Bible Study with Xyle

I like this thread. Judging people who believe in the words of people who slaughtered sheep and cows to appease an omnipotent creator. A creator that apparently cares how you hold your hands while you do various hand motions and the direction of those motions. A creator that cares if you wear wool and linen at the same time. A creator that is omnipotent and omniscient, yet created everything in 6 days rather than a single moment.

I think I can go on for quite a while...
Very fruitful discussion.

 

You should look up the biblical laws on cheating spouses.
Also, how can you speak in God's name when he never really states that?

 

Any discussion in which your arguments are based solely on Old Testament Law is going to be a fruitless one, unless you consider highlighting your poor understanding of the Bible as a complete work to be a fruit.

 

Really I just want to avoid letting you off the hook for your apparent view that men and women are equal except for when they are not. Either you are for equality, or you aren't, but you don't get to say that you are while actually not being so. You said that some people think that gender roles are only suggestions, but immediately followed it by saying that sameness of treatment would be stupid. So clearly you aren't one of those people who think that gender roles are only suggestions.

Equality under the law and equality of opportunity are what I'm referring to when I say "equality". Clearly we now have equality under the law in Western countries. And we have equality of opportunity in a technical sense. Technically, a woman can run for president, it's just that a large section of society will shake their heads because they think it's not a suitable job for a woman. Presumably you're one of those people, given what you've said, otherwise your statements don't make a lot of sense. If that's the case then you are sexist. If it's not the case, then I apologise, but you haven't explained your position particularly well.

 

When I say that sameness of treatment in all aspects of life would be stupid, I mean taking it to the extreme. Like removing the urinal from the men's room and installing a tampon dispenser. I believe that, generally, women should be afforded the same opportunities as men, but not to the point of impracticality; for instance, I don't think it's a bad thing for schools to have separate sports teams for boys and girls.

There are exceptions to every rule, people who don't fit the stereotype. So while I think that men tend to have more innate leadership ability, I don't believe that women are incapable of outstanding leadership. And gender is about the last thing I'm concerned about when choosing which presidential candidate to vote for.

So in short: I'm not a mysogynist, and I don't have a basement full of repressed women. Sorry to disappoint.

 

Hey, if misogynism always came with a basement full of repressed women, I might be more inclined to consider it.

I've gone back and re-read your posts, and realised that at no point did you actually say that you agreed with any of the biblical proclamations you mentioned, rather that you were presenting an explanation of how they could amount to a defensible position if one were so inclined. The error is mine, and I apologise.

 

You and me both pal.

 

Ugh maturity on the internet, what happened to this place? Dick this shit, I don't come here to read people having reasonable discussions.

Anyway, personally I find atheists (who I think are probably right) often more irritating than religious people when either try and push their views at you - there's something much nicer about a religious person who believes something along the lines of 'if you don't believe this set of things then you will go to hell' trying to get you on board because they don't want you to go to hell than an atheist trying to push their position when all that will happen if you don't agree with them is... nothing.

Does the Bible take a position on wanking? Is that allowed? x

 

Kind of a gray area, open to personal interpretation. Unless you're Catholic, in which case the only appropriate place to blow your load is inside your wife's unprotected vagina.

 

But the first five books of the old testament are the words of god himself; how can I not include it in the discussion? I mean, God dictated that stuff to Moses.
Also, as far as I know, all Christian faiths include that in what they define as "The Bible".

I mean, sure, we can drop the word of god from a discussion about Christianity, I'm not going to stop you.

 

Let me break it down for you, Barney-style, you fucking troll: your remarks have made it perfectly clear that you only know enough about the subject matter to make yourself annoying, and that you have no intention of having anything approaching a fruitful discussion. You're not going to win any coolpoints by acting like a douche and shining a spotlight on your ignorance, so fuck off back to your cave.

 

Ahem. Well, anyway, my question was for Xyle.

Specifically, the telepathically linked betrothed is proving disobedient.

My point being, maybe a little respect and a little less stone age patriarchy would make for a more Christian relationship.

Japes, your faith seems functional; more power to you.
Xyle, yours seems to be harmful in some respects, so I challenge it.

 

For the most part, crazy fundamentalist Christians (the type that would be considered to have "stone age patriarchy" in your words) are the kind that give rational Christians a bad name.

Faiths all over the world have this problem. Muslims in particular, what with the violence and terrorism. A noisy, more visible minority is the source of problems for many groups of people.

 

I still take some issue with this kind of thing. Though such objections might be a bit tired at this stage, I still can't get around the fact that, for me, jumping from what we have available to us (surroundings, books, etc.) to what is essentially magic is almost completely arbitrary. I say 'almost completely', because I'm thinking of the fact that people are brought up to believe it, or they 'find God' through going through crises in their lives, or they plain just start believing, etc.; but I can't help but feel uncomfortable about what I perceive to be an excessive lack of self-critical awareness, since there seems to be nothing separating people of this kind of faith from people with delusions, except for community support and acceptance.

 

It helps to think of humans as a kind of mad ape.

The odds of rationality, let alone perceiving truth, are slim to nil.

Cosmology aside, ethics is the urgent issue in mad ape society.

It really is very simple but try explaining that to a screaming chimpanze.

"Taste happy god flesh and be immortal fun nice man" is, all things considered, a good start toward morality if not sanity.

 

Condescending trivialising aside, courtesy of our resident guru, I'm still wondering

 

I agree that it can be, and there are both a lot of religious people who don't seem to have applied much critical thought to their beliefs, and that a lot of the beliefs that come with religion don't have any rational basis. However, I don't think belief in some form of God or higher power or whatever is necessarily without basis in scientific or rational thought. (I also really don't like it when people talk about religion and science as if they were opposite ways of looking at the world; they're not, the existence or non-existence of God is a scientific fact either way, as it would be if the Easter Bunny, or Jaws were real.) But anyway, science still hasn't really been able to offer a convincing explanation of how the universe could come into being from nothing, or how the pre-existing conditions for the Big Bang could come into place or how life could suddenly exist - I can't remember who said it but one scientist famously described the approach as 'Give us one free miracle and we'll do the rest.' If you posit the possibility of a God-being, one outside natural law as we understand it then you don't need to worry about that (or add in any extra layers of myth for that matter.) So I don't think it's a) impossible that there is a God, or b) that it's irrational to believe in one. However, (without having the necessary qualifications or knowledge to say this is more than instinct really) it does feel more likely to me that there is a non-God explanation for it, but to claim that there definitely is NO GOD just seems as irrational as insisting there must be one, there just isn't enough evidence to be that sure.

 

I'm not really sure who you're referencing with this comment; I'm not sure that anybody in the thread said any of these things.

I think the God-of-the-Gaps fallacy can be safely put to bed by now, even in its weak form (as here). Naturally, God and his merry men are ways to speculate and conceive of ways we can fill in such gaps, but only as much as any other such supernatural event is. I think, also, that even wondering such things as 'how does something come from nothing?' etc. come with a whole host of unaddressed presuppositions (in this case, one seems to be supposing that something coming from nothing in pre-Big-Bang World is as remarkable as it would be if it happened at our kitchen table) that one could argue lurk at the center of the whole act of theorising about such things.

 

No, but the conversation is clearly taking place in the context of the differences between atheistic and religious world views.

This isn't really an argument: what other supernatural events? And if there are other events which would work as much to fill in the gaps, then they're just options too. It's just a Ockham's Razor type question though isn't it? There are gaps, the world coming into being, for example, out of the sweat of a giant's armpit is a supernatural explanation which introduces more things into a worldview than are necessary - a cogent explanation for a God-created world could be put forward, what you don't need are his merry men. (On a side note, I've recently been catching up with Once Upon a Time, has anyone seen that? I'm pretty sure it must include the only version of the Robin Hood story

Spoiler

in which Robin gets raped.

And yes, something coming from nothing pre-Big Bang would be exactly as remarkable as it would be at the kitchen table.

 

Mmm, I used to be religious, praying daily for several years, studying the various holy texts several times a week. Except I was into Judaism, so my knowledge of the Christian new testament is indeed limited.
I still don't see how any of what I've wrote is irrelevant.
Last Thursday I gave a ride to an orthodox christian priest (who came to Israel on a pilgrimage. I picked him up at St. Gerasimus monastery, where I stopped for their excellent coffee) and we've argued the whole way on the subject; he was trying to point out that Christianity is simply one of the paths available to reach god, not the correct path, he pointed out that "the correct path" is a strictly subjective term.
When asked regarding the various ways to do the sign of the cross or pray, he said that God doesn't care for neither of those, and that these things are simply for the person who does them, affecting his psyche to become closer to god. He said that technically a person staring into a wall could get closer to god than a christian monk, if that what worked best for his/her psyche.
Unfortunately he had no concrete answer as to why he thinks there even is a god, except for his feelings.

Anyway, I must say that for a wannabe christian you're quite aggressive. Lighten up.

That's simply not true. The conditions within this given universe are not the same as the conditions beyond it.
Here's Laurence Krauss, trying to explain stuff in 2009, before we witnessed it in the LHC:



The Watchmaker analogy would be correct, if you possessed the scientific knowledge of the time it was thought of (1802), but that is no longer the case.
Another issue is that an intelligent creator doesn't mean that it provides any additional evidence for the monotheistic deity of christians/jews/muslims. As far as we know, our lord-creator could be Quetzalcoatl.