(June 1, 2015 at 8:06 am)Randy Carson Wrote: I suppose we have to begin be defining God.Good idea there. But when you include in your definition 'beyond human understanding' or 'ineffible' or 'infinite' you sabotage any further description. Once God is place beyond knowledge, you lose standing to claim knowledge thereof.
Personal revelation does not solve this. To judge personal revelation true, you have to be able to judge its validity, a task whose possibility you just eliminated.
(June 1, 2015 at 8:06 am)Randy Carson Wrote: Then why bother posting in my thread at all? C'ya!To see the bug wiggle.
In my model of reality, religions are complicated memeplexes that colonize minds. They are living structures of information carried in human brains. They have replicating strategies and defensive mechanisms that have evolved to aid their persistence and replication. They mutate and adapt. Or don't and go extinct, subject, as are we all, to selective pressures. While once strong, religion is being squeezed into smaller and smaller niches. Will it survive?
As an infected carrier, and potential vector, you are an available experimental subject.
Poke the bug, see it wiggle.
I am happy to admit, my model is also a replicating memeplex, but at least it is aware of its condition.
(June 1, 2015 at 8:06 am)Randy Carson Wrote:Sorry, I was unclear.(May 31, 2015 at 4:11 pm)JuliaL Wrote: Let's talk about cultural imperialism of the inquisition. Auto da fe anyone?
Yes, let's talk about the Inquisition. Or better yet, let's listen to atheist Tim O'Neill who IS a historian talk about the Inquisition.
I was referring to the entire expansionist imperialism of the Christian colonizing powers, not simply a few Spanish witch burners. The reaction of the Catholic church to the perceived existential threat of the reformation was to try to take back its ambulatory memory (re-convert by argument or force) and, were this to fail, fall back on a strategy of replication and expansion into the non-european minds becoming available. This expansion (missionary work to the heathen) supplanted cultures throughout the globe with attendent license to rape, pillage and murder because, after all, they were doing God's work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christiani...olonialism
Quote:During the Age of Discovery, the Catholic Church inaugurated a major effort to spread Christianity in the New World and to convert the Native Americans and other indigenous people.And, not at all incidentally, to destroy the extant cultures they discovered.
Quote:Adriaan van Oss wrote:Compared to this, a policy of hiding pedophile priests from due punishment is pretty weak meat.
If we had to choose a single, irreducible idea underlying Spanish colonialism in the New World, it would undoubtedly be the propagation of the Catholic faith. Unlike such other European as England or the Netherlands, Spain insisted on converting the natives of the lands it conquered to its state religion. Miraculously, it succeeded. Introduced in the context of Iberian expansionism, Catholicism outlived the empire itself and continues to thrive, not as an anachronistic vestige among the elite, but as a vital current even in remote mountain villages. Catholicism remains the principal colonial heritage of Spain in America.
So how, exactly, does God know that She's NOT a brain in a vat?