RE: Agnosticism IS the most dishonest position
February 19, 2020 at 3:07 pm
(This post was last modified: February 19, 2020 at 3:08 pm by R00tKiT.)
(February 19, 2020 at 12:57 pm)The Grand Nudger Wrote: No, I already told you, I have moral objections to his character and his ethics. This makes him unsuitable as a cult leader, and makes his cult unsuitable, to me.
I think you only hear what you want to hear. I already said you can't object morally to his character mainly because he doesn't belong to your era. You need a stronger case against him than simply saying "not my jam" and/or name calling.
(February 19, 2020 at 12:57 pm)The Grand Nudger Wrote: I like to tell your christian brethren that I'm just not a winnable soul. The things that you consider to be true, the truth that you would have me affirm, repulse me as a person of good character and strong conscience.
Again, you're referring to yourself - more precisely, to your tastes - as judge and jury over the entire history. Until now you didn't give any objective underlying reason for your distaste against the prophets.
(February 19, 2020 at 12:59 pm)Mister Agenda Wrote: The usual definition of 'god' is fine by me: a superhuman divine being or spirit worshiped for its supernatural powers. If I capitalize it, I'm talking about one of the 'created the universe' ones. Why would a just deity necessarily be the one that created us if we were created by any deity at all? Maybe the god of clay molded us out of river sediment and the god of justice handles all the 'being just' aspects of reality. Myths are very malleable, and so are deities, their backgrounds and attributes depend largely on what people want them to be. Maybe the gods of clay and justice are still with us and actively participating in human affairs without being obvious about it; and we'd get more justice and better ceramics if we prayed to them instead of the wrong gods. If you only want to talk about Gods, that's fine, but you have no authority to say lesser superhumanly powerful immortal beings don't count as gods.
I think we should refer to established belief systems when trying to agree on definitions. I didn't pick the attributes of God in Islam, nor did any other Muslim or Christian or Jew, and thus, at least for major religions, God is not that open to imagination. Also, regarding the gods of clay and justice, even the claim isn't there anywhere, no one ever made it his life's purpose to preach for the god of clay, therefore, a fortiori, the god of clay didn't send anyone . So we can rest assured that, even if these gods existed, they didn't want us to find out, and we shouldn't concern ourselves with them. The versions of God for which there is at least a claim, that is, messengers or revelations making extraordinary assertions, are a good starting point.
(February 19, 2020 at 12:59 pm)Mister Agenda Wrote: Jesus said to love your enemy. I've seen people who can manage that, surely God can if he wants to.
I don't see the relationship between loving your enemy and unconditionally loving a person who did gravely immoral deeds his entire life.
(February 19, 2020 at 12:59 pm)Mister Agenda Wrote: God can't have 'motherly tenderness'? God can't exert just punishment and still love the one that unfortunately has to be punished? I would agree that God can't love the object of unjust eternal torture (that's obviously either preternatural hatred or superhuman pettiness); but punishment and love are not mutually exclusive. Sounds like your God's version of love is very limited and ordinary. Not the sort of God you'd worship out of love, the sort you'd worship out of fear in order to placate. I suppose that might turn into a Stockholm Syndrome type of quasi-love.
Firrst of all, there are people who justly deserve eternal torture. The length of a crime has no bearing on the length of the punishment, drinking poison only takes seconds to make one pass away forever, shooting someone is done instantly while prison time can be as lengthy as it gets, etc. It's not hard then to say, for example, that a murderer like Hitler should pay the price of every human life he took unfairly, and since human life is infinitely valuable, infinite punishment is the only right thing here.
And speaking of love, I didn't negate benevolence altogether, I'm objecting to omnibenevolence. You already seem to agree that God can't love people condemned to eternal damnation. Well, there are people who deserve it. God is benevolent, sure, and there are Muslims - whose religion doesn't say their God is all-loving - who worship God out of love, namely, adepts of Sufism.
(February 19, 2020 at 12:59 pm)Mister Agenda Wrote: If you're never able to change your mind, in what sense is your will free? You forgot about the part of free will where you're free to make a different choice. An omniscient being literally cannot make a different choice, all of its choices were predetermined. No thought or decision making is involved, the moment you are omniscient with regard to the future, that's the moment all of your choices are set in diamond.
"Thought" and "decision making" are, again, specific to the human thought process. You say "all of its choices were predetermined" without explaining exactly what you mean by predetermined. Predetermined by whom? If by God himself, then so much the better, as long as he makes the absolute best choices -which he does by defintion. God was always there and he does what he wants without any external force or condition influencing his actions, and this is free will.
Even the word decision is not appropriate when speaking about a supreme being, decision underlies some studying done beforehand, which is of course not the case with an omnipotent being.
You say : "the moment you are omniscient with regard to the future, that's the moment all of your choices are set in diamond." And I agree. And it's not a problem, God is that good by definition.
(February 19, 2020 at 12:59 pm)Mister Agenda Wrote: It's all a pure product of the human mind, at least the ones who believe in God's love are being kind of sweet. Everyone who believe in a god takes a god with half-baked attributes seriously, because they're all half-baked. None of the supposed gods or Gods changes anything in anybody's life except for the psychological effect on their attitudes and actions; because they're all imaginary or might as well be because none of them have an existence that is verifiable in any rational way. They're all only as real as their followers belief in them. There is nothing to be done with the god question because there either aren't any gods or they are completely undetectable.
We believe in God's love too, only not in the omni sense. The three omni God, if he exists, actually does change the eternal portions of all our lives - our afterlife. And thus, he does have, theoretically, a bearing on our existence. And as I said, this same God can't be undetectable logically. But if you establish that this is the case, by ruling out the major revelations out there as complete fabrications, then you're done.