I have no way to determine objective truth, and therefore afford her no points for religious notions she may or may not truly believe, and that may or may not be true regardless of her belief in same.
Not changing my mind 'bout nothing. Apparently her technology is sufficiently advanced. Or that’s how I’d read it. Gonna take a lot more proof than has been given.
…I can only assume you’re looking to murder poor Billy Batson, I thought you liked that fascist Carol Danvers.
The real question is can Cyborg Super-Skald beat Skald-Prime?
I’m distinguishing evidence and proof.
Say I’m accused of a crime–embezzling from my employer, say. If you can demonstrate that a deposit of $10,000 was wired to my personal checking account within hours of an unathorized debit of the same amount from a company account, that is evidence that I might be guilty, but not proof of it–not by itself, anyway. There are other explanations. It’s cause for further investigation. Now it might be disproven; someone might say, “Hey, Skald was in the ICU unconscious during the time the money was stolen, there’s no way he could have done it,” that’s probably proof that I am innocent.
As I wrote upthread, I’m an atheist because of the lack of evidence of the supernatural, along wth an unwillingness to take God’s existence on faith. But Anne’s demonstrated powers are evidence of the supernatural. If she says, “I can turn water into beer–observe!”, then taps your water bottle, and the Evianinside suddenly becomes Amstel, she has given evidence of the supernatural. She hasn’t proven that God exists, but she’s given the notion credence it lacked previously.
What WOULD you consider evidence of the existence of God or gods? If the answer is “nothing,” how is your position any more logical than a a creationist’s denial of evolution?
I don’t LIKE that Billy’s superhero ID is now Shazam, but I do reluctantly acknowledge it.
How is Carol a fascist? I haven’t read her series in quite some time. Probably not since the Skrull Invasion.
Agreed that Anne’s powers and her philosophy are two separate and distinct things. I would be vocally and effusively grateful for her interventions on behalf of the health and safety of others. But I would not necessarily believe her powers gave her any special insight on the nature of God and religion. That being said, she appears to be a good person with solid morals and overall a benevolent presence. I might well attend some of her sessions and hear what she has to say. But again, not necessarily because of the miracles, but rather, because of her demonstrated good character. People of good character often form solid philosophies.
(It’s great to have you and your bionic body parts back!)
In the poll, does the answer, “It depends on the areas of disagreement.”, mean the same thing as, “I give no extra credence to their morality based on the magical powers. I would change my opinions if they made a convincing argument, and not if not, just the same as anyone else.”?
Fundamentally, there’s two problems:
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It’s far more likely that the magical phenomena are caused by aliens, manipulating my mind to serve their will, than it is that an almighty creator figure is doing it. Humans are, after all, just electro-chemical reactions, and there’s nothing to stop one from building a device that takes advantage of that effect, just the same as one might build a RFID writer. And it’s far more likely that there are alien beings with a higher level of technology than us, than that there’s a God.
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Even if there was an almighty creator figure, fundamentally he’s just an entity with his own opinion and his own road to walk. I’m the one living my life. I get to decide how to go about it and what makes sense for it. If he’s got an argument that I should change it, then great, but the argument needs to make sense for my reality.
I voted “I don’t care how magic she is, I’m not changing my mind about nothing.” but there’s a caveat - I might be persuaded otherwise if she can coherently define “God”.
How do you it’s “more likely”? Where are you deriving the data needed to assess probabities?
If the whole thing is a mind-control scam, why are the aliens allowing you to continue to have doubts?
If the aliens are manipulating your perceptions, why are they acknowledging any limits to their power (i.e., Anne’s inability to raise the dead, both shown in the original incident and explicitly acknowldged in her claims)?
Maybe. But what evidence of the existence of such tech have you in this scenario, other than your reluctance to believe in miracles? How is your refusal to accept something you yourself witnessed and which was verified by someone you love and presumably trust, any different than a Flat-Earther’s denial that our planet is an oblate sphereoid?
I’m going to ignore the word “almighty” here, partly because Anne is explicitly denying that she, personally, can do literally anything conceivable, and partly because mythological deities (Yahweh no less than Odin or Zeus) are not typically described as being without limits either. (Odin couldn’t resurrect Baldur; Zeus got his ass kicked by Typhon; Yahweh couldn’t handle iron chariots) But if a creator deity existed, it would necessarily be of a wholly different order than its creations, I think, with psychology and perceptions very unlike ours. If an eternal creator and judge exists, surely it defines morality no less than it did thermodynamics. If it says, “Homosexuality is perfectly fine with me, that’s why I put the possibility for it into vertebrates, and if that silly bitch Davis doesn’t get with the program I am gonna bring her back as an earthworm next incarnation,” how can it be wrong to make that judgment in any meaningful sense?
I wondered that myself, and interpreted it to mean “requires less stretching/adjusting of my current worldview.”
As I originally wrote the scenario (I cut it down for brevity), there was a line in which the personally-pacifistic Anne said, “Yeah, there’s a creator God and an afterlife. But I’m supposed to avoid talking about any details, because God wants humans to focus on being good to their fellows in the current world, not worrying about Heaven or Hell or their next incarnations. It’s what you do unto others that matters, not what beliefs you espouse. So please consider carefully what you want to be told before you ask any questions and decide whether it’s worth the distraction.”
Would that placate you, or would you insist on details?
No it wouldn’t, because nowhere in there is there a coherent definition of “God”, and yes I would want details.
Although my first inclination is to think any being who dodged a straightforward question with such a bullshit answer as “the truth would be a distraction” is up to absolutely no good. My view on that would be fairly emerald-coloured, if you catch my drift…
Ok, then define “supernatural”, and how it relates to “deities”. To me, it’s evidence of unknown forces at work, and my first thought would be these forces have some “natural” origin, natural being a part and parcel of our universe.
Okay. By supernatural, I mean “in inexplicable defiance of fundamental physical law, most specifically the laws of thermodynamics and of the conservation of matter and energy.”
I know Christians who like to say that airplanes, for instance, violate the law of gravity. Which of course they don’t; they operate in accordance with the laws of gravity, along with the laws of aerodynamics, balancing several different forces in a delicate way.
On the other hand, when Superman catches a falling airplane without crushing it to bits and killing everyone inside, he IS acting supernaturally, even though the comics claim that his powers have a scientific basis. I’d say Anne’s pinpoint weather control is similarly supernatural.
I don’t play video games, so I trust y’all will correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t there such things as cheat calls, allowing a player to violate the internal consistency of the game in ways that, to a character in the game, seem magic? Maybe Anne’s God s like a video game programmer.
You didn’t answer my question, so I still don’t know how to vote on the poll. But anyways…
It’s more likely because we have evidence for the existence of life in this universe (i.e. planet Earth) and we have evidence that such technology is theoretically possible. There’s no reason to doubt its possibility. And based on the total number of planets in the universe, if anything, it’s strange that there aren’t aliens with futuristic technology roaming around the skies around us. It’s almost safer to assume that they’re already watching and (potentially) interfering with us than it is to assume that we’re alone in the universe or the most advanced species in it.
We have no evidence for deities, nor is there any reason to suppose their existence, and everything theorized about their existence conflicts with basic common sense (turtles all the way down, giving a damn about the wholeness of our penile skin, etc.)
Why is a deity? There’s no reason for him to put a magic peddling mystic on the surface of the Earth, when he can simply override my mind and make me instantly knowledgeable in everything there is to know and obey him unconditionally.
If he exists, that evidence would seem to indicate that he’s genuinely given me free will and does not feel so secure in his own opinions that he feels comfortable to force them on me. So then why is this person trying to tell me suddenly that he demands obeyance?
But more likely, and more likely than aliens, is that the “mystic” is simply someone who doesn’t have technology to control my mind, but has found some sort of technology that produces magic-like results.
Should it be aliens, though, then maybe they’re just performing scientific experiments. How am I supposed to know what their motives are?
Again, how am I supposed to know what their motives are? Why am I supposed to doubt that these limits don’t have valid technological underpinnings?
I didn’t deny the miracles. I stated that there’s more likely explanations than the one given by the mystic.
Say that our universe is just a high resolution physics experiment in a computer. The guy who started the application in his computer, is he “God”? Well, even if he did code the physics program, he’s still just a guy. Yeah, he could destroy me, he could change reality in any way he wants, he can override my mind and make me think that pickles taste like marshmallows, and from my vantage that’s all “magic”. But the reality is that it’s just a guy like me, with no greater insight as to the meaning of life, who happens to be a dimension higher up. But everything that he can do is completely explainable and understandable. There’s no component of it that has to be handwaved away.
If the mystic can explain the setup of the universe and everything they explain tests out true and accurate, then we would have to believe them about the setup of the universe, since all we can really do is accept reality as we can observe it. And if aliens are screwing with our observations, then we’re just boned.
And if something about that reality makes it make sense to change my morality, then I’d change my morality. But I’m not going to change it simply based on someone having done a few magic tricks one evening. It needs to make sense.
If our creator is just a computer programmer, simulating a world very much like his own - for example, to study global warming - then it wouldn’t be an alien psychology. Potentially, he would be exactly like us.
If our creator is just a computer programmer, simulating a world very much like his own - for example, to study global warming - then his concept of morality might be no more informed than our own.
The morality of alligators is completely different than our own. They abandon their young and have no concept of ongoing relationships. Other animals have different instincts about how to behave.
If the creator, created us out of the desire to give us morality, why not make us moral? Shouldn’t our instincts just be to be moral? If we have to act in some artificial way - practicing perfect monogamy, shunning wealth, chopping bits off our weiners, etc. - that conflicts with our instincts, and is impossible for most of us to follow, then that would seem to put into the question to benevolent intentions of the creator.
The answers that the mystic gave would need to explain all the discrepancies between what we observe and what they’re preaching.
See previous.
nope. she may have no idea how her powers work and is just making stuff up to explain it. kind of like if someone who had never encountered electricity realized flipping a switch on the wall made light but didn’t know why so they postulated some bizarre thing to explain it. people have always done this-don’t understand the why so they invent gods, ghosts, and bigfoot.
For her miraculous powers, rather than her practical talents and her adherence to social justice and charity?
Actually, yes; I know a Healer, and have benefited from her skills, and know her to be a moral and ethical and spiritual woman. I pay a lot of attention to everything she says.
I couldn’t really pick an answer because I cannot accept the premise. I cannot imagine witnessing anything that could only be explained via the supernatural. I would conclude that my eyes simply deceived me (much, much more likely). All else fails I would fall back onto Arthur C. Clarke’s mantra:
“Any sufficiently advanced technology would be indistinguishable from magic…”
I guess I should pick three then.
I liked the last three ---- and BTW welcome back.
I would listen but I’m not sure what (if anything) I would change; I would not automatically follow her or give her teachings more weight than I would someone else. In the religious sense I am all to aware of false prophets and in the advanced tech sense even this computer amazes me. So on many levels I’m not surprised or impressed.
It seems like she’s proven that she can make it rain, not that she has any particular insight or philosophical genius. Ororo didn’t get to be the leader of X-Men, I don’t see why she should be mine.
“You know, just once I’d like to hear a player say, ‘Yeah, we were in the game, until Jesus made me fumble. He hates our team.’” - Jeff Stilson