(November 21, 2018 at 4:06 am)ignoramus Wrote: Bel ...That's all very noble but still based on nothing solid.
Granted, the very short version I've typed out here seems arbitrary. People have been working on it for well over 2000 years, though, so we can be pretty confident that whatever objections occur to us have been addressed.
This doesn't mean you should believe it -- just that there may be more solidity to it than my summary implies.
Quote:As atheists can and do strive for the "good", is God needed?
According to this view, insofar as anyone is striving for the Good, he is striving in the direction of God. Knowledge of the concept of God would not be needed.
Quote:If God "is" the good, then he may as well be anything and everything and dilute to nothing.
It is not a thing -- if by "thing" we mean something tangible, sensible, having a separate and physical existence. It is closer to an ideal or an idea. This is why both Plato and Weil insist that the best introduction to God is mathematics. The intangibility and purity of math, and its existence despite that, points us in the right direction.
Quote:Since when does good give spare lives out if you follow the rules?
Aren't you thinking of video games?
I've already addressed the issue of rules.
Life after death, in this view, is of a completely different type than life in the material world. We have to get past the view of heaven we get from New Yorker cartoons, with people on clouds lined up at the Pearly Gates. Dante's description is most clearly imagined, though since he is writing for people who can't imagine eternity without time or space, he makes it clear that he is writing symbolically.
