RE: Christians, Prove Your God Is Good
February 25, 2015 at 2:41 am
(This post was last modified: February 25, 2015 at 2:44 am by Ignorant.)
(February 24, 2015 at 6:55 pm)IATIA Wrote:(February 23, 2015 at 6:34 pm)Ignorant Wrote: What if I told you that God is pastichalony? When you ask me what pastichalony means, I respond with "Environmentalism is pastichalony". When you press me for a more meaningful description, I say, "it means different things to different people." When you ask me what I personally mean by it, I say, "I already told you that environmentalism is pastichalony." If you can adequately imagine that sort of exchange, you will understand my utter dissatisfaction.That makes no sense. You have provided no description of pastichalony, but rather used it as a descriptor and assumed one should be able to define pastichalony without reference.
That is precisely the senseless use of language that I was trying to illustrate, so thank you for the feedback on its effectiveness. It shouldn't make sense if I illustrated it correctly.
The person in that example is using the word "pastichalony" as if everyone just knows what it means. When he is pressed to offer a definition, he just keeps using the word which is not understood.
Using a word as a descriptor and assuming other people should be able to define that word without reference is, indeed, without sense.
It also happens to be what several people are doing in this thread with the word "good". However, hopefully you will notice that when I was asked to supply my own definition, I described the word "good" in a much different way than the hypothetical person was describing "pastichalony"
(February 24, 2015 at 7:27 pm)Nope Wrote: Christians say that their god is good so they must have some sort of definition as to what good is. If they can't even define good how do they know that their god is good or that anything that they do is good?
That is an excellent question for Christians who don't know what they mean by the word "good", but hopefully you will admit that it is just as excellent a question for atheists who say that god is not good. I'm not demanding a definition, but we should not assume that we all mean the same thing by the word, or that we all actually can articulate what it means according to our usage of that word.
