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Where in the Bible did Francis find firing employees is a "grave sin"

Arkady

President
A huge collection of ancient scrolls; it isn't a novel written by God, it is many centuries of ancient writings. God knows how many authors are in there. It is a preservation of human history and human faith, not a how-to manual.
It's basically the camp-fire stories of one small collection of middle-eastern tribes.... essentially a less competently written Iliad or Odyssey.
 
C

Capitalist

Guest
First, you know why it's called that. It's because they imagined themselves descended from a superhero who wrestled with a supernatural being, variously identified as God or an angel. None of that, of course, wipes away my paragraph.
Struggle as in "fight." Your paragraph demands a pacified sheep-like people. Israel embraces the fight with God. God embraces Israel. Your paragraph is way the hell off.

Not a superhero. Jacob.
 
C

Capitalist

Guest
The context has been mentioned over and over in this thread. I'm trying to be less long-winded. The point is that the one thing we know that Jesus considered to be Caesar's is money for taxes. That's the question he was asked, and that's the guidance he gave. He also said to render to God what is God's, but didn't provide clear guidance for what that might be.
Luke 20:20

Paying Taxes to the Emperor. 20 d]">[d]They watched him closely and sent agents pretending to be righteous who were to trap him in speech, in order to hand him over to the authority and power of the governor. 21 They posed this question to him, “Teacher, we know that what you say and teach is correct, and you show no partiality, but teach the way of God in accordance with the truth. 22 Is it lawful for us to pay tribute to Caesar or not?”e]">[e] 23 Recognizing their craftiness he said to them, 24 “Show me a denarius;f]">[f] whose image and name does it bear?” They replied, “Caesar’s.” 25 So he said to them, “Then repay to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God.” 26 They were unable to trap him by something he might say before the people, and so amazed were they at his reply that they fell silent.
His answer is not paraphrased as, "It's good to pay your taxes." It is instead, "I don't care." If he meant "pay your taxes" he would have said "pay your taxes." His answer left them speechless not because He fell on the side of the Romans but because He broke their trap. Had He meant "It's good to pay your taxes" they sure as hell wouldn't have remained silent.

Furthermore, what exactly "belongs to Caesar?" Taxes? All my work? ALL my taxes? As defined by Caesar? If so then your interpretation is little more than a rationalization for theft. I don't think Jesus would advocate that.

Context baby. Context.

And it doesn't do you any good to repeat yourself. You have to at least develop your argument more. Like this:

Your cloudy lens:
I'm just saying that reading it like a novel makes you realize it doesn't hold together.
You expect a novel from something that is not a novel. What did you do when you got to the book of Psalms? Did you say, "Shit! This novel reads more like a bunch of song lyrics! What a crappy novel!" Square peg, round hole.
If it were scrupulously internally consistent, we might be more willing to see it as a fairly accurate recounting of real events
Why are you putting that constraint on the books of the bible? It's as if you think Abraham should have consulted Strunk and White while constructing Genesis. And if you are clinging so diligently to this perceived contradiction in Genesis then you are looking to the bible as some sort of bad science text. So you need to expand your set of things the bible isn't to include a self contained novel as well as a science text. There are many other things the bible is not. You bring your assumptions and stiff necked prejudices to your cloudy lens.

Clearing up your cloudy lens:
Ironically, you would do well to take the advice of a fellow atheist, Ayn Rand, who said, "There is no such thing as contradiction. If you see what looks like a contradiction you need to change your premise." That's it. Contradiction in Genesis? Change your premise. Did you think the original writers of Genesis did NOT recognize the empirical and stylistic differences between the two creation stories? Did you think they laid down both and just said, "Yep. Looks good. These two stories are exactly the same." You think the world lived in darkness for centuries thinking those two stories were exactly the same until you and your atheist brethren came along and said, "HEY! They're DIFFERENT!" That's ridiculous. I think it's safe to say that the writers wrote them down and the chroniclers combined them into one text knowing full well the differences between the two. Don't you? So the chroniclers must have had some goal in mind other than confusion. Other than destruction of their own credibility. What might that have been? The method is clear.

Change your premise.

They must have been communicating something that does NOT match your entering assumptions and prejudice. So what do those two stories have in common? Find that and you'll discover your proper premise. Of course, that presupposes you are interested in finding the truth at all. Are you interested in the truth?
 
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C

Capitalist

Guest
It does no such thing. Reread.
I did. It does.

Yes, Jacob, their super hero -- a Hercules-like figure with the strength to wrestle a supernatural being to a stalemate until it used magic to injure his leg.
Jacob was a man--son of Isaac, not some god-spawn like Hercules. Your premise is that God is inhumane and evil. Change your premise and resolve your contradiction.
 

Arkady

President
I did. It does.
Find someone who is better at reading to explain it to you.

Jacob was a man--son of Isaac, not some god-spawn like Hercules.
True. OK, more of a Wolverine or Spiderman, then.

Your premise is that God is inhumane and evil.
No, that's not my premise -- it's the premise of the men who wrote the Bible. Their god, Yahweh, is ferociously inhumane, and evil to a depth that even Hitler couldn't compete with.

Take the story of Passover, for example. In that story, Yahweh wanted the Egyptian government to free his pet tribe. As established frequently in the Bible, Yahweh had mind-control super-powers he could have used to make Pharaoh simply order the release, with nobody having to suffer. But, instead, he used his mind control the exact opposite way. Again and again, to make sure Pharaoh didn't give into Yahweh's terrorism before there'd been enough suffering to satisfy Yahweh's blood-lust, the evil god "hardened Pharaoh's heart."

Finally, in an act of unspeakable racism and cruelty, Yawheh sent his magical spirit door-to-door murdering the first born children of people of the disfavored races (dodging the doors of his own tribe, which had made a grisly blood sacrifice to him.) Only after that did Yahweh stop hardening Pharaoh's heart so that the man could again operate his free will and let the pet tribe go.

It's hard to imagine a more inhumane and evil character than that -- he's a terrorist and mass murderer of children. But he's even worse than that, because he did those things not as the only way he could think of to achieve his purpose, but rather because he got off on it. The most evil real-world being we can conceive of is Hitler, yet if you'd given Hitler Yahweh's power and he'd have "miracled" the Jews to Madagascar or somewhere, rather than conducting the Holocaust to slaughter them. Yahweh is even worse than Hitler, having preferred the route of maximum bloodshed and suffering, despite having infinite numbers of more humane options available to achieve his end. He could have teleported the tribe to the Promised Land (or the Wilderness, if he preferred), but he preferred to terrorize the Egyptian people with a series of increasingly horrific plagues, culminating in mass child slaughter.

How could anyone read that and not conclude the god of the Bible was inhumane and evil? How morally depraved a person would have to be to worship such a being!

Robert Ingersoll said it best (echoing a similar sentiment from Mark Twain), when he said

'The portrait is substantially that of a man -- if one can imagine a man charged and overcharged with evil impulses far beyond the human limit; a personage whom no one, perhaps, would desire to associate with now that Nero and Caligula are dead. In the Old Testament, his acts expose his vindictive, unjust, ungenerous, pitiless and vengeful nature constantly. It is perhaps the most damning biography that exists in print anywhere."​
 
C

Capitalist

Guest
Find someone who is better at reading to explain it to you.



True. OK, more of a Wolverine or Spiderman, then.



No, that's not my premise -- it's the premise of the men who wrote the Bible. Their god, Yahweh, is ferociously inhumane, and evil to a depth that even Hitler couldn't compete with.

Take the story of Passover, for example. In that story, Yahweh wanted the Egyptian government to free his pet tribe. As established frequently in the Bible, Yahweh had mind-control super-powers he could have used to make Pharaoh simply order the release, with nobody having to suffer. But, instead, he used his mind control the exact opposite way. Again and again, to make sure Pharaoh didn't give into Yahweh's terrorism before there'd been enough suffering to satisfy Yahweh's blood-lust, the evil god "hardened Pharaoh's heart."

Finally, in an act of unspeakable racism and cruelty, Yawheh sent his magical spirit door-to-door murdering the first born children of people of the disfavored races (dodging the doors of his own tribe, which had made a grisly blood sacrifice to him.) Only after that did Yahweh stop hardening Pharaoh's heart so that the man could again operate his free will and let the pet tribe go.

It's hard to imagine a more inhumane and evil character than that -- he's a terrorist and mass murderer of children. But he's even worse than that, because he did those things not as the only way he could think of to achieve his purpose, but rather because he got off on it. The most evil real-world being we can conceive of is Hitler, yet if you'd given Hitler Yahweh's power and he'd have "miracled" the Jews to Madagascar or somewhere, rather than conducting the Holocaust to slaughter them. Yahweh is even worse than Hitler, having preferred the route of maximum bloodshed and suffering, despite having infinite numbers of more humane options available to achieve his end. He could have teleported the tribe to the Promised Land (or the Wilderness, if he preferred), but he preferred to terrorize the Egyptian people with a series of increasingly horrific plagues, culminating in mass child slaughter.

How could anyone read that and not conclude the god of the Bible was inhumane and evil? How morally depraved a person would have to be to worship such a being!

Robert Ingersoll said it best (echoing a similar sentiment from Mark Twain), when he said

'The portrait is substantially that of a man -- if one can imagine a man charged and overcharged with evil impulses far beyond the human limit; a personage whom no one, perhaps, would desire to associate with now that Nero and Caligula are dead. In the Old Testament, his acts expose his vindictive, unjust, ungenerous, pitiless and vengeful nature constantly. It is perhaps the most damning biography that exists in print anywhere."​
Sounds more like man's inhumanity to man via pharaoh's inhumanity to the Hebrews than God's inhumanity to man.

Jesus Himself reduced the law down to two commandments indicating an obvious shift in the faith.

So what changed in the course of a few thousand years of writing scripture? God or our understanding of God?

Change your premise.

And clear your lens.
 

Arkady

President
Sounds more like man's inhumanity to man via pharaoh's inhumanity to the Hebrews than God's inhumanity to man.
No. As a reminder, the god of the Bible hardens Pharaoh's heart repeatedly, forcing him to continue being inhumane towards the Hebrews. And even if that weren't the case, the powers that are elsewhere established for Yahweh throughout the Bible make it clear that he could have chosen any number of ways to free the Hebrews without having to murder countless babies. Yahweh looked at his infinity of options and thought "I'll go with the one that has a racist child-killing spree!"

Jesus Himself reduced the law down to two commandments indicating an obvious shift in the faith.
He did not. This is one of those many areas where the Bible is self contradictory, but Jesus lists multiple commandments in each of the three versions of the parable involving the rich man.

In Matthew, he lists you shall not murder, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not steal, you shall not give false testimony, honor your father and mother, love your neighbor as yourself, and sell your possessions and give to the poor.

In Mark he lists you shall not murder, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not steal, you shall not give false testimony, you shall not defraud, honor your father and mother, and sell every thing you have and give to the poor.

In Luke he lists you shall not commit adultery, you shall not murder, you shall not steal, you shall not give false testimony, honor your father and mother, and sell everything you have and give to the poor.

Obviously, those are three mutually contradictory versions of the same story, where the list of commandments that have to be followed varies in each. Is "love your neighbor as yourself" really one? How about not defrauding? But, regardless, none has reduced the list to just two commandments.

Change your premise.
My view is consistent with the text. Yours isn't. Why should I be the one to change? Wouldn't it make sense for you to actually read the Bible, so you know what you're talking about, and THEN come to a conclusion?
 
C

Capitalist

Guest
No. As a reminder, the god of the Bible hardens Pharaoh's heart repeatedly, forcing him to continue being inhumane towards the Hebrews.
Is that an accurate depiction of God or of how Hebrews viewed God back then?

He did not. This is one of those many areas where the Bible is self contradictory,
If you think so you need to change your premise.

but Jesus lists multiple commandments in each of the three versions of the parable involving the rich man.
Matthew 22:36-40 said:
36 “Teacher,b]">[b] which commandment in the law is the greatest?” 37 He said to him,c]">[c] “You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. 38 This is the greatest and the first commandment. 39 The second is like it:d]">[d] You shall love your neighbor as yourself. 40 e]">[e]The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments.”
Of course you knew that. If you choose to dig your heels in and demand that there are multiple versions of this "reduced law" and as such are contradictory then you have no concept of sub-text or sub-laws or summary.

Do you know what a summary is? Do you know how it would apply here?

Of course you do. You're being contradictory now which is a prompt for me to change my premise. It started off as me supposing you were looking for the truth. I now have to change my premise to suppose you are trying to win and have no concern about the truth. That would be consistent with your conclusions.
 

Arkady

President
Is that an accurate depiction of God or of how Hebrews viewed God back then?
The question is meaningless. We have no evidence there even is a God, and even if there is, we have no evidence for what his character is like, much less what it was like in ancient times. So, it's a bit like us reading a story of Zeus breeding his way across Ancient Greece like a horny goat and then I ask "but is that an accurate depiction of Zeus, or how the ancient Greeks viewed Zeus back then"? They're one and the same thing. Zeus is a mythological character from ancient stories, just like Yahweh. The stories tell us what the character was like. If you want to imagine some other figure -- a "higher Zeus" or "better Yaweh," with a superior nature than the characters depicted in the old stories, you're free to invent that character, too. But then that's a different character.

If you think so you need to change your premise.
It's not a premise. You don't appear to even know what that word means. A premise is something that you base something else on -- it's what your argument rests on. What I'm offering here aren't premises, but rather conclusions. I look at what the Bible actually says and then I draw conclusions from that. So, when the Bible has three different stories recounting the same event, and they each differ with regard to highly important details (like which commandments we're supposed to follow), I conclude that the Bible is self contradictory. That was not my premise. I didn't start by presuming the Bible was self-contradictory and then build some argument on that. I started by reading the Bible and then drew conclusions from the evidence. The evidence, in this case, was three mutually contradictory versions of what appears to be a single event.

To help you understand what a premise is, consider your own approach to the Bible. You start with the premise that it is a record (albeit possibly a distorted one) of a true God. You further start with the premise that this true God is a good being. Based on those premises, you perform apologetics on the Bible -- dismissing evidence that the God therein isn't good, by way of various excuses and rationalizations.

Do you see the difference between a premise and a conclusion now? I start with the evidence and draw a conclusion from it. You start with a premise and then manipulate the evidence to fit it.

Of course you knew that.
Of course I did. The question is why you didn't. You claim to have read the Bible, and yet wrongly thought Jesus reduced the law down to just two commandments. In reality, he very clearly said that not one jot of the law would fall away. So your very notion that he had effectively erased large portions of the law would be a direct contradiction of Jesus himself.

You tried to find evidence for your claim, but then realized you'd imagined it, and the closest you could get was some passage where he said that the law was dependent on two commandments (not that there were only two, but rather than everything else depended on those two). It would be like if a doctor told you that everything your body does is dependent on the processes of eating and breathing, and you thought that meant that eating and breathing were the only two bodily processes. Pretty silly, right? Obviously, there can be lots of processes and yet everything depends on two of them, just as obviously there can be lots of commandments and yet everything depends on two.

Wouldn't you have been better to read the Bible first, so you knew what it actually said, rather than guessing and then going looking for some distantly similar thing in the Bible to try to distract from your error?

Now that you've confirmed you were wrong in your claim, will you retract it, or just double down on it? Sadly, I think we both know the answer to that.
 
C

Capitalist

Guest
The question is meaningless.
The question is at the center of the issue.

We have no evidence there even is a God,
God is not a scientific construct. This is a matter of faith. Again, square peg, round hole.

and even if there is, we have no evidence for what his character is like,
Aren't you being redundant now?

much less what it was like in ancient times. So, it's a bit like us reading a story of Zeus breeding his way across Ancient Greece like a horny goat and then I ask "but is that an accurate depiction of Zeus, or how the ancient Greeks viewed Zeus back then"? They're one and the same thing. Zeus is a mythological character from ancient stories, just like Yahweh. The stories tell us what the character was like. If you want to imagine some other figure -- a "higher Zeus" or "better Yaweh," with a superior nature than the characters depicted in the old stories, you're free to invent that character, too. But then that's a different character.
Nope. God is not Zeus. Zeus and every other pagan deity was made in man's image whereas man is made in God's image. This was a relatively new concept back in the day. Copycats came later. While proto-Natural Law had its first inklings with Aristotle (having little to nothing to do with Zeus) Natural Law had its real beginning in Judeo-Christian scripture.

Romans 2:14-15 said:
14 For when the Gentiles who do not have the law by nature observe the prescriptions of the law, they are a law for themselves even though they do not have the law. 15 They show that the demands of the law are written in their hearts,
This puts Judaism and Christianity quite apart from Greek mythology.

It's not a premise.
Sure it is.

You don't appear to even know what that word means.
I sure do know what it means. Thanks for asking.

God is good. From that premise it follows that He is good throughout differing stories of creation.

If you have the premise that God is evil then it follows that He would show his evil ways by confusing you with differing stories of creation. See how that works?

Now you are about to say that that is backwards. But you're wrong. Allow me to pre-empt the coming bullet point: No. God cannot be logically deduced. To believe in God requires faith. Faith is the first step. You either have faith that God exists or you have faith in a purely materialistic universe but you have faith in something. If I have faith in God then that is my starting point not the end.

I believe God is good. Ergo, He is good throughout differing stories of creation. Notice how this doesn't work for humans. Showing the evil nature of humans doesn't require faith, only evidence.

Again, it's a matter of faith. You are using the wrong tool in your exposition. Now, having said that, and given the incredible unlikelyhood that any of us are here due to universal constants being EXACTLY what they are with any deviation resulting in no life in the universe at all, given the fact that the Earth is in the right place for life, given the fact that evolution conspired to create the human mind as well as opposable thumbs, given the evidence that everything in the universe appears to be laid out in a rather intelligent manner that invites us to discover it. . .it would appear to require greater faith to believe in a Godless universe than to believe in God.

And so "God is good" is the starting premise. From that axiom the conclusions come forth. You have it backwards. Now you are about to tell me that I'm wrong and then merely restate your backwards "Derive God through logic" folly. Let me remind you: It starts with faith, not logic. You see, God created logic. So if you don't believe in God your logic in disproving God is empty.

What I'm offering here aren't premises, but rather conclusions.
So you don't know what a premise is. You see, a premise precedes a conclusion. You can't have a real conclusion without a premise. You have a premise. You just didn't state it. So I stated it for you. You're welcome.

If you disagree then what is your premise?

Aw. Are you sad now? (Your tactic not mine) Is it because you know you're wrong and would have to change your narrative? Does changing your narrative make you sad?
 

Arkady

President
The question is at the center of the issue.
The question asked whether a character was really like the character was written or whether it's just how the character was perceived by those who wrote the character. It's gibberish.

God is not a scientific construct. This is a matter of faith.
Yes. Everything people believe without evidence is, by definition, a matter of faith.

Aren't you being redundant now?
No. It's a separate point. First, there's the lack of evidence of existence. Then there's the fact that even if we were to come across some evidence of existence, that wouldn't necessarily inform us of character. For example, even if we knew beyond a doubt that there was a supernatural creator being who had forged existence, we wouldn't know whether suffering was part of a divine plan for the greater good, or a side effect he was indifferent to, or something intentionally built into the system because he's a sick bastard who likes to watch people writhe in agony.

Nope. God is not Zeus. Zeus and every other pagan deity was made in man's image whereas man is made in God's image.
That's an assertion. I could as easily assert that Yahweh and every other non-Olympic deity was made in man's image but that man was made in the image of the Olympic gods, like Zeus. That's what the ancient Greeks thought, just like the ancient Yahweh worshippers thought we'd been made in Yahweh's image.

This was a relatively new concept
It's an old concept that you find in one mythology after another. Since most mythologies imagined their gods in more or less a human form, they had to explain that similarity by way of imagining that those gods had made humans in more or less their own form. It's a natural consequence of the way humans like to imagine the supernatural in their own image, without admitting they invented the supernatural.

Sure it is.
As you now see, it is not. You misunderstood the meaning of the word, but now it's been explained to you.

God is good. From that premise it follows that He is good throughout differing stories of creation.

If you have the premise that God is evil then it follows that He would show his evil ways by confusing you with differing stories of creation. See how that works?
Yes. In both cases, you're starting with the conclusion and then coming to the stories to try to fit them with your conclusion. As I explained, that's not how I work. I don't start with the conclusion. I came to the stories to see what they said, and drew my conclusions from those. I didn't start with the assumption that the Bible would contradict itself. I read the Bible and discovered that it contradicted itself. Nor did I start with the premise that God is evil. I didn't even start with the premise that God exists. Instead, I came to the Bible and read about the character Yahweh, and discovered that he behaved evilly. That doesn't mean there's a real God, much less an evil one. It just means that the character Yahweh in that particular set of myths is an evil character.

So you don't know what a premise is.
No, as you now see, you were using the word incorrectly. As you're now aware, I wasn't circle-jerking my way to a conclusion by way of reasserting my starting premise, the way you do. Instead, I was coming to the evidence and finding my conclusion by analyzing it.
 

Barbella

Senator
Catholics at their heart are communists. Which is why despite abortion, they are largely Democrats.
LOL... which is why:

Bankers' best guesses about the Vatican's wealth put it at $10 billion to $15 billion. Of this wealth, Italian stockholdings alone run to $1.6 billion, 15% of the value of listed shares on the Italian market. The Vatican has big investments in banking, insurance, chemicals, steel, construction, real estate.

https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=vatican+wealth&*
 
C

Capitalist

Guest
The question asked whether a character was really like the character was written or whether it's just how the character was perceived by those who wrote the character. It's gibberish.
No. Perceptions vs. reality is most certainly not gibberish.

Yes. Everything people believe without evidence is, by definition, a matter of faith.
You believe in atheism--a Godless universe. It requires more faith than Christianity.

That's an assertion. I could as easily assert that Yahweh and every other non-Olympic deity was made in man's image but that man was made in the image of the Olympic gods, like Zeus. That's what the ancient Greeks thought, just like the ancient Yahweh worshippers thought we'd been made in Yahweh's image.
No. Man poured man's characteristics into the gods: Lust into Aprodite, engineering into Hephaestus, aggression into Ares. These are gods made in man's image. You don't have that with Judeo-Christianity. The imaging is the other way around. You have the idea that man is the thinnest skin from God--an image incapable of becoming God but a reminder of who we are and where we came from. God is not a vessel into which we pour our base characteristics but something inscrutable beyond our reach that we can only get glimpses of from time to time. This is very different from polytheistic mythology. The fact that you insist that God is just another name for Zeus in a different form shows you really don't get it.

It's an old concept that you find in one mythology after another.
No. Polytheism does not equal monotheism.

Yes. In both cases, you're starting with the conclusion and then coming to the stories to try to fit them with your conclusion. As I explained, that's not how I work.
I know that's not how you work. You put the cart before the horse. Before you know. . .ANYTHING you must first believe SOMETHING. You believe in a Godless universe. That's how you work. THAT is your starting point. And from that you get your whole atheistic outlook. And once you understand just how incredibly improbable our existence is you'll discover why it takes more faith to believe in a Godless universe than to believe in God.

Rock ribbed atheists like yourself have more faith in your atheism than the Pope has in God.

I don't start with the conclusion. I came to the stories to see what they said, and drew my conclusions from those. I didn't start with the assumption that the Bible would contradict itself. I read the Bible and discovered that it contradicted itself. Nor did I start with the premise that God is evil. I didn't even start with the premise that God exists. Instead, I came to the Bible and read about the character Yahweh, and discovered that he behaved evilly.
Forgive me but I don't believe for a second that you came to the bible as a blank slate with no preconceptions, assumptions, or prejudices. That much is made clear with your own admission that you made your decision after page 2. No reservations. No wait and see. Just pure pile on after that.

You can proclaim your openmindedness as loud as you like but that fact is archived here and is a clear indication that the thousand plus remaining pages of the bible would not have convinced you otherwise. Not my words. Yours.
 
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Dawg

President
Supporting Member
LOL... which is why:

Bankers' best guesses about the Vatican's wealth put it at $10 billion to $15 billion. Of this wealth, Italian stockholdings alone run to $1.6 billion, 15% of the value of listed shares on the Italian market. The Vatican has big investments in banking, insurance, chemicals, steel, construction, real estate.

https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=vatican+wealth&*
with such wealth they should help meals on wheels more

upload_2017-3-18_12-36-35.pngfriends grandparent couldn't eat what they brought said it was nasty and ask them to Please stop coming
 

Arkady

President
No. Perceptions vs. reality is most certainly not gibberish.
We're talking about a character in the book. Your question was whether that character was really the way he was portrayed in the book or whether he was just perceived that way by the book's writers, who invented the character. That is, obviously, a nonsense question.

You believe in atheism--a Godless universe. It requires more faith than Christianity.
No, it requires no faith at all. Atheism is merely the lack of belief in God. Lack of belief, when evidence is lacking, doesn't require faith. It just requires being honest about the lack of any evidence. If evidence were to emerge, I'd change my view, whereas in your case it doesn't matter how long evidence refuses to emerge, your views will remain fixed, because they're a matter of faith.

Put it this way: Do you believe that there's an invisible, intangible elf who controls your actions? If you say, "no" does that require faith? Of course not. There's just no evidence of it, so your default position will be that it doesn't exist, since it's a claim that's dramatically at odds with anything we've witnessed.

No. Man poured man's characteristics into the gods: Lust into Aprodite, engineering into Hephaestus, aggression into Ares.
Yes, and man poured jealousy and wrath into Yahweh. Yahweh is made in man's image, just like most of the other gods man has invented over the years.

No. Polytheism does not equal monotheism.
Of course not. No one thing ever equals another thing, or we'd only be talking about a single thing, obviously. Polytheism and monotheism are two of the several different major varieties of mythology.

You put the cart before the horse
No. You've admitted that's what you do. You start with the presumption that there's a God and he's good. I do not. I look to the evidence and draw conclusions from it.

Before you know. . .ANYTHING you must first believe SOMETHING. You believe in a Godless universe. That's how you work
Are there real flying dragons living in Central Park? A moron might start with the presumption that there are, and then "reason" from that various things, like that the dragons are invisible and intangible, and that's why we never see any evidence of them. But, it would make more sense to look for the evidence and then draw conclusions from that.

There are things people could propose that I'd be agnostic about, because while I have no evidence, the claim is of a type where I wouldn't necessarily expect to have seen evidence, and where the nature of the claim is such that it's not at odds with the types of things we have been able to find evidence for. For example, is there a species of monkey that lives in the Amazon and has not yet been discovered by science? I don't know. I'm agnostic on that. There's no evidence of it, but there wouldn't necessarily be evidence if it were true, since that area is remote and densely forested, such that we haven't done a very thorough job of surveying it, and even something as large as a monkey could have evaded us. We've seen how undiscovered large fauna can turn up in such places, so it's not an inherently improbable claim, and we know there's nothing fantastical about the concept of a monkey living in the Amazon. So, I have no reason to take a stance on it one way or the other. That's agnosticism. When it comes to the flying dragons of Central Park, though, the claim is inherently implausible enough that the default assumption should be that it's untrue, until such time as evidence emerges in favor of it. Claims about God, gods, fairies, gnomes, griffons, etc., are like that.

Theists get that in nearly every case. Ask them if they think there are flying dragons living in Central Park and they'll say they don't. Ask them if they believe there's a teapot orbiting the Sun somewhere between Earth and Mars and they'll say no. Ask them if they think Kim Jong Il went 38 under par his first time ever golfing and they'll chuckle in disbelief. Ask them if they believe various ancient myths of gods are true and they'll say they don't.... with the single, arbitrary exception of the one set of myths that they have faith in (which is nearly always the set of myths they were instructed to believe when they were too young to think rationally, by people they trusted). Where theists and atheists differ is that 100% of the time atheists think the same sound way theists think 99.999% of the time. We are simply being consistent in sticking to the way of thinking you consider correct in NEARLY every instance.

That's what makes theist outrage so funny. They know that thinking the way we do doesn't require faith, because they think the way we do almost all the time. They KNOW that assuming Kim Jong Il didn't really go 38 under par doesn't require a leap of faith. Yet when they make similarly outlandish claims, with a similar absence of any evidence, but of a sort they have an emotional commitment to, it makes them very angry when atheists just do what the theists would do in absolutely any other context and dismiss it as untrue.

Forgive me but I don't believe for a second that you came to the bible as a blank slate with no preconceptions, assumptions, or prejudices
No human is ever entirely devoid of those things. And I came to the Bible with certain prejudices -- I'd been raised Christian, and so like most such people, I started with prejudices in favor of the idea that there was a God and that the Bible told us certain truths about Him. But, those prejudices were weaker in me than in most Christians, and didn't cripple the functioning of my reason. So I was able to evolve beyond them.

That much is made clear with your own admission that you made your decision after page 2
I made no such admission. Reread.
 

connieb

Senator
LOL... which is why:

Bankers' best guesses about the Vatican's wealth put it at $10 billion to $15 billion. Of this wealth, Italian stockholdings alone run to $1.6 billion, 15% of the value of listed shares on the Italian market. The Vatican has big investments in banking, insurance, chemicals, steel, construction, real estate.

https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=vatican+wealth&*
Absolutely. Which is why thy are down with globalism. Those with big investments in stocks and banking - all endorse globalism. Francis is the nice old man doddering uncle. He may be a truly good man, I think that he is. But, the real strings are being pulled by all the others that actually run the Vatican. He is a useful stooge to their ends. A happier sunnier face.. that they needed after decades of bad press.
 

Barbella

Senator
Absolutely. Which is why thy are down with globalism. Those with big investments in stocks and banking - all endorse globalism. Francis is the nice old man doddering uncle. He may be a truly good man, I think that he is. But, the real strings are being pulled by all the others that actually run the Vatican. He is a useful stooge to their ends. A happier sunnier face.. that they needed after decades of bad press.
I've always been critical (and, admittedly cynical) about the Catholic Church for exactly that reason.
 

connieb

Senator
I've always been critical (and, admittedly cynical) about the Catholic Church for exactly that reason.
The basic test I use to evaluate any religious of philosophical or economic system is this - if at any point leaders of the philosophy have used some sort of forced compliance with the system via the silencing opposition, restricting the movement of your citizens, prohibiting anti-organizational speech, or prohibiting certain kinds of unacceptable speech because it inevitably leads to non conformity, etc.... it is not a just philosophy/practice.

When you look at the history of communism, of socialism, of many of the worlds "religions' they have several things in common but the most obvious commonality is this - at some point in their present day or history - they have prohibited dissent and non-conformity. In china you can't speak against the Gov't. In socialist countries - you can't speak against the pet groups so they have hate speech laws, etc, or like in Nazi Germany they built walls to keep people IN. The Church has had "heretics" and burned people at the stake and had the crusades, Islam has also in many ways we are afamiliar with squashed dissent and non believers.

The bottom line is - if you have to MAKE people believe yours is the right way, by controlling and influencing and pressuring them in many cases to the point of violence, yours is not the right way. When people are willing to die to get to another country because you won't let them, or they will be punished.. yours is not the right way. When you kill or maim those that speak against your religion or your Gov't, yours is not the right way. If you punish those who speak against others in the group - or make laws to prevent that, then yours is not the right way.
 
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