apply. Those who suffer spiritually (meaning all of us to some extent, but much more so with some of us) are rewarded with certain guarantees that the consequence of their suffering will be bliss — i.e., the attainment of what they were unable to attain in this brief eye-blink of their earthly sojourn. Jesus teaches that a man is not held to account for that over which he has no control, and in any event every man will judge himself morally by the aesthical choice he makes when his spirit is no longer entangled with his physical ball-and-chain. And so the astute person will raise the question, “Why bother with all this, then, if in the end we all get what we want?” And the answer is that without all this, we could never have _expressed_ what it is that we want (or value). The frustration of a spirit in a brain damaged body — that frustration is itself an expression that the spirit is seeking to do good but is failing through no fault of its own. For every emotional expression, there is a spiritual analog. They are not equivalent because their essences are not the same, but they are equally compelling. The suffering of a frustrated spirit is no less compelling than the suffering of a crushed nerve ending. Finally, the question is raised, “But why must there be suffering at all of any kind? Why can’t we just all have perfect brains and be essentially good?” One answer, given what you’ve read, is obvious: there would be no free moral will without free moral agency in an amoral context. But even more important, perhaps, if only because of how our modern world of convenience and comfort have anesthetized us to the human condition — both man as an evolved animal and man as an eternal spirit — is that we have reached the point that we have assigned to such things as poverty and suffering and struggle a certain ignobility that they do not deserve. It used to be the case (and still is, outside the sterile world of material abundance) that suffering for a cause is a noble thing, and that the experience of victory is a hollow and one-sided accomplishment without the intimate understanding of how defeat feels. That’s why Paris Hilton might think she’s suffering when she must eat meatloaf instead of pate. That’s why Jesus teaches that “the last shall be first, and the first last”. It means that those of us who suffer the most will be the most blissful when our suffering is eleviated, and we find ourselves emersed in that which we have treasured all our lives but have been unable to attain. Life on earth is a moral journey, not a moral destination. And so you can see that when the equivocation is removed, there is nothing to reconcile. ---
**Author:** ![Sophistry\_and\_Illusion](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/b3f665/32.png) [@Sophistry\_and\_Illusion](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sophistry_and_Illusion)\ **Post date:** [December 31, 2007, 1:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-people-get-defensive-about-god/430142/510 "2007-12-31T01:46:45Z")
**Liberal** – I see more where you are coming from. Unsurprisingly, I reject some of the assumptions that underly your theory (e.g., I deny that the metaphysical libertarian notion of free will needed to make sense of all this is coherent). But that’s a whole other can of worms. ---
**Author:** ![Liberal](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/848f3c/32.png) [@Liberal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Liberal)\ **Post date:** [December 31, 2007, 2:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-people-get-defensive-about-god/430142/511 "2007-12-31T02:16:12Z")
[QUOTE=Sophistry and Illusion] **Liberal** – I see more where you are coming from. Unsurprisingly, I reject some of the assumptions that underly your theory (e.g., I deny that the metaphysical libertarian notion of free will needed to make sense of all this is coherent). But that’s a whole other can of worms. [/QUOTE] No one could ask for more than that a peer simply understand. Even without agreement, understanding is itself a beautiful and aesthetically valuable thing. I think we’ve both done something morally good — we’ve both been edified by the exchange. ---
**Author:** ![Sophistry\_and\_Illusion](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/b3f665/32.png) [@Sophistry\_and\_Illusion](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sophistry_and_Illusion)\ **Post date:** [December 31, 2007, 2:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-people-get-defensive-about-god/430142/512 "2007-12-31T02:28:46Z")
[QUOTE=Liberal] No one could ask for more than that a peer simply understand. Even without agreement, understanding is itself a beautiful and aesthetically valuable thing. I think we’ve both done something morally good - we’ve both been edified by the exchange. [/QUOTE] Well, God knows it’s been vastly more edifying than most exchanges I’ve had in this forum. That’s why I felt like a child who has had his cookie taken away from him when you disappeared from this thread last week. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-people-get-defensive-about-god/430142.md?page=25)