Spirituality
11 May 16
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Originally posted by sonshipThe question was dealt with in detail by other posters, twhitehead has no need to make
No comeback about my poor reading comprehension twhitehead ?
Guess its kind of hard when there's nothing of a reply to either read or comprehend from you there. huh?
points already multiply made.
And yes, your inability to see this speaks to your abysmal reading comprehension and reasoning ability.
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Originally posted by googlefudgeThat's an abysmal excuse.
The question was dealt with in detail by other posters, twhitehead has no need to make
points already multiply made.
And yes, your inability to see this speaks to your abysmal reading comprehension and reasoning ability.
Before the question was asked of person W, persons X,Y, and Z answered before it was asked.
That's a lousy excuse in the name of your copycat complaint about my reading comprehension. Are you playing Simon Says ? Banking on parroting the same criticism ?
Polly want a cracker ?
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Originally posted by sonshipI've been objecting to your abysmal comprehension for years, I'm not copying anyone.
That's an abysmal excuse.
Before the question was asked of person W, persons X,Y, and Z answered before it was asked.
That's a lousy excuse in the name of your copycat complaint about my reading comprehension. Are you playing Simon Says ? Banking on parroting the same criticism ?
Polly want a cracker ?
YOU are the one parroting religious claptrap you don't understand, and failing to
comprehend the reasoned arguments you get in response.
06 Jun 16
Originally posted by finneganGood and evil are value judgements.
Good and evil are value judgements.
Malaria could be defined as evil if we imagine the world is designed around the needs of humanity. Why would a just God devise this torment for so many innocents? Alternatively, why is Satan allowed quite so much autonomy and to what beneficial end (for humanity)? That makes no sense. At best it has to be classifie ...[text shortened]... umbs up to Suzianne's post above saying much the same thing from her very different perspective.
If good and evil are merely value judgements, then they are subjective. How would you know that your subjective view of them is the correct one?
06 Jun 16
Originally posted by Ghost of a DukeIf morality is subjective then it would only be a matter of individual or cultural opinion. This would mean that torturing babies for fun, rape, & child abuse are not really objectively wrong, and are only a matter of opinion. Also saying God is evil for allowing suffering would also be a matter of opinion. However if you believe an objective moral law exists you have to posit a moral law giver, which in my opinion is God. There is no argument if morality is subjective.
What do you mean by 'correct one?'
Originally posted by googlefudgeThanks for your liinks. You may like this essay which I encountered by chance, asking what went wrong with secularism in the USA.
finnegan is doing a good job dealing with this, but here is my pennyworth.
First, I would suggest doing some research into secular ethics.
Because people have been working out how to make secular moral systems for centuries and there
are all kinds of ways to do it [almost all of which are better than argument from authority] and none
of them requ ...[text shortened]...
Both videos have QA sessions on the end so the talks are not as long as the run-times suggest.
https://aeon.co/essays/why-did-the-secular-ambitions-of-the-early-united-states-fail
"In 1788, with the adoption of its Constitution, the United States became the first modern republic founded on a legal separation of church and state. In a country that holds sacred the intentions of its revolutionary-era founders, those founders’ secular ambitions are clear. Thomas Jefferson wrote a book, The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, to try to prove that Jesus was not Christ, that the man was not the son of God. Around the world, his pithy expression ‘a wall of separation between church and state’ continues to represent a particular secular ideal of separating religious and political power.
James Madison, the primary author of the US Constitution, was an even more rigorous and consistent, if less poetic, secularist. On grounds of what he called ‘pure religious freedom’, Madison opposed military and congressional chaplains, believing that they amounted to government sponsorship of religion. Every step short of this ‘pure religious freedom’, he wrote, would ‘leave crevices at least thro’ which bigotry may introduce persecution; a monster… feeding & thriving on its own venom’.
So, in brief, what went wrong? How did the country founded by visionary secularists, and that made historic advances in both religious freedom and the separation of religious and political powers, nonetheless become the world’s most religious political democracy? Understanding secularism better helps to answer the question. Secularism is not one simple thing; it has distinct theological, philosophical and political lives. Its theological and philosophical versions are formed from simple, if explosive, ideas. In its political guise, ideas are less important than institutions, and it is on the shoals of institution-building that American secularism wrecked."
......" The simplest way to grasp the underlying philosophical idea of the secular is to understand that its original antonym is not religious, but divine. That is, secular refers to all things that are not the prerogative of the divine, of God, but are in the world and ‘in time’. God is not in time, or worldly, because God and the City of God are eternal. It is the worldly, the City of Man, that changes."....
"...The devout tend to conceive of God or Jesus or Allah or the Quran or the Bible as incomparable, unique authorities. They interpret the secular obligation to render religion a private matter as the impious or heretical telling them that some of their sacred duties are inherently illegitimate...."
..."Political life is where American secularism ran into a wall: the simple problem was its unpopularity. This unpopularity is one reason why American secularism remains clouded in some obscurity." ...
..."The separation of church and state was not just an idea. It was a political act, in fact a very difficult political act. In revolutionary-era Virginia, the Anglican Church’s support for Britain in the War of Independence had left it weakened. Where it had supported 91 clergy before the war, following the Peace of Paris in 1783 only 28 Anglican clergy remained, in a population of approximately 690,000 in Virginia. Still, most people expected that the Anglican Church would remain Virginia’s state church, and that Virginia would continue to recognise Christianity. Just before becoming governor, Patrick Henry had prepared a bill calling upon the state of Virginia to legally recognise Christianity as the one ‘true religion’ by, among other means, a mandatory tithe to be paid to the government by each citizen. The bill also called for the state of Virginia officially to recognise that heaven and hell exist, that the Old and New Testaments were of divine origin, and that the Christian God be publicly worshipped. John Marshall, George Washington and other major figures in Virginia politics supported Henry’s bill.
However, a procedural oversight on Henry’s part delayed voting on the bill, and Madison moved to action. ... Madison set out to terrify Virginia’s Presbyterians, Baptists and other rival sects into fearing that the state church would be an oppressive Anglican one. To this end, he wrote a broadside: the Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments (1785). The Memorial succeeded, since most Virginia Christians wanted their own church to be the state church, and if not theirs then nobody else’s.
‘The mutual hatred of these sects has been much inflamed,’ Madison wrote to Thomas Jefferson in 1785, and ‘I am far from being sorry for it.’ Virginia’s disestablishment, or separation of church and state, came to be the model for national separation. But it was made possible only by a combination of parliamentary legerdemain and elite manipulation of sectarian hatred..."
As we can see repeatedly in history, religion's claim to an objective and universal truth does not preclude intense sectarian hatred and vicious, violent disputes not only between religions but within all of the major monotheist faiths. Without a secular model, then we would be reduced to a war of annihilation against all religious rivals - it has been tried many times of course, and is not a dead idea today as we know to our cost.