Quote:Grow up dude. 

He's quiet grown up 

Quote:"Why God can't commit suicide" is an invalid question because it already contains a contradiction.

Nope

Quote:This is not a reductio ad absurdum, which requires the contradiction to arise in the conclusion, not the premises.

It's still a valid objection you have not dealt with

(February 18, 2020 at 4:30 pm)Klorophyll Wrote:

(February 18, 2020 at 3:34 pm)The Grand Nudger Wrote: Not knowing may end up being a permanent fact of their existence.  It's not as if plenty of people haven't gone to their deaths uncertain of what, if any, future awaited them. 

This is true of course. But one's state of mind should always be to keep looking. Probably no religion - and certainly not Islam -  condemns a sincere atheist/agnostic who died not knowing .

Is that really true, though?

Anywho....why should I keep looking for something that I've already found and have no use for?  My position on gods is based on what I know, not what I don't.  Like I said, I'm not an agnostic.  

Quote:

(February 18, 2020 at 3:34 pm)The Grand Nudger Wrote: I don't reject islam because I'm an atheist, either.  I couldn't be a muslim even if the moongod were real. 

So what reasons made you so hostile to this religion anyway ?

I have a never-ending stream of moral objections to the abrahamic cults.  There's so much horrid shit in all of your religions that I can't co-sign on them regardless of whether or not your gods exist.

(February 18, 2020 at 6:20 pm)The Grand Nudger Wrote:

(February 18, 2020 at 4:30 pm)Klorophyll Wrote: This is true of course. But one's state of mind should always be to keep looking. Probably no religion - and certainly not Islam -  condemns a sincere atheist/agnostic who died not knowing .

Is that really true, though?

Yes, it's absolutely true. You're free to look up Ahl al-Fatrah, a technical term in Islamic theology refering to anyone who sincerely looked for an answer and didn't find it / was geographically isolated / embraced an entirely different religion and never looked into Islam hard enough / died before the Islamic prophet, etc. All these categories are honest people who did what they could.

(February 18, 2020 at 6:20 pm)The Grand Nudger Wrote: Anywho....why should I keep looking for something that I've already found and have no use for?  My position on gods is based on what I know, not what I don't.  Like I said, I'm not an agnostic. 

If you're not an agnostic, you must have a reason for weighting the other side, that is, God not existing. Otherwise, you are erring on the side of dishonesty.

Sure, plenty of reasons, but they're not the reasons that I'm not a muslim, christian, or jew. I went looking and found answers, to use your phrase above. The answers I found made your religions impossible for me to belong to.

(February 18, 2020 at 6:20 pm)The Grand Nudger Wrote: I have a never-ending stream of moral objections to the abrahamic cults.  There's so much horrid shit in all of your religions that I can't co-sign on them regardless of whether or not your gods exist.

Bring it on and pick your most vicious moral objection regarding Islam

Quote:If you're not an agnostic, you must have a reason for weighting the other side, that is, God not existing. Otherwise, you are erring on the side of dishonesty.

Once again same old tricks .You have failed to demonstrate god and not our job to do so .That's not dishonest .Either you have evidence or disbelief is justified even if on is not certain or reserves final judgment.You can deny this all you like it's a valid position .

All the usual misgivings that a person like myself has with regards to the ethical views of a 7th century warlord and child molester. Or to the divine tyrant he implores us to worship, under threat of torture...or through the bribe of heavenly reward. Or to the blatant distortion of facts in your magic book that amount to real human misery here in mere reality.

That's just not the way to get me into a club. It's honestly not my jam....and it wouldn't suddenly become my jam, as I said, if god were to descend on my lawn for a courtesy call.

(February 18, 2020 at 12:01 pm)Klorophyll Wrote:

(February 18, 2020 at 10:43 am)Mister Agenda Wrote: It's entirely possible that a just deity could exist without me finding it.

If you mean by not finding it that there was no possible way for you to do so, then I beg to differ. A just deity, by definition, is just to its creatures, justness entails not leaving them lost in the most fundamental questions of life. What I see around me appears to imply design and care from a higher being, I am basically wired for belief. New understanding of natural processes through science doesn't change the fact that we tend to believe. This very fact should at least suggest to seriously looking for answers in revelation.
It will be dishonest for anyone to say he doesn't feel there are aspects of being taken care of in his life in some way.

A just deity doesn't have to be omnipotent, it has to be just and a deity. Maybe it's in another galaxy and doing the best it can with the worshipers it has over there. Maybe a just deity created us and died in the effort. There are other ideas of gods besides the tri-omni one.

(February 18, 2020 at 12:01 pm)Klorophyll Wrote:

(February 18, 2020 at 10:43 am)Mister Agenda Wrote: Now a tri-omni God is ridiculous and does not exist, it falls apart under its own definition, attributes, and premises.

The problem of evil applies to a tri-omni God: if it's all-powerful and all-benevolent; it wouldn't create a universe with creatures capable of suffering. The existence of suffering is evidence against that version of God being real.

A tri-omni God knows all of it's future actions and because its knowledge is perfect, it can't do otherwise; but an omnipotent being could choose to do otherwise that it foresees...but if it does, it wasn't truly omniscient, it was wrong about what it was going to do.

Not to mention all the things I can do that a tri-omni God cannot: grow, learn, make mistakes, repent, be surprised, fail, doubt, and regret; a tri-omni being is the most alien creature imaginable. But it doesn't exist. It attributes are incompatible with each other. It's clearly the result of generations of religious people claiming their god is greater than anyone else's until they hit 'it knows everything and can do anything and loves everything more than anyone'.

I think we already discussed this point when talking about free will.
If you mean by all-benevolent all-loving, then no, this is not one of the attributes all major religions agree on. The three-omni properties generally refer to  : eternal, omnipotent and omniscient. Once stuff about love kicks in, which is essentially an attempt to anthropomorphise God, we can come up with all kinds of contradicitions, as is the case with the all-loving Christian God throwing Muslims to hell for eternal damnation. God in Islam is not all-loving, and this is explicitly mentioned in the Qur'an.
Three-omni God cannot grow? Sure. Growth already entails being incomplete, we grow to approach something, some limit, some higher state of existence. But for God there is nothing to grow for by definition. Not being able to grow is not a logical problem, it's wordplay again on the definition of God.
The same can be said about being surprised, failing, doubting, regreting ... These are all doings of human beings dealing with unknowable stuff - like the future, other people's thoughts, etc. For God there is again nothing unknowable, and God not being able to be surprised [lol] is again not a problem, it's simply you playing with the adjective "able" hoping to rule out his existence.

It's always amusing to see which leg of the tripod of theodicy a believer in that kind of God will try to saw off when pressed, and a little depressing when they decide they can do without the benevolence but absolutely have to save the omnipotence. You have just admitted the God you worship is not tri-omni, only 'bi-omni'. That's much more manageable and does away with the problem of evil; but an omniscient God still cannot have free will because it can not do other than it has foreseen that it will do, and it can't be omnipotent for the same reason; omnipotence requires free will. Since omnipotence seems the most important attribute to you, maybe slice a little bit off that omniscience. It's your character, you can edit it however you want.

(February 18, 2020 at 12:01 pm)Klorophyll Wrote:

(February 18, 2020 at 10:43 am)Mister Agenda Wrote: I'm an agnostic atheist. I don't know there's no God, I just think it's unlikely. The tri-omni God falls apart on close examination; the other versions of a creator God and the other gods are indistinguishable from campfire stories. For any god to be real, the supernatural also has to be real, and no supernatural claims have ever stood up to close scrutiny. The tri-omni God is impossible and the others have no evidence. The God of deism is the most coherent and it still lacks any evidence at all in support of its existence.

If you think the three-omni God concept  falls apart - I just explained that this is not the case - , then you are an atheist of the hard kind toward the God of all major religions. You are simply confirming the point of my post : we actually do take sides regarding the three omni god, since its attributes are so extreme he either is obviously there or obviously non-existent.

Yes I am, that's what I was saying about the Abrahamic God, glad you picked up on that; but you know that Buddhism and Hinduism are also major religions, right? The god of deism and the Greek gods are no more likely to be real than leprechauns (I don't eliminate the possibility entirely as they can't be proven not to exist) but the tri-omni God of Abraham as accepted by the more literal of the Abrahamic religion followers not only doesn't exist, it obviously doesn't exist (your objections don't make it not the case), because its proponents went way too far overboard on how great it's supposed to be.

Of course members of the Abrahamic religions don't believe all the same things in perfect harmony, the idea of God can vary between sects and some versions have the advantage of not being a contradictory pile of omni-attributes. In Open Theology, God does not pre-determine the future and therefore does not have direct foreknowledge of everything that's going to happen, leaving both God and humans free will and an 'open' future of possibilities in which God can be influenced by human actions and decisions. By limiting the omniscience, they get to keep the omnibenevolence and omnipotence. Their God does not will evil and God's intervention is not ruled out but their God rarely intervenes in the course of events and their God is not immutable and unchanging. Neither is the God of Process Theology, which is part of time, not outside of it. They limit God's omnipotence in that their God is not coercive, it never forces human behavior. Self-determination characterizes both God and humanity.

I don't believe in those Gods either, but at least those concepts don't immediately self-destruct and I kind of appreciate that they'd rather believe God has limits on God's power or knowledge than believe that there are limits on God's love.

(February 18, 2020 at 4:30 pm)Klorophyll Wrote: Grow up dude. "Why God can't commit suicide" is an invalid question because it already contains a contradiction. This is not a reductio ad absurdum, which requires the contradiction to arise in the conclusion, not the premises.

Nope. You are now claiming that your gaaaawwwwwwwdddd lacks the power to terminate it's own existence. By definition it therefore cannot be omnipotent. There is clearly at least one power it lacks.

What other powers does it lack, according to you?

(February 18, 2020 at 6:48 pm)The Grand Nudger Wrote: All the usual misgivings that a person like myself has with regards to the ethical views of a 7th century warlord and child molester.  Or to the divine tyrant he implores us to worship, under threat of torture...or through the bribe of heavenly reward.  Or to the blatant distortion of facts in your magic book that amount to real human misery here in mere reality.    

That's just not the way to get me into a club.  It's honestly not my jam....and it wouldn't suddenly become my jam, as I said, if god were to descend on my lawn for a courtesy call.

Nothing you're mentioning counts as an objection. You need to deal with moral relativism first before judging what people did centuries ago. For Aristotle, slavery is good. That doesn't give us the right to start insulting the guy centuries later.

Look up for anachronism, although I think you already know this stuff ; "anachronism is an embarrassment. It is not merely getting a date wrong, a chronological error. It is mistaking some aspect of a period’s regulative conceptualization of the world. It typically occurs when we impose our own modern conceptions onto the workings of the past."

Muhammad married Aisha when she was six years old. If that was a moral problem for his contemporaries - and they are the only poeple who have the right to judge -, his marriage would have been mocked by every pagan in Mecca, and would have jeopardized his career as a prophet. But none of that happened. The marriage happened almost ten years after he started preaching the message, i.e. he was already a nuisance that needed to be dealt with for the Quraysh leaders. And dealing with him included discrediting him as a moral role model.

(February 19, 2020 at 10:47 am)Mister Agenda Wrote: A just deity doesn't have to be omnipotent, it has to be just and a deity. Maybe it's in another galaxy and doing the best it can with the worshipers it has over there. Maybe a just deity created us and died in the effort. There are other ideas of gods besides the tri-omni one.

I am curious to know your definition of a deity and its exact attributes. Because ruling out omnipotence is a big one. I suppose though that this deity you're talking about is the same deity that created us. And it would be awkward for this very deity not to be able to reach us.
A mortal deity is a useless concept that is not worth pursuing. Why? Because its existence is something of the past, even if provable, it has no bearing on our lives because, again, it's dead.

I agree we can imagine all kinds of deities. But it's an exercise in futility to investigate deities that can't interfere with us in any imaginable way, because, whether they exist or not, there is no reason for us to care.

(February 19, 2020 at 10:47 am)Mister Agenda Wrote: It's always amusing to see which leg of the tripod of theodicy a believer in that kind of God will try to saw off when pressed, and a little depressing when they decide they can do without the benevolence but absolutely have to save the omnipotence. 

I don't see how keeping omnibenevolence will relieve your depression either. Is it acceptable to you that a God loves - unconditionally, mind you - a person who murdered entire families, conducted rapes and genocides with no remorse?
Is it conceivable in any imaginable way that God loves the likes of, say, Ted Bundy or Henry Lee Lucas unconditionally?

The Qur'an explicitly mentions the problem:
[4:18] : The Jews and the Christians say, “We are the children of God, and His beloved.” Say, “Why then does He punish you for your sins?” In fact, you are humans from among those He created. He forgives whom He wills, and He punishes whom He wills. To God belongs the dominion of the heavens and the earth and what lies between them, and to Him is the return.

The very existence of punishment is not reconcilable with omnibenevolence. The latter is merely an extension of motherly tenderness, nothing more. It's the product of our imagination. That's why the Christian belief is competely nonsensical, his advocacy for omnibenevolence is actually a symptom of an altered, corrupt doctrine.

It's very simple and straightforward : those who deserve love are loved, those who don't, aren't. Unconditional love is something sweet to sing about, but it doesn't make sense.

(February 19, 2020 at 10:47 am)Mister Agenda Wrote: but an omniscient God still cannot have free will because it can not do other than it has foreseen that it will do, and it can't be omnipotent for the same reason; omnipotence requires free will. Since omnipotence seems the most important attribute to you, maybe slice a little bit off that omniscience. It's your character, you can edit it however you want.

I think you're forgetting what free will means in the first place. From Wiki we have : "Free will is the ability to choose between different possible courses of action unimpeded". It doesn't include regretting a decision made in the past, which is what you are supposing implicitly. For you argument to work, God needs to second guess a decision he made freely, and second-guessing has nothing to do with free will. You just want to stick a bad attribute to God as you were doing before when you mentioned being surprised, learning, growing, etc. Again, you're anthropomorphising God to rule him out of existence.
Now, it's true an omniscient God can't do other than it has foreseen. Is that a problem? As long as he didn't change his mind about what he decided, there is none. And being able to change mind is specific to us feeble humans.
God also can't feel sorry for itself, can't feel guilt, can't get tired, can't feel hungry, etc.  You can see now I think the problem with your reasoning.

(February 19, 2020 at 10:47 am)Mister Agenda Wrote: Yes I am, that's what I was saying about the Abrahamic God, glad you picked up on that; but you know that Buddhism and Hinduism are also major religions, right? The god of deism and the Greek gods are no more likely to be real than leprechauns (I don't eliminate the possibility entirely as they can't be proven not to exist) but the tri-omni God of Abraham as accepted by the more literal of the Abrahamic religion followers not only doesn't exist, it obviously doesn't exist (your objections don't make it not the case), because its proponents went way too far overboard on how great it's supposed to be.

Of course members of the Abrahamic religions don't believe all the same things in perfect harmony, the idea of God can vary between sects and some versions have the advantage of not being a contradictory pile of omni-attributes. In Open Theology, God does not pre-determine the future and therefore does not have direct foreknowledge of everything that's going to happen, leaving both God and humans free will and an 'open' future of possibilities in which God can be influenced by human actions and decisions. By limiting the omniscience, they get to keep the omnibenevolence and omnipotence. Their God does not will evil and God's intervention is not ruled out but their God rarely intervenes in the course of events and their God is not immutable and unchanging. Neither is the God of Process Theology, which is part of time, not outside of it. They limit God's omnipotence in that their God is not coercive, it never forces human behavior. Self-determination characterizes both God and humanity.

I don't believe in those Gods either, but at least those concepts don't immediately self-destruct and I kind of appreciate that they'd rather believe God has limits on God's power or knowledge than believe that there are limits on God's love.

As explained above, infinite love is much more problematic than infinite power, and more importantly, it doesn't make any sense, because it's obviously a pure product of the human mind, something we spice up to make the concept more attractive. Why some tend to think omniscience is impossible is only because of its subtle meaning, there is nothing wrong about it logically. 

Of course the idea of God varies for every belief out there. But nobody really takes a god with half-baked attributes seriously, because its existence (or non-existence) doesn't change anything in anybody's life. Only the tri-omni just god does, because then his existence implies necessarily that he gave us clues about himself, and created us for a purpose. He's also the only concept of god against which you had real objections. His existence is verifiable in some way. If we do that, there is nothing more to be done regarding the god question.