The Pope out of control?

Originally posted by fjord
This is an rather unfair insinuation
Are you an advocate of the "Culture of Endless Suffering"? I don't think so.
We should stop throwing dirt.
The same counts for your usage of the word "killing". Killing is what happens in wars, f ...[text shortened]... uss such topics with respect for our different opinions

Fjord

Why do you look upon the term "Culture of Death" as an insinuation ?

It means that this culture advocates "ending lives" ( killing) as a solution to very important human problems such as problems of not being able to see the meaning of life in a difficult, painfull situation or losing the will to live. In the case of abortion it even advocates ending the life (killing) of another human being. In the case of assistance in suicide it also includes ending the life (killing) of another human being.

If this has nothing to do with killing then I wonder what all the fuss is all about ....... that is exactly the heart of the matter ... do human beings have a right to kill in order to solve problems ? Let's not use all kinds of evasive terms covering up what it is really all about ...

Until so far nobody of the participants in this debate has objected to the usage of the term "to kill". Why should they ? Let's take things as they are. Let's not make the terms we are using even more ambiguous as they allready are.

Originally posted by ivanhoe
Why do you look upon the term "Culture of Death" as an insinuation ?

It means that this culture advocates "ending lives" ( killing) as a solution to very important human problems such as problems of not being able to see the m ...[text shortened]... ms we are using even more ambiguous as they allready are.

Culture of Death, culture of death...you certainly have become enamored with that phrase recently. I think it would do you good to look in the mirror the next time you decide to glibly toss that phrase around. Let us look at some concrete examples:

Most, if not all, of the people on this site who identify themselves as "freethinkers" were opposed to the unsanctioned U.S. invasion of Iraq. They said diplomacy was the proper course of action. You, on the other hand, have now gone on record as saying that you think the invasion was the right thing to do. How many people died as a result of that war? The freethinkers wanted peace and diplomacy, while you wanted war. Tell me again, Ivanhoe, who is fostering the "culture of death"?

Now before you start saying, "But the lives saved by ousting Saddam will surely exceed the number of lives lost in doing so...", we need to examine another piece of evidence you have provided us with. In another post in this very thread you tried to apply your ubiquitous "culture of death" label to Bbarr for claiming that in certain circumstances we have "an obligation to kill".* But now you are claiming that the U.S. had an obligation to invade Iraq and engage in killing in order to remove Saddam. Is this not the very practice which you decried in your rambling "culture of death" tirade?

If there is a culture of death in the world today, it is surely being bred by religious dogmatism, and not freethought.

*from your post on December 21st in this thread.

Originally posted by rwingett
Culture of Death, culture of death...you certainly have become enamored with that phrase recently. I think it would do you good to look in the mirror the next time you decide to glibly toss that phrase around. Let us look at some concrete ...[text shortened]... freethought.

*from your post on December 21st in this thread.

I advocate the way of diplomacy to solve international problems.
My opinion was and is that the US/UK did not have any other realistic choice, after France blockaded the possibilities to put pressure on Saddam Hoessein and thus ruined the chances for a political solution.
This problem of waging war on political criminals constitutes the problem of the "just war". I also look upon the US governments decision to wage war against Hitler as a justifiable decision. This war was a "just war". That however does not imply that I'm an advocate of solving our problems by killing. I'm not advocating any "Culture of Death". I'm NOT advocating war as a method to solve our problems. These wars were meant to stop people who used killing to solve THEIR problems: The NAZIS: the opposition "problem", the Jewish "problem", the Roma "problem" , the Homosexual "problem", The "Lebensraum" problem, the remain in power "problem". The Allies during the Second World War were waging war to stop the NAZI and Japanese agression and the killing.
Same thing applies to Saddam: He also tried to solve his "problems" by killing: the opposition "problem", the Kurd "problem", the Sjiite "problem", the Swamp Arabs "problem", the Iranian "problem", the Kuwait "problem", and again the Jewish "problem". He didn't even hesitate to kill his two son in laws when they turned against him.

It can be justifiable to wage war against political criminals who use the method of killing to solve their "problems". The intention must be to stop them killing and raping and stealing. You cannot possibly call this military effort to stop the killing an attempt to advocate the "Culture of Death". On the contrary, this war was meant to stop the killing.
I hope I made it perfectly clear that your claim:
Rwingett: "The freethinkers wanted peace and diplomacy, while you wanted war." is an oversymplification of the situation. I'm convinced that the Freethinkers you are referring to wanted peace. I also wanted peace, but not only for the people in the US and UK etc, but also for the people in Irak who had to endure this murderous regime. The images shown in television after the liberation of cheering people were not all fabricated by the CIA. Especially the man in the street hitting a Saddam Hussein poster with one of his shoes, while crying, expressing his deep grief, is an image I will never forget and it was this image that took away the doubts I had about my stance of supporting the decision of waging war on the Saddam Hussein regime .......

Originally posted by rwingett
Culture of Death, culture of death...you certainly have become enamored with that phrase recently. I think it would do you good to look in the mirror the next time you decide to glibly toss that phrase around. Let us look at some concrete ...[text shortened]... freethought.

*from your post on December 21st in this thread.

Rwingett: "If there is a culture of death in the world today, it is surely being bred by religious dogmatism, and not freethought." Rwingett.

Advocating killing to solve our problems = The "Culture of Death"

The Freethinker movement is doing so in advocating abortion (including late abortion), active euthanasia, suicide and assisted suicide.

There are movements in the Islam world who claim to be Muslims that have transformed Islam into a political doctrine to realise their dream of the Arab nationalist state and they even want to establish an "Islamic World Caliphate". They use violence and killing to solve their "problems" and to reach their political goals. We must not have any illusions as to what means they will use to solve their "problem" of staying in power once they have realised their ideals. They will use the methods of the "Culture of Death" and that means killing ....

I'm against all ideologies that advocate killing to solve problems. It doesn't matter if these ideologies are religiously, philosophically,
scientificly or politically inspired or whatever mask they are using to rationalise and justify their methods. Even when they are claiming to do it out of love and compassion, I will oppose to these ideologies strongly .......

Hi Ivanhoe,

I've been kind of busy, and this reply is somewhat long, so it took me a while to compose it. Its a reply to your long post on page 4. Here goes...

First answering these:

Freethought tries to deal with complicated matters such as philosophy, religion, the question does God exist yes or no, the question does the three-O God exist, social processes, political matters, matters of life and death, abortion, euthanasia, suicide, other moral problems, it deals with these matters as they were matters of pure reason, mathematics and logic. They want to treat philosophy as it were a science ruled by mathematics and logic.

and

The fact that things in reality like hope, sin, life, death, eternity, time, future, past, present, space, omniscient, omnibenevolent, attitude, truth, lies, etc. etc. cannot be defined in a way that is possible in the case of mathematical entities poses a problem that is extremely underestimated by Freethought. Freethought is not enough aware of this problem. Freethought should criticise their own conclusions much more. It idolises reason and logic in a way that is unacceptable to me.

I think you are mistaken here - I'll begin with logic, and move on to issue of reason. I'll try to explain and defend the method used by freethinkers as best I can.

Freethought does not try to deal with real world issues as matters that can be thoroughly explained by the mere application of logic; that would be a completely untennable position in a world of such complexity that we live in; such a thing is self-evidently not possible outside the world of pure mathematics. Logic merely sets the framework for distinguishing things that are possible (that may, or may not be true) from things that are impossible (that may not be true, even in theory). The reason why it is important to apply logical scrutiny to theories and belifs is that logic sets the absolute limits to what can be real, and as such, is useful in raking out the claims that are worth considering from those that simply aren't. As such, freethinkers don't idolise logic, but rather acknowledge it as an essential tool in making this distinction between things that might be true from things that can't be true.

For example, lets say someone (we'll name him Bob) holds a belief X, which, at least as Bob defines his belief, appears to inevitably require the existence of square circles to be true. Now a freethiker would point this out, and say that belief X is not worth believing, because it cannot be true for the reason that square circles cannot exist; it would be a logical contradiction, and true contradictions can't have a real world manifestations.

The possible resolutions to this dillemma are as follows:

1) Belief X is simply and unseremoniously false.
2) Bob is mistaken in his understanding of belief X, and some slight revision of his assumptions of X would remove the requirement of square circles, and thus make it at least plausible that he might be right about X.
3) The freethinker who pointed the contradiction out is mistaken, and there really is no contradiction, only an appearance of one.

If case 3 is true, then all Bob has to do is explain how the "contradiction" is actually only an appearance of one. This could be done, for example, by making up some logically consistent scenario of how belief X could be true, a scenario that avoided having to assume the existence of square circles or other logical impossibilities. This requirement gives Bob as much leeway as could be imagined, as the scenario Bob comes up does not have to be the true way of things, nor does it even have to be reasonable sounding, all it has to do is to avoid the logical contradiction while preserving Bob's original belief intact. It doesn't matter if Bob's scenario includes invisible flying bunnies or other logically consistent absurdities, as long as it gets around the logical contradiction that the freethinker proposed exits. Bob can say: "Ok, here's one theoretical way of getting around the contradiction - it's not what I believe is true, and I agree it sounds absurd, but it is a logically consistent counter example, so no matter how silly it may sound, it means that there is nothing logically impossible about there possibly being another, more reasonable scenario which we're not familiar with, that also doesn't include square circles, and which is the way things really are".

If Bob can do this, then he has refuted the freethinker's objection that belief X necessarily leads to logical contradictions. If Bob cannot do this, then he should at the very least concede that there is a problem with his belief, that while he may not reject X right away, he'll not forget the contradiction that he can't at the moment dispel either - and that he'll look into it, and study the problem until he finds a way around it or can find no other option than to concede that belief X has to be revised in some way, or rejected. This take, in my view, would show the sort of intellectual integrity that freethinkers in general hold in high regard.

If Bob is unable to come up with even one scenario that would make his belief possible, with all this leeway, and instead of acknowledging the problem tries to evade the question or change the subject, then I think it's not unfair for the freethinker to point out the fact that what Bob is doing appears irrational - after all, in this case Bob would be buring he's head in the sand hoping for the problem to go away, instead of facing it head on. If Bob goes further than that, and expects other's to adopt his belief X without providing any way whatsoever for someone to look at the problem entailed with it that was pointed out, then he is asking others to do either the impossible: believe in a contradictory thing, or the intellectually-reprehensible: sweep the problem under the carpet and pretend it doesn't exist in order to be able to believe X.

Reason is different from pure logic in that it is far less easy to objectively judge what is reasonable than it is to objectively judge what is logical. I don't think Freethinkers worship reason either - everyone, including yourself I'm sure, would describe their own beliefs as reasonable, and find beliefs that contradicted your beliefs unreasonable in some respect. This is just the nature of belief - no-one genuinely believes things that they find unreasonable. If a Freethinker says that you are being unreasonable, or that your worldview leads to unreasonable conclusions, or has unreasonable ramifications, then he's not judging you; he's making an argument, he's claiming something. That's just the standard way people, including Christians argue. I'm sure there are freethinkers who don't make enough allowance for the possibility that some of what they think is reasonable might not be, in the light of some knowledge they don't posses, but the exact same thing could be said of many (if not most) Christians. It takes a great mental effort for anyone, freethinker or believer, to give your opponent's arguments the benefit of the doubt, and genuinely consider that you might be wrong about any beliefs you hold. We as people are not inclined to seek truth "naturally" but rather defend our preconceived views as if our lifes depended on it. To actually value the truth more than one's own conceptions of it is not an easy task.

Finally, one more point I need to address:

Why doesn't Freethought prove first that God does not exist and after that, as a necessary and logical conclusion, proclaims the human subject as being the Ultimate Moral Authority. Thát would have been the correct Freethought way. Because they fail to do so, they've become believers themselves.

You are mistaken here - to say that there is a God that is the source of morals is to claim an answer to the problem of morals. The burden of proof is ALWAYS and without exception, with the claim of an answer. The same burden would apply to me if I were to say "Morals are the inevitable natural result of the evolution of an intelligent social species". if I say something specific about the source of things, or give something as an explanation to something else, before I can validly base my actions on the ramifications of that explanation, the explanation has to be scrutinised, and evidence must be provided to support the explanation.

If this were not so, then what would prevent, say, a hindu from making the same argument against you - that before assuming that your God is in any way involved with morals, you should first prove that Shiva (or whatever daity is appropriate for this task in the Hindu faith) isn't responsible.

Your belief that God is behind morals has no special status, it is not excempt from the burden of proof, no more than hindu gods are, or naturalistic theories are. A God-belief isn't the default position against which freethinker should judge other positions, the default position is ignorance. It takes evidence to move from ignorance to some direction, be it a theistic world view or a naturalistic one.

-Jarno

Originally posted by chancremechanic
... what the hell ... Keep giving them hell, Ivanhoe!! 😵

Hell indeed 😛

Originally posted by chancremechanic
I think Ivanhoe knows what the hell he's talking about. He makes more sense than you left-wing "free thinkers" who wouldn't lift a finger if you saw a grandmother getting mugged. You'd say "let UN diplomacy work it out", and by that time poor old Granny would just be a blood stain. If Ivanhoe is European (Dutch?), that makes it even better ...[text shortened]... es on this site make me wonder if there is hope for the U.S. Keep giving them hell, Ivanhoe!! 😵

I rather enjoyed Pyrrho's post actually.

Originally posted by ivanhoe
Especially the man in the street hitting a Saddam Hussein poster with one of his shoes, while crying, expressing his deep grief, is an image I will never forget and it was this image that took away the doubts

I've seen many images of people burning the american flag,
expressing deep anger.
It never took away my doubts.

Originally posted by Nohup
I've seen many images of people burning the american flag,
expressing deep anger.
It never took away my doubts.

Burning the American flag? Yeah, I'm sure it never took away your doubts. Seen a lot of your anti-American crap in these forums this time home🙂 I wonder what the Nazis would have renamed your precious little Belgium if my dad and his generation hadnt gone over there and freed your parents generation of all that, just so punks like you could come along and piss all over us Americans. The sooner you make your great pilgrimmage to poor, opressed Libya. the better.

Originally posted by Bobla45
Burning the American flag? Yeah, I'm sure it never took away your doubts. Seen a lot of your anti-American crap in these forums this time home🙂 I wonder what the Nazis would have renamed your precious little Belgium if my dad and his generation hadnt gone over there and freed your parents generation of all that, just so punks like you could come along and ...[text shortened]... er us Americans. The sooner you make your great pilgrimmage to poor, opressed Libya. the better.

Thanks! I just returned from two weeks away from this site and had forgotten all about poorly conceived ideas, heavy-handed sentence structure, oversimplifications and rampant ignorace. The refresher is appreciated 😛!

Originally posted by royalchicken
Thanks! I just returned from two weeks away from this site and had forgotten all about poorly conceived ideas, heavy-handed sentence structure, oversimplifications and rampant ignorace. The refresher is appreciated 😛!

🙂
What do you expect ?
The president himself setting the example...

Originally posted by royalchicken
Thanks! I just returned from two weeks away from this site and had forgotten all about poorly conceived ideas, heavy-handed sentence structure, oversimplifications and rampant ignorace. The refresher is appreciated 😛!

Then why didn't you stay over in merry olde England and study numbers...just because everybody's not a 16 year-old professor such as you and don't structure our sentences the way you do doesn't make you smarter than we. How did you get so educated? Did daddy put you through private school and is now planning to send you to Oxford? I bet you have never worked an honest day in your life...broke a sweat over a shovel...changed the oil in your car...you probably have a butler tie you shoes...how glamorous...🙄🙄

Originally posted by chancremechanic
Then why didn't you stay over in merry olde England and study numbers...just because everybody's not a 16 year-old professor such as you and don't structure our sentences the way you do doesn't make you smarter than we. How did you get so educated? Did daddy put you through private school and is now planning to send you to Oxford? I bet you ha ...[text shortened]... ...changed the oil in your car...you probably have a butler tie you shoes...how glamorous...🙄🙄

Er, not really. I go to a state school. When I attend college, it will be funded largely by scholarships. I don't own a car, but can change the oil on one. I work as a landscaper in the summer. I am not trying to be arrogant; variety of opinion is a good thing. I'm just tired of hearing the same unconsidered bromide being passed off as a substantiated point of view by the same people, over and over again.