[split] Are Questions About God Important?

[SimpleCaveman]

Hi Grand Nudger,

Sorry for the delay. Things have been busy. Still are.

Good god, it's a wave of specific incompetence!  Probably random chance or completely noncognitive.  

I know! And the whole notifications, thing. Dogs and cats living together. Yikes!

Yes, ofc I was speaking to you - and I can loop you right in.  What if..like Boru, I played along with this notion that my values come from christianity, as a post christian pagan-leaning anti-theist..and say that they're just christianity+?  Like, yeah, all of these supersititions and gods are garbage and you shouldn't worship them or miseducated children into thinking that the reason not to stab little johhny from the next row is that those silly non-gods are watching...and I say, "...plus the christian one".  Who has more of whatever in this instance, and what word would you like to use to refer to whatever that more is?

I’m going to skip this scenario, even though you grant me the gift of picking the word to use to refer to “whatever”. Thank you. I would have picked “spatula.” Spatula is a good word. :-)

Previously, you said this, which I think captures the source of confusion well.

Let's try a thought experiment.  If you went to your church or temple or fellowship or whatever, and told the folks there that...if god weren't real... there'd be no reason you could think of not to eat their kids....what do you think would happen?

Of course, I could think of a lot of reasons that people wouldn’t eat their kids. They’ve been avoiding that for millennium. Similar for stabbing little johnny, whether we eat him afterwards or not. But that’s not the point that it seems like, as you describe it, theists are trying to make. And their point is not my point, when I referred to Holland’s book. And that isn’t even the main point of the thread!
(NB: I love these kinds of discussions, but they do bring up many, many branches. I will try to prune the variants. Avoiding the many branches just from this, I will make one post on this topic and then try to go back to somewhere on the original thread. I do not have much of a life, but the natural lack of focus in these threads is more than even a simple caveman wants to handle)

Holland’s point is that a rigorous review of Roman and Greek cultures makes it clear that most people would find their mores to be alien. This is because western culture (as well as many cultures they indoctrinated) was steeped in Christianity for, let’s say, 1300 years. Even 50 years ago, most people would gladly, fully, identify as Christian of some sort. You can’t come out of something like that without being heavily influenced by it. To use an analogy you may enjoy, If you plant crops on the site of a nuclear explosion, the corn’s going to be radioactive.

Now, back to the main thread (probably tomorrow).

Pax et bonum