Why would any woman want to be Christian?

[jstrodel]

Strodel, you are literally one of the worst debaters I have ever come across, and by the looks of it a pretty despicable human being too; scrabbling to make excuses for the most awful immoral things while sniffing with haughty derision at we atheists for daring to disagree with you. You are either a liar, an idiot, or a brainwashed puppet, and this will be the last time I respond to any of your rambling, incoherent posts. However, I feel compelled to put a finer point on my reasoning in a few areas that you seem to have missed in your haste to call me a liberal some more, as though I should take that as an insult.

Not an insult, liberals have accomplished some good things.

Sweet! Okay then, I can feel pretty good about not bothering with you after this, because as you've just said, you have no morality! Your entire moral system is based on a system that can change, meaning what you're advocating isn't some divine, objective morality that is rigid and perfect, but for a command structure, where the whims of your deity inform your morality.

Have you ever read a book on Christian ethics in your whole life? I get sick of responding to these objections because you are so ignorant. The Bible/Christianity does not create an absolute authority in itself, God is the authority.

Now that we know this, don't you dare ever open your fucking trap again to criticize the strength of secular morality, you hypocritical oaf!

Maybe if you weren't making so many insulting statements you could think hard enough to put what you wrote into an argument. How does the knowledge of the God who created everything in history with a specific intention who knows its nature and has a divine order in which he is aware of the specific order that should result fail to deal with the problem of moral skepticism?

You are not even making arguments, it is not surprising you can't wrestle with difficult issues in the Bible.

I'll get to this in a moment, but I just wanted to say that this is the most breathtakingly ignorant and privileged comparisons I've ever seen. And that I know you understand the difference between the two, unless you really are an idiot, in which case... well, either way, why bother?

Why bother typing something if you aren't going to argue it? You are wasting my time.

Well, the reason I brought up Lot specifically is because even after offering his daughters up for gang rape, he was still allowed to leave Sodom as the one moral person in the city. God protects him, allows him to live while striking down the rest of his city for immorality. So... does that not count as something of a hint as to god's opinion on Lot's moral stature?

No, it counts for something that proves that you are not interpreting the Bible using sound scholarly principles, you are interpreting it by making stuff up as you go. There are many leaders in the Bible who are not judged immediately, and others who do suffer like Job. And atheists complain about Young Earth Creationism... You know, there are established ways that people understand the Bible. Go read a book by NT Wright or someone like that.

So, I've never sold anyone out as badly as Lot did there, I live a fairly normal and moral life, yet I'm going to hell for not believing, yet Lot's okay? Yeah, sounds like a fair system.

The Bible does not say that Lot went to heaven. You are ignorant about Biblical interpretation. I wish I could show you what I see. I went to school to study the Bible. You treat Biblical interpretation like it is some sort of apologetic game. Christians treat evolutionary science with great respect and care, whether they accept it or not (some like Mendel and Collins have influenced it deeply). In contrast, atheist views of scripture revolve around exegetical fallacies and amaturish ideas. Picture Penn Gillette holding up the Bible and saying about how it is "bullshit". If Christians had people like Penn Gillete talking about science that way, atheists would have a field day. Well, ok, they do, the fundamentalist movement has people like that. But Christians that are serious about the Bible tend to distance themselves from those guys. In contrast, the atheist movement blindly follows false methods of scripture interpretation.

You probably don't own one Bible commentary and have never used one. You apply a different standard to studying subjects that can produce economic fruit, such as natural science versus subjects that are not connected to economic gain, such as the study of scripture. Well, I am not against studying science, but if you want to have respect for knowledge, at least have it universally and not only have "respect for the truth" as it relates to fields you can use to make money and prove you don't have to submit to divine teachings.

You know, you say we need to interpret the bible, but can you step away from your own position for a moment and try to look at it from the outside? What you're really saying by that is "disregard the actual words there, and just pretend it says something else instead."

Who are you to interpret god's word? Or is god just a bad author? Either way, yes, I do refuse to put myself through the doublethink and mental contortions one needs to go through in order to make an immoral book seem slightly less immoral. Two plus two equals four, Strodel. Not five. We have not always been at war with Eurasia.

Your ignorance is bleeding through. I didn't say that. I take the authority of the Bible very seriously. If you are so convinced that you can follow the Penn Gillette "if I can't see it is valuable, it is BULLSHIT" method, why don't you try and become a lawyer using that method. Lawyers don't have to interpret the law right, "if it isn't literally true from what I can understand, it is bullshit". That is the way science works too, there is no interpretation, "if the words don't feel nice to me, or it feels weird, it is bullshit".

Deut 28 is obviously presenting a dichotomy between consensual and non-consensual acts. I have actually studied the Hebrew words in the passage, the word is "seize", I think it actually means something closer to "fuck" than "rape". It is not translated rape in all translations. Why would there be a contradictory penalty in the same passage, one for rape receiving death and the other not receiving death? It is because it is trying to draw a separate case. The Bible is not going to contradict itself by the same author in the same passage. The most basic principle of interpretation is to understand the original intention through trying to understand how the passage communicates the whole, contextual message. You can go with sound principles of Biblical interpretation or you can go with the Penn Gillette approach. But you can't call yourself an intellectual and study the Bible the way grown ups study it.

I guess my point was that god has no issues preventing certain social things outright, so why does he ease up on slavery so much? You've made a pretty pathetic strawman here to avoid answering my question, so I doubt you will ever approach this debate honestly at all, but everyone else gets what I was actually saying here, right? All the rational people?

This isn't an argument, it is more like "I wonder why God did this that way". For the intellectually sophisticated atheist, it is no problem to go from "I wonder why God did this that way" to "I see my opinion that this state of affairs is superior based on assumptions that I refuse to justify".

So, I'm an empathic being, which means I can put myself in the shoes of others. Do I think slavery would feel good? No, I think it would cause me quite considerable suffering. Being that I give a shit about other people, does that mean I therefore think of slavery as moral, until it affects me? No, it's immoral, because it causes people suffering and excludes them from being able to contribute to society under their own volition. So, from a moral perspective we seek to reduce suffering, and from a cost/benefit scenario, people who don't actively hate their work are more likely to do better, and the intellectual gifts that might be squandered on lives of hard labor in slavery would be better used in a world of self determined paths. There's your empathy.

How do you know that slavery does not eliminate more pain than it produces, for instance, by people selling themselves into slavery to avoid famine? Do you think this sort of economic analysis would be very easy to do? The last few hundred years has shown that it is very difficult to analyze economics from a philosophical perspective (see, Marxism). What makes you think that your approach is so right that you can call into question the foundation of Western civilization? How much time have you thought in your life about the way that slavery interacts with primitive economies? Probably not more than an hour or two. That is all you need to pull a Penn Gillete though.

Is forced, unending slavery immoral? Yep. I can't understand why a person with a supposedly superior divine morality is arguing otherwise.

Since slavery causes pain, you say it is moral to regulate slavery. Is it moral to regulate anything that causes pain? Is it always wrong to not regulate it. I am for legislation banning slavery, but I do not see slavery as an issue that exists as something that is basically separate from other issues. Capitalism causes pain. Should capitalism be seen as an intrinsic evil that is condemned? Well, I think it should be regulated. There is only so much that people can do.

What does this have to do with morality? The people who took slaves were doing an immoral thing... people sometimes do that. What's your point? I should excuse immorality because it happened by force?

How do you think ancient people should handle prisoners of war, who would revolt and kill them if they had the chance? Look at the situation in Iraq, only then, the different in military capabilities was much different. If you had just a small number of men with clubs, how hard do you think that would be to organize. I am not a military expert, but you cannot generalize from the modern world to what the ancient world should do. It is not like they had the resources to contain massive numbers of people or they had the military capabilities to endless subdue them. War is a complicated thing.

And? Am I saying slavery had no positive effects on the world? No, not really. Am I saying that there were much, much better ways to accomplish the same things, and probably surpass them? Yes, definitely. But we'll never know what the alternative history without slavery would look like, now will we?

You are just repeating your tired atheist apologetic. What makes you think slavery could be eliminated in the ancient world in a much easier way? How much time have you thought about this? How many books have you read about this? I have given up my whole life to seek God.

If you are saying slavery had no positive effects on the world and you are using a utilitarian approach, are you saying that slavery is considered to be wrong because it produced more good than bad? You acknowledge that it didn't have any positive effects on the world. How do you know that in the ancient world slavery produced more happiness than pain. These is just using your categories, which are horribly flawed and insufficient to understand morality. But they will do for this exercise.

The thing of it is just this: you have never studied slavery in the ancient world. You have no idea whether it would produce more happiness than pain or whether empathy would lead people to reject slavery or not. You are making it up as you go. You have probably not spent more than 4 hours thinking about this in your whole life. And you think it is perfectly legitimate to call yourself an "intellectual" and say the things you are saying. What if I did that about modern physics, if I spend 4 hours thinking about physics on the internet and then made anti-physics apologetics saying that physics was evil because it created the atom bomb and all these weapons and this and that and that all the physics theories were wrong because they violate COMMON SENSE DICKHEAD principles.

Of course that would be rejected.

Additionally, I suspect you brought up economics as a smoke screen because you know that you're arguing for an immoral and unpopular act, but you can't stop because that would mean admitting defeat to an atheist. Nobody is talking about economics but you. We were discussing morality and rights, which is a different issue that requires a different tact.

It is unsurprising that you are politically liberal that you think you can separate morality from economics. I used to be a leftist. If you are saying you should have empathy for people, wouldn't the empathy be directed towards knowing people economic destiny, and wouldn't that knowledge be relevant. Liberals love political propaganda and platitudes. These things win elections. Cold hard analysis, which is obviously the basis of real love, which takes through real hard work, not through convincing people of the merits of something but through actually doing it. Love and empathy are related to real ends, not the ability to convince people of the value of those ends. Politics is about convincing people to follow certain moral platitudes or this or that. Real love is directed towards people in specific circumstances and understood rigorously and clearly, it directed towards people and not causes or politicians. I think you have some confusion here.

But hey, I'm not surprised that you were being dishonest. It seems it's just a thing that you do, easy as breathing.

Where? What did I say that was dishonest?

Saying all this, just to advocate for slavery? My my, you must be right. Clearly I should bow to you, superior moral philosopher, with your cavalcade of faint ad hominems, constant strawmen and unsupported assertions, and your immoral central position. Yes.

When did I say I was an advocate of slavery? I am an advocate for doing things that help people. The Bible does not advocate slavery, it regulates it. If you want to live in a theoretical utopia, why not live in a Communist nation like North Korea? There you can live at peace knowing that there are absolute moral principles to economic organization. Does that actually produce a better quality of life? No. Is that the same thing as sounding good?

I'd call those nations democracies, you fucking moron.

Which democracies have been run on empathy and mutual agreement? The last time I checked, America and all the countries of Europe have been run on military power, redistribution of wealth and aggressive, often deceptive politics.

Because the bible is a self-contradictory piece of trash written by desert dwelling savages with superiority complexes, and the people that follow it are imbecilic cultists like yourself, or indoctrinated normal people who just throw out the bits they don't like.

Well, there is your evidence, you start off with the presupposition that the BIble is contradictory, so when you see something that looks contradictory, you don't have to try and understand it, you can add it to the "apologetics" pile.

Now I'm done with you. Feel free to respond as you like. Just know that the rest of us are laughing at you, but we're all secretly disgusted with you too, you dishonest, immoral excuse for a human being.

I am immoral? Why? You yourself said that "slavery may not have had only bad effects". You are saying that I am immoral based on a failure to apply very very complicated economic analysis that you yourself cannot do. Your analysis of the situation was entirely based on ad hominem and your own reasoning, you did not cite a single author or do any sort of analysis to support your position. You think that the Bible is something that you can safely disregard and have a presupposition against, though it created the culture that you live in.

When you write, you write words. You start writing, and you don't care if the words you write actually say anything.

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I...

I... I can't... I'm not equipped to...

It's not... it doesn't... How can... Why does...

It just doesn't work like that... It's so...

ARGH!

I need to get out of here, or I might slam my head into my desk so hard it splits the atoms there and kills us all. I'm almost vibrating at how angry this makes me.

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Why should I take your feelings to be authoritative? Where does your worldview guarantee the accuracy of your feelings.

Ditto.

You guys are so high and mighty with your political platitudes and cultivated psuedo-feminist sensibilities, but if you you go a judge in America and you see a situation in which you get drunk and something happens with a girl and it is not really clear exactly what happened (rape, consensual, a screwed up situation), the judge will want to know what happened.

You guys are so self righteous and the way that you talk about these issues shows that you lack intellectual depth or discernment. It is like I am watching a television advertisement for a Democratic politician, telling me that if i don't vote for him I am not a feminist. That is where all of this comes from, and that is the level of it. It is propanganda.

You know when you are dealing with political propaganda when you ask someone to justify why it is that they feel some controversial issue is a universal absolute and, instead of justifying it they say "YOU ARE AN EVIL PERSON WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU CAN'T YOU SEE HOW BAD THIS IS". That is when you know that they really have nothing other than the propaganda they believe that has fooled their heart into thinking they have perceived the nature of existence. If you can perceive the nature of existence, share that, but when I see that people refuse to share that and instead utter empty words, my heart is sad because of their great and destructive ignorance.

I do consider myself to be a feminist, and care very deeply about woman. It is something that I have spent a good deal of time thinking about.