(August 30, 2010 at 6:06 pm)Captain Scarlet Wrote: The Christian god is said to exist by definition in a superntural realm as an omnipotent but incorporeal mind. As such an incorporeal mind has no potential nor kinetic energy they are incapable of acting upon the material world. Energy is of the material world and is required for action within it (eg forming earth or life upon it or just directing matters to take a particular course requires energy) therefore the Christian god cannot be omnipotent and this would lead one to conclude that therefore no being with these qualities exists and that atheism is true.
The only reason god is defined as omnipotent and omnicient is to cover all the horrible plot holes and errors in religious texts and so god can have no defined parameters in which to fail. It's a very convenient way to argue against less compitent people to allow god to do things in very impossible ways.
For example, 'god's mysterious ways' is a result of god knowing the future perfectly and can manipulate events across space and time in any manner it sees fit in order to make things happen in a specific manner. It's also a convenient way to explain how loving god is even though he's so perfectly cruel a deity in the old testiment.
The examples are endless. He's the original Mary Sue.
It's also why such a being is impossible as anything other than the workings of the human imagination and mythology. It's also why the Christian bible is far and away less interesting than greek, nordic, egyption, roman, or really just about all mythos.
If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach in the public schools, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools and next year you can make it a crime to teach it to the hustings or in the church. At the next session you may ban books and the newspapers...
Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding. Always feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers; tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lecturers, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, Your Honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth centry when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind. ~Clarence Darrow, at the Scopes Monkey Trial, 1925
Politics is supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first. ~Ronald Reagan
Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding. Always feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers; tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lecturers, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, Your Honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth centry when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind. ~Clarence Darrow, at the Scopes Monkey Trial, 1925
Politics is supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first. ~Ronald Reagan
