Unconventional Religion

[genkaus]

What I'm getting from you is that self-sacrifice is bad. You see, you didn't answer the question, and resorted to a backhanded comment.

I suggest you limit making unfounded extrapolations to your Bible studies. I don't consider things to be universally bad or universally good - so no, you are not getting from me that self-sacrifice is bad.

What you are getting, however, is that according to any rational and sane morality, self-sacrifice, in most contexts, is bad. As to your specific question - yes, in most cases, according to a rational morality, being irrational does result in something bad. But since it is possible to arrive at the same conclusion rationally and irrationally, that is not always the case.

For future reference - here's my position on the matter:

Descriptively, I accept that there are many different moralities out there, Christian morality being one of them.

Normatively, I subscribe to a rational, objective and comprehensive morality the contents of which are not fully known.

This rational morality would not issue universal commands like Christian morality does. Rather it'd guide you towards the right decision depending upon the context and situation you find yourself in.

It'd also not preach irrational concepts such as self-sacrifice/altruism being universally good. As a matter of fact, it would advise against in in most cases.

Christianity, however, does preach those concepts. And a host of other irrational tenets.

So, according to this morality, the Christian morality is irrational and immoral.

Which means, even in its beginning, Christianity had to practice controlling the masses if they had to get them to accept those irrational tenets as a good idea - and this is the point of the whole thread.

[The Reality Salesman01]

A soldier's job is not to die for their country. Their job is to make sure that other SOB dies for theirs.

Thanks Patton!

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I don't see an instance where self-sacrifice, an irrational act, would be immoral.

You keep adding that in (bold). You have yet to establish that ALL acts of self-sacrifice are irrational. Instead, you have decided it prudent to start arbitrarily defending the moral characteristics of self-sacrifice. Who's attacking it? What immoral implication is there for an irrational act? Why has this discussion suddenly changed its course? I must have missed something.

[Angrboda]

Leibniz's Law is a bi-conditional that claims the following: Necessarily, for anything, x, and anything, y, x is identical to y if and only if for any property x has, y has, and for any property y has, x has. Because this is a bi-conditional, it is comprised of two conditional statements (i) and (ii):

• (i) If x is identical to y, then for any property x has, y has and for any property y has, x has.
  
• (ii) If for any property x has, y has, and for any property y has, x has, then x is identical to y.
  

[note 1]

The Indiscernibility of Identicals

(i) is called the Indiscernibility of Identicals because it claims that self-identical object(s) must be indiscernible from themselves. It is a fairly uncontroversial thesis. I say "fairly" because there are philosophers who deny this claim. ... Almost everyone else, however, will grant that if something, x, is identical with something, y, then x and y have all of the same properties; x and y are just one thing, after all, merely called by two different names "x" and "y." If Superman is identical to Clark Kent, then Superman wears glasses and Clark Kent has x-ray vision (because Clark Kent wears glasses and Superman has x-ray vision). Since Superman is identical to Clark Kent, there is no property that Superman has that Clark Kent does not have, and there is no property that Clark Kent has that Superman doesn't; "they" are just one guy, after all, not two.

— Leibniz's Law, the Indiscernibility of Identicals, and the Identity of Indiscernibles

Fully human and fully divine?

According to Liebniz' law, which rests on classical logic and traditional ontologies, in order for two hypothetical things to be the same thing, they must share all the same properties. I am fully human. There are many properties of the divine which I lack. However, to be fully divine, I would have to possess all these properties. If a thing is any part divine in a non-human way, then they are not fully human. If they possess human characteristics which the divine do not possess, then they are not fully divine. The only way you can be fully divine and fully human and still be consistent with Liebniz' law is for the properties that make something divine to be the same as the properties that make something human. This is bad news for the Trinity. There are potential outs, however. You can give up traditional ontology (I think I might be able to get there using Stoic ontological principles). Most Christians would not be willing to do this, and giving up the ontological assumptions behind Liebniz' law leads to all sorts of unforeseen consequences; you can't just change ontologies without having everything else change as a result. Liebniz' law also rests on classical logic, and there are non-classical logics that you could appeal to in order to resolve the dilemma. Like changing ontologies, changing logics has consequences which most Christians would not be willing to accept. So the only remaining solution is to say that classical logic and ontology applies everywhere else, but it does not apply to Jesus and God. However, since you're still accepting classical logic in general, this is a case of special pleading, and it is therefore not logically valid and cannot be presumed to be true as a consequence of this logical error.

So, realistically, Trinitarian Christians have to accept one of three options: give up traditional ontology and Liebniz' law, give up classical logic, or accept that you can't get there from here. [note 2]


I leave it up to Trinitarian Christians which part of their worldview they want to give up.




[note 1] There are varying interpretations of what Liebniz' law is and how it should be stated; I've stated here an interpretation which is convenient to the structure of my argument, but which I believe is essentially non-controversial.

[note 2] And the logic you replace classical logic with has to satisfy certain criteria; without doing too much thinking about it, the law of non-contradiction would likely have to go in its classical form. I believe the class of logics described by such maneuvers is generally termed paraconsistent logics.

[DeistPaladin]

This will be my last post for about a month. I'm needing to take a hiatus for personal reasons. Others can take it from here...

I thought you were trying to assert something like that in your essays.

There's a difference between a religion being started by a charismatic snake oil salesman claiming to have spoken with a god and a religion that is the amalgamation of different ideas which certain people find appealing due to the circumstances of the time. I make no assertion that there was a planned conspiracy to start Christianity. If there were such a plan, Christianity would be put together much better with fewer internal inconsistencies. For one thing, they'd have nailed down the important details of the life story of their lord and savior.

For example, just to pick one, when did Jesus fly up into the sky to go to his father god in Heaven after his resurrection?

• Mark and Luke: Same day
  
• John: 8 days later
  
• Acts: 40 days later.
  

I'm not picking at nits here. We're not talking about "was his robe scarlet or purple?" We are talking about really important details that any witness would have remembered if it had really happened.

If "someone just made up Jesus one day" they would have gotten this story straight. The fact that we have so many continuity gaffes in the story suggests many authors working independently of one another. Christian apologists are left to explain why they aren't really contradictions in a festival of ad hocs, sounding not unlike Star Trekkies or Star Wars fans.

At many times in Christian history, the Church was just outright about it.

Of course they were. Apologists can't deny the existence of the heretical churches so they do the next best thing: downplay them as heretics and schismatics.

Would you say that Christ was adapted to the Gospels or the Gospels were adapted to Christ?

Difficult to say for sure what the real story was. The details are sketchy. The best we have is the Annals of Tacitus, a second century oblique reference to a "Christos" crucified by Pilate.

The best case scenario I can map out for Christianity is that Jesus was an insignificant rabbi that no one outside his small following thought was worth a mention. He wrote nothing down and so his actual teachings are lost to us, explaining why there were all the divergent Christianities in the first few centuries. We might assume he was a doom-crier and messiah-wannabe, as there were a plentiful number of them in Judea at that time. Pilate may have crucified him, as he did with many Jewish leaders (he was a brutal governor even by Roman standards). Decades later, according to the dates of the apologists, fanciful tales were written about him, who knows if any are based on anything more than imagination, urban legend and different theological agendas. The first was Mark. Matt and Luke expanded on the story working independently and coming up with their own incompatible versions. John's advanced theology reads like a much later addition, once Trinitarian dogma took hold.

Christians like to think that critics of Christianity would have cried "false" if any of these contradictory tales were not true, as if 2nd century Judea was populated by fact-checking commandos ready to pounce on unsuspecting rabbis.

The fact is we've seen this kind of urban legend in more recent figures. Elvis was "sighted" long after his death. George Washington was barely in the grave before urban legends sprang up about him and the cherry tree. Davey Crockett was a real man but I can bet he didn't really "kill him a bear when he was only three." Reagan and his very presidency got a complete re-write in conservative circles. The man they revere didn't exist and the real version wouldn't make it in today's GOP. How well do you think urban legend would work in a more primitive society, one without internet fact checking and one more saturated in superstition?

[DeistPaladin]

Or details of it were slightly altered or cut out as time went on and motives changed.

It isn't just petty details that changed. Further, you can see a logical progression and escalation with each successive Gospel.

Take John the Baptist, for example. His followers, the Mandaens, were rivals of the early Christians. Somehow, they didn't get the memo that their leader knelt before Jesus and proclaimed himself merely a forerunner. It's a tactic that worked so well, Muslims later did that to Jesus.

With each successive Gospel, John the Baptist sinks lower and lower onto his knees until he never even baptizes Jesus at all in John. It's not hard to see the theological agenda at work here.

My bad for mis-remembering the Garden of Gethsemane prayer. It's been a while since I've read the Gospels.

Fully God, fully man. He is where both meet. Divine goodness reveals itself to fallen humanity for the purpose of bringing fallen humanity to divine goodness. He became what we are to make us what he is. He is the path to salvation. And so on.

You'll pardon me, I hope, if I tell you I only hear babbling. The Trinity and fuzzy notion of "fully God and fully human at the same time" to be so much nonsense invented to explain nonsense.

It amazes me that anyone ever believed this stuff, never mind in today's age, and it's enough to shake my confidence that we're endowed with the Gift of Reason and maybe the atheists are right that we were lucky to get this far.

[Consilius]

You don't see an example in this thread or you cannot imagine one?

9/11 ring any bells?

There were very many unwilling victims in that sacrifice.

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It'd also not preach irrational concepts such as self-sacrifice/altruism being universally good. As a matter of fact, it would advise against in in most cases.

Christianity, however, does preach those concepts. And a host of other irrational tenets.

So, according to this morality, the Christian morality is irrational and immoral.

Which means, even in its beginning, Christianity had to practice controlling the masses if they had to get them to accept those irrational tenets as a good idea - and this is the point of the whole thread.

I have yet to see a case of self-sacrifice being bad. You are balancing on that premise.

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You have yet to establish that ALL acts of self-sacrifice are irrational.

It is by nature irrational.
Self-sacrifice is giving something of yours to someone else. The giver no longer can use the item he is giving away (life, health, time) to survive. Some would say it is counterproductive.
There are also many proofs that altruism is in our nature. That we do things for the good of the group. When we reduce personal chances of surviving, we increase group chances of surviving.
genekaus doesn't seem to be interested in that other part. So we will treat self-sacrifice as counterproductive and irrational without referencing the biological side of it.

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Fully human and fully divine?

According to Liebniz' law, which rests on classical logic and traditional ontologies, in order for two hypothetical things to be the same thing, they must share all the same properties. I am fully human. There are many properties of the divine which I lack. However, to be fully divine, I would have to possess all these properties. If a thing is any part divine in a non-human way, then they are not fully human. If they possess human characteristics which the divine do not possess, then they are not fully divine.

You can't define something by what it doesn't have.
Humans are not things that can NOT see the future, do NOT fly, and are NOT invisible. Well, they are, but that does not define a human. Humans are things that can remember events, walk on land, and have two arms.
God is something that is invisible, not something that can NOT forget.

Christ, therefore, had every attribute of God and every attribute of a human.

[genkaus]

I have yet to see a case of self-sacrifice being bad.

What do you mean? I gave those examples a few pages ago and you already added your own to the list (contextual T&C apply).

Letting your murderer kill you is bad.
Blocking a bullet with your body is bad.
Blindly dying for your country or your religion is bad.
Engaging in charity when you have no reason to is bad.

Its just that you don't consider them 'bad' because your irrational Christian morality has warped your mind into thinking of them as 'good'.

[Angrboda]

You can't define something by what it doesn't have.

Then it's probably a good thing that is not what I was doing. Thus your objection here is irrelevant.

Moreover, this sounds like a principle you just dredged out of your ass, and seems to run afoul of the law of the excluded middle, thus confirming your apparent need to jettison the laws of classical logic in order to make room for your Trinitarian god.

[Faith No More]

Christ, therefore, had every attribute of God and every attribute of a human.

Not possible, as many of their attributes contradict each other. A god is omniscient while a human's mental faculties are constrained by the limits of their physical brain. Those constraints are an attribute of being human.

[ronedee]

Or details of it were slightly altered or cut out as time went on and motives changed.

It isn't just petty details that changed. Further, you can see a logical progression and escalation with each successive Gospel.

Take John the Baptist, for example. His followers, the Mandaens, were rivals of the early Christians. Somehow, they didn't get the memo that their leader knelt before Jesus and proclaimed himself merely a forerunner. It's a tactic that worked so well, Muslims later did that to Jesus.

With each successive Gospel, John the Baptist sinks lower and lower onto his knees until he never even baptizes Jesus at all in John. It's not hard to see the theological agenda at work here.

My bad for mis-remembering the Garden of Gethsemane prayer. It's been a while since I've read the Gospels.

Fully God, fully man. He is where both meet. Divine goodness reveals itself to fallen humanity for the purpose of bringing fallen humanity to divine goodness. He became what we are to make us what he is. He is the path to salvation. And so on.

You'll pardon me, I hope, if I tell you I only hear babbling. The Trinity and fuzzy notion of "fully God and fully human at the same time" to be so much nonsense invented to explain nonsense.

It amazes me that anyone ever believed this stuff, never mind in today's age, and it's enough to shake my confidence that we're endowed with the Gift of Reason and maybe the atheists are right that we were lucky to get this far.

I would guess you had no answer to my question: Who, and what is God's Messiah, promised by Him?

Maybe you need a month to find an answer?