[split] Debunking Christianity? And Boris Spacek raised the dead...

[Boris Spacek]

In my very first post, I suggested that evil was the necessary corollary to good. In that sense, God "created" good and evil, in that without evil, good could not exist.

What we humans have deemed good could definitely exist without evil. The only thing evil would be necessary for is for us to understand the conept of good. If good cannot exist without evil, then there must be evil in heaven.

Wrong. All this says is that there must be a Heaven and a Hell.

Now about existence...

I argue that if the concept of evil exists, evil exists. Why? By the example of prophetic writers, it has been demonstrated time and again that thoughts in one's head one day may manifest themselves as real things occupying space outside one's head. The best examples are prophetic writers like Roger Bacon and Karel Capek; among the ludicrous, unconvincing ones is Nostradamus. Basically, very little separates a concept or a plan from it's fulfillment: if you can perfectly imagine the mechanism by which something will work, it can be built and can have existence. That's why robots exist and vampires (in the mythical sense) don't: there aren't any great ideas as to how a vampire could exist. One could try to imagine it, but existence would be deemed very unlikely. Inference and conceptualization also played a major part in the discovery of atoms and molecules, which were theorized by Boltzmann long before substantial evidence was brought forth to confirm this. There's something to be said for the superiority of concepts (forms) over their material copies: if all the copy can do is weakly resemble one's imagining, then why exalt the copy when it is the thought that gave birth to it, to which the copy owes all thanks for existence. On the other hand, copies are a useful check on whether or not one has a stupid idea or not: for each person, a copy can always precede his/her concept, but a concept won't always precede the copy.

Evil is one of those age old ideas that people have a great many ways of meticulously describing. Even if people cannot agree on how evil is defined, it still has various existences. Contradiction doesn't make the concepts any less real, and the concepts are no less real than their fulfillments.

So, what do you think of this? I have to go and forgot where I was going with this...

[genkaus]

Wrong. All this says is that there must be a Heaven and a Hell.

Now about existence...

I argue that if the concept of evil exists, evil exists. Why? By the example of prophetic writers, it has been demonstrated time and again that thoughts in one's head one day may manifest themselves as real things occupying space outside one's head. The best examples are prophetic writers like Roger Bacon and Karel Capek; among the ludicrous, unconvincing ones is Nostradamus. Basically, very little separates a concept or a plan from it's fulfillment: if you can perfectly imagine the mechanism by which something will work, it can be built and can have existence. That's why robots exist and vampires (in the mythical sense) don't: there aren't any great ideas as to how a vampire could exist. One could try to imagine it, but existence would be deemed very unlikely. Inference and conceptualization also played a major part in the discovery of atoms and molecules, which were theorized by Boltzmann long before substantial evidence was brought forth to confirm this. There's something to be said for the superiority of concepts (forms) over their material copies: if all the copy can do is weakly resemble one's imagining, then why exalt the copy when it is the thought that gave birth to it, to which the copy owes all thanks for existence. On the other hand, copies are a useful check on whether or not one has a stupid idea or not: for each person, a copy can always precede his/her concept, but a concept won't always precede the copy.

Evil is one of those age old ideas that people have a great many ways of meticulously describing. Even if people cannot agree on how evil is defined, it still has various existences. Contradiction doesn't make the concepts any less real, and the concepts are no less real than their fulfillments.

So, what do you think of this? I have to go and forgot where I was going with this...

The crux of your argument fails on two points.

1. Just because it can be conceived does not mean it does, can or would exist. Something which cannot exist can be conceived as well.

2. The claim that material is an approximate copy of and therefore inferior to the conceptual ignores the fact that concepts are made after observation of the material - therefore it is the concepts that are created from it.

[Boris Spacek]

[/quote]

The crux of your argument fails on two points.

1. Just because it can be conceived does not mean it does, can or would exist. Something which cannot exist can be conceived as well.

2. The claim that material is an approximate copy of and therefore inferior to the conceptual ignores the fact that concepts are made after observation of the material - therefore it is the concepts that are created from it.

[/quote]

My point was that anything, if properly conceived, (that is, building upon the laws of nature), can be brought into existence. We're literally doing it all the time, but proper conception is the key. If you deny this, you're saying that science cannot work: you're saying that from many smaller conjectures, you cannot build new ideas or invent new machines.

I'm not saying that everything conceived is able to be generated from matter--thought some Idealists do believe this. I'm saying that an idea that's well constructed enough exists long before someone "tests" it using nature. Scientific progression leans heavily upon this definition of existence. For something to 'exist', as everybody accepts the notion of the word, it only needs to be built. Supposing that the way it were built could be known by man, then he could essentially claim to know and understand it, even prior to witnessing it in real life, etc. All a concept is is a very heavily compacted representation of the thing itself, supposedly containing all the information required to build it. In the mind, it can even behave the same way its real facsimile would.

On these terms, conception certainly can allow any number of impossible entities to feign existence, but perfect conception or complete conception cannot involve impossible entities because you've already recognized what makes them impossible by the time you've perfectly conceived of them

In response to your second point, indeed that may be true. In some cases I've agreed that it is true; however, cannot one combine concepts formed from observation to create a concept that has no corresponding physical entity? A griffin, for example. Now, we don't say that griffins don't exist because we've never seen them--we're not that naive--instead we say they don't because there is no evolutionary pathway that could have led to such a bizarre crossover. It is because we cannot perfectly conceive of it that we believe it doesn't exist. True, many extant organisms are independent of our perfect conceptualization of them: we'll meet many cattle before we fully appreciate their complex digestive system. But my argument is that well formed concepts have a kind of existence that is appreciable compared to how 'real' physical entities seem to us.

To clarify, I'm neither a realist nor an idealist. I'm just siding with the idealists on a few points.

[Minimalist]

I have to go and forgot where I was going with this...

You were going around in circles....which is common for moralizing jesus freaks.

[Boris Spacek]

I have to go and forgot where I was going with this...

You were going around in circles....which is common for moralizing jesus freaks.

Cakesniffer...

[Autumnlicious]

Cakesniffer...

Not amused.

Post something of content. Troll at your own risk.

[Boris Spacek]

Cakesniffer...

Not amused.

Post something of content. Troll at your own risk.

Tell that to Minimalist. At least mine was a reference to children's literature. You didn't get it did you?

[Faith No More]

Wrong. All this says is that there must be a Heaven and a Hell.

Aren't heaven and hell two different planes of existence? If something requires a counterpart to exist, they must exist in the same plane, correct?

[Jackalope]

Cakesniffer...

Not amused.

Post something of content. Troll at your own risk.

Tell that to Minimalist. At least mine was a reference to children's literature. You didn't get it did you?

Are you suggesting that a flame that references a series of children's books is somehow not a flame? And by "you didn't get it did you", you obviously meant "you haven't read Lemony Snickett, have you?"

[Boris Spacek]

Wrong. All this says is that there must be a Heaven and a Hell.

Aren't heaven and hell two different planes of existence? If something requires a counterpart to exist, they must exist in the same plane, correct?

Interesting. God is all that is good, and God and heaven occupy the divine plane. However, God is transcendent, so He is not limited to the divine plane, meaning He can even go to Hell. However, Hell is the state of forsakenness from God, so all this means is that God can seek out lost souls of his own will, so no contradictions. But you’re asking if an opposite to something can reside on another plane, as necessarily would be the case with evil and good. My problem with planes is that they aren’t very well defined. The emotional plane, in some cases, is no different from the physical plane. Pain, for instance, is something you feel, but has a very real presence in your nervous and vascular systems. The spiritual plane is something altogether unattainable except when you perceive you’re there. What do you mean by planes?

---

Cakesniffer...

Not amused.

Post something of content. Troll at your own risk.

Tell that to Minimalist. At least mine was a reference to children's literature. You didn't get it did you?

Are you suggesting that a flame that references a series of children's books is somehow not a flame? And by "you didn't get it did you", you obviously meant "you haven't read Lemony Snickett, have you?"

Sheesh, no need to be so dogmatic about it. It's a flame if the other party is insulted; that's Speech Legislation for you. And no, you merely might have forgotten that particular little gem from the thirteen many books there are.