RE: Enough of this crap, I want to hear directly from god
December 3, 2020 at 11:56 am
(This post was last modified: December 3, 2020 at 11:57 am by R00tKiT.)
(November 30, 2020 at 9:21 am)The Grand Nudger Wrote: There's no indication, thusfar, that we're discussing anything god related. No one is making any assumptions about god aside from yourself.
The observation is that children tend to ascribe purpose to natural phenomena.
Some portion of this, we agree, is down to kids imagining things. That they're very capable of describing something that is not there. I don't know what portion of experienced content that accounts for, but we can put a pin in that and say some. Some of what children see is purely imaginary. I doubt that the purely imaginary stuff is what you have in mind when you insist that this is evidence for a god.
Still, we might assert that....at least sometimes....children get it right. I think that's probably more fair than the notion that they always get it wrong. They ascribe purpose to natural phenomena because it's there. This is what the term natural teleology explicitly refers to.
Again, you're describing the content of their imagination, -which, we agree, doesn't say much about reality- instead of the tendency. Children are a more honest version of ourselves, stripped of any cultural or ideological influence, at the same time we observe that they invariably assign big phenomena to big creators -be it a giant unicorn, pixies, or something similar- and/or give them purpose.
As I already said, children often have no problem with the ideas of heaven, hell, afterlife, they may even invent them themselves without being presented with any religious elements. Death in its raw form isn't conceivable even to adults.
One can of course see this as further proof that religion is man made. But there is an equal probability of it being a creator leaving us imprints making its religion easy to grasp/follow.
So, whether children picture these creators/these vague meanings of purpose accurately is not really an interesting question. To describe even simpler stuff accurately to other people already requires a great deal of linguistic ability and social intelligence.
(November 30, 2020 at 9:21 am)The Grand Nudger Wrote: It either is or isn't possible. The specific failures of your own imagination are irrelevant. Nothing has prevented equally religious people from conceiving of an afterlife without any gods and nothing about you believing in some silly god makes that impossible.
That's not how any of this works, at all.
You didn't answer my question. What external power you think will intervene to ressurect the dead ? What kind of power will glue together the ashes of billions of burned people- for example? If you claim you can conceive of an afterlife without an all powerful being, they you can at least conceive of a rudimentary scenario of godless ressurection.
Meanwhile. Here is my logical argument against any possiblity of afterlife absent a god:
1- An afterlife requires supernatural intervention. For natural intervention cannot bring back the dead, or even cure all diseases of the living.
2- Absent a god, there is no supernatural intervention.
3- Therefore, if there is no god, there is no afterlife.
(November 30, 2020 at 9:21 am)The Grand Nudger Wrote: To you, maybe..and perhaps that's why you made yet another assumption. That other people would share your silly beliefs about god-purpose. I don't think that god-purpose is worth anything at all.
The god purpose motivated many people to work for the exact causes you mentioned -preventing famine, genocides, rape, etc. Absent the god purpose, all other purposes are equally appealing.
On a sidenote, if someone tells you he finds purpose in favoring white people over black people, what makes his purpose less valuable than yours ?