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oldcelt
Guest
Well stated
- Status
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Roseeurekacross
Guest
If you need me to tell you, then you would not understand it.Not because you are intellectually unqualified, but because you have too much “invested” in your system.
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Vera Ljuba
Nope, you arent throwing out a one liner , just one outlandish claim you believe ( in faith) I swallow.
No, it does not. It cannot prevent natural disasters, which slaughter people randomly. We try as we can to find cure for all sorts of diseases, and can chalk up a few successes. God could give us all the information to cure the other ones. But he does not.
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Vera Ljuba
ah but we could lead people out of their desolate homeland and offer them a new life in a place that rains enough to grow crops. Or build desalinators and pump water. The list is endless…
We could stop building infrasructure on flood plains or on the edge of tectonic belts.
We could buy a bunch of Elvis fire planes to stop bush fires being so deadly. An Elvis saved a couple of guys I know, who were trapped by a bushfire, in their house… It kept dumping water on them while the bushfire front was on them. I can guarantee you, they said a prayer or two!
If, we, spend, and allot more resources to finding cures, instead of other stuff like louder fireworks, maybe the cures are there for the finding. Before an antidote was found for Funnel Web Spider bite, death was within the hour.
There is no sign of help. How many children die because of famine? A little rain could prevent it.
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Vera Ljuba
See above
How many? There is no positive correlation between prayer and healing.
Vera Ljuba
I dont have the resources today, but over the weekend lets look at peer reviewed scientific studies available to us on the internet. For both physical and psychological effects of prayer. And test this hypothesis. If we can find no studies either way, it would be down to the funding of research into this. It might make a nice post grad thesis.
Of course I don’t believe in God, but I am willing to entertain it as a working hypothesis. I am willing to ponder the attributes that God allegedly has, like omnipotence, omniscience, omni-benevolence, and the rest. Most of them are simply logically nonsensical, and the rest is simply unsubstantiated claim.
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Vera ljuba, this time last year, I was kind of at the same place you are. And also thinking why has jo blo got a dream run in life with a gold card , when his neighbour just got their generational farm repossessed because the wheat crop failed again.
A benevolent entity would never allow useless, meaningless, gratuitous suffering. If you wish to contend that every piece of suffering is logically necessary, if you say this is a best possible world, that there is no way to improve on it, then you need to argue for each and every one of them. No “maybe”, no “perhaps” are allowed as argument. You could start with the Holocaust.
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Vera Ljuba, another has posted on the Holocaust. But please dont assume what I wish to contend, or what I think of this world. Take your own advice, start by answering the outlandish claim thing.
Today , in my country, there is a Public Holiday for its inception. There are many celebrations, honours, fireworks tonight.
For one group, this day is Invasion Day, the Day their Genocide and Holocaust began.
Enjoy your Thursday!
One more question,
is there any reason other then God allows evil and suffering, and appears indifferent to prayer, that you believe God is indifferent?
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Bradski
Guest
Nice to see you back, Oldcelt. Assuming you have been away - it could be you’ve been hanging around different parts of the forum. Anyway…Well stated
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tonyrey
Guest
The distinction between good and evil has no rational basis in a Godless universe. If only matter exists nothing matters and everything is meaningless…
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tonyrey
Guest
On what do you base your distinction between good and evil?
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tonyrey
Guest
- How do we know what is good for us and what is bad for us?
- Who does “us” include?
- Do you accept the principles of liberty, equality and fraternity? If so why?
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inocente
Guest
Thing is, you guys debate the god of the philosophers but that’s not what people believe.
Say you have a daughter, she’s the apple of your eye, and she falls ill and dies. You don’t understand why, you just know the pain.
One way to deal with it is to hope maybe there is some reason, if only you could know, that makes sense to her life and death.
Or you can think that what you loved most was taken by blind forces, statistics. But if you work through the logic of that without flinching, it follows that life is meaningless, reality is absurd.
Either way, whatever you think, you could be fooling yourself. If you think there are only blind forces then there’s no point at all trying to convince others of that, since all humans could die off tomorrow and nothing will care. Just enjoy the ride, for the ride is all there is.
But most people hope maybe there is some reason that makes sense of it all.
(Scenario taken from Annabelle by Gillian Welsh, song here, lyrics here).
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tonyrey
Guest
Please explain **how **every single misfortune could be prevented in a universe in which there is development of immensely complex forms of life which have enabled us to exist?
Would you prefer to be deprived of your power of self-control which enables you to choose what to to believe, how to live and who to love?
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petra22
Guest
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petra22
Guest
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goout
Guest
Because love forces itself on others, right?
Benevolence has to do with love, not with fitting a person into a distorted notion of a painless existence.
Have you ever been in love? Did you force yourself on the other for their own good? (I hope the answer is no!)
My daughter suffered because she rejected a man who was good for her.
Perhaps he and I should have forced him on her. After all, we could have prevented suffering if we forced her to marry him. :whacky:
Open your eyes to the world around you.
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Aloysium
Guest
The question posed by the OP is whether the ultimate truth is love or indifference.
Is our destiny fullness of being or a void?
The answer is important to how we live our lives, how we behave towards one another and to our happiness.
Our approach to one another may be a caring giving of ourselves, a search for intimacy and communion, in other words loving.
It is in the nature of love to include both joy and suffering, the laughter and the sobbing, united in the ecstatic.
Here are some scenes from the movies Shadowlands, adaptations of the relationship between CS Lewis and Joy Davidman Gresham.
The first two clips are from the British version and the third, from the Hollywood version, directed by Richard Attenborough, staring Anthony Hopkins and Debra Winger.
Especially the latter takes some liberties with the truth, alternate facts as current thinking has it.
For those interested, I would recommend A Grief Observed, first published under the pseudonym N.W. Clerk, and is a collection of C. S. Lewis’s reflections on his bereavement.
youtube.com/watch?v=UMIiajrItPs
youtube.com/watch?v=-wYks3C_15Q
youtube.com/watch?v=z3PUhrvAxyg
I refrain from belabouring the obvious.
And, if it is not clear what they mean, like explaining a punch-line, it won’t help you get it.
Enjoy?
Is our destiny fullness of being or a void?
The answer is important to how we live our lives, how we behave towards one another and to our happiness.
Our approach to one another may be a caring giving of ourselves, a search for intimacy and communion, in other words loving.
It is in the nature of love to include both joy and suffering, the laughter and the sobbing, united in the ecstatic.
Here are some scenes from the movies Shadowlands, adaptations of the relationship between CS Lewis and Joy Davidman Gresham.
The first two clips are from the British version and the third, from the Hollywood version, directed by Richard Attenborough, staring Anthony Hopkins and Debra Winger.
Especially the latter takes some liberties with the truth, alternate facts as current thinking has it.
For those interested, I would recommend A Grief Observed, first published under the pseudonym N.W. Clerk, and is a collection of C. S. Lewis’s reflections on his bereavement.
youtube.com/watch?v=UMIiajrItPs
youtube.com/watch?v=-wYks3C_15Q
youtube.com/watch?v=z3PUhrvAxyg
I refrain from belabouring the obvious.
And, if it is not clear what they mean, like explaining a punch-line, it won’t help you get it.
Enjoy?
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Aloysium
Guest
What would help would be posting the correct videos.
The second is not the one I intended. The third begins with a dialogue which doesn’t ring true to me in terms of the real life people they represent. At any rate, what I found gets to the point I was trying to make, begins at around the 3 minute mark, in the exchange between Jack and Douglas.
The ultimate reality, as it is revealed, irrespective of religious teachings and affiliation, in our relationships, those which pierce the surface, to the core of our humanity and beyond to its Foundations, is Love.
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Vonsalza
Guest
The OP is inexcusably inconsistent in their application of rational skepticism.
The concepts of “good” and “bad” are as subjective as the OP’s expectations concerning God.
When I steal your boat, I experience a perceived “good”. You experience a perceived “bad”. They’re subjective without the use of an outside reference point (like religion).
When two people get sick and there’s one unit of cure, nothing “bad” happened. The two people chanced into a lethal pathogen and supply-and-demand only predicted one would be sick at-a-time. No evil transpired.
And don’t bother with “law”. Law is merely a proxy for perceived good and bad. Who can’t name a trash law that was done away with and who can’t name a trash law that recently came into effect? Similarly, we’ll break the law if we think we’ll get away with it (doing a few miles over the speed limit, for example).
Also, don’t bother with “The Golden Rule”. A patient is in a coma. Dr. A wouldn’t want to go on like that. Dr. B would want to stay alive for a future cure. Without a moral framework to nest it in, the Golden Rule is absurdly easy to collapse.
“Good and bad” carry the same subjective hazards as our expectations of God. As they can’t be observed, measured and compared, the material rationalist must abandon them like they must abandon God.
The only morality we can observe is “Right of Might”. “The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must”. Rationally, there is no “good” or “bad”.
So enjoy either the road to nihilism, or the notion that “good and bad” DO exist, and the OP’s material rationalist approach is insufficient for answering absolutely all their questions.
The concepts of “good” and “bad” are as subjective as the OP’s expectations concerning God.
When I steal your boat, I experience a perceived “good”. You experience a perceived “bad”. They’re subjective without the use of an outside reference point (like religion).
When two people get sick and there’s one unit of cure, nothing “bad” happened. The two people chanced into a lethal pathogen and supply-and-demand only predicted one would be sick at-a-time. No evil transpired.
And don’t bother with “law”. Law is merely a proxy for perceived good and bad. Who can’t name a trash law that was done away with and who can’t name a trash law that recently came into effect? Similarly, we’ll break the law if we think we’ll get away with it (doing a few miles over the speed limit, for example).
Also, don’t bother with “The Golden Rule”. A patient is in a coma. Dr. A wouldn’t want to go on like that. Dr. B would want to stay alive for a future cure. Without a moral framework to nest it in, the Golden Rule is absurdly easy to collapse.
“Good and bad” carry the same subjective hazards as our expectations of God. As they can’t be observed, measured and compared, the material rationalist must abandon them like they must abandon God.
The only morality we can observe is “Right of Might”. “The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must”. Rationally, there is no “good” or “bad”.
So enjoy either the road to nihilism, or the notion that “good and bad” DO exist, and the OP’s material rationalist approach is insufficient for answering absolutely all their questions.
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Randy_Carson
Guest
John 15
9 “As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love. 10 If you keep my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commands and remain in his love. 11 I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete. 12 My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. 13 Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. 14 You are my friends if you do what I command. 15 I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you. 16 You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you so that you might go and bear fruit—fruit that will last—and so that whatever you ask in my name the Father will give you. 17 This is my command: Love each other.
The New Testament speaks of us as friends, sons and children of God. We are called to know our “master’s business” or God’s will.
Further, Jesus said,
Matthew 6
25 “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? 26 Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? 27 Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?
28 “And why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. 29 Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. 30 If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? 31 So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ 32 For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. 33 But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. 34 Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.
Matthew 10
29 Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground outside your Father’s care. 30 And even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. 31 So don’t be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows.
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Qoeleth
Guest
Well, what’s wrong with a little wishful thinking? It may well be true.
On this side of the grave, we’ve no way of knowing, so I’ll take my bets with the side that has ‘a chance’ of coming out good in the next world.
And, in the meantime, if I live according to the teachings of Christ, and there’s no hereafter- what have I lost?
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tonyrey
Guest
As so often Pascal was right. We have everything to gain and nothing to lose. Even in this world we are happier and more fulfilled if we follow His example. “What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his soul?” To be loved we have to be lovable - for what we are, not for what we possess…
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Bradski
Guest
And if I do the same and there IS a hereafter…well, lucky me.
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tonyrey
Guest
So Pascal was right. He was certainly no fool.
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Vera_Ljuba
Guest
Nothing is wrong with a LITTLE wishful thinking.
As long as you are aware that you engage in wishful thinking, and do not confuse it with reality.For a very long time most people adhered to the principle: “The Lord hath given, the Lord hath taken away, blessed be the name of the Lord”. And they also lived according to the idea: “It is very bad here, in this vale of tears, but in the next life everything will be balanced”.
This kind of fatalistic attitude only helped to fossilize the status quo. (No wonder that the Dark Ages lasted so long!) The changes all came from those, who thought: “This world stinks. Let’s not wait for the hereafter, let’s fix what we can do HERE and NOW”.
6000 characters are not sufficient to enumerate the list.
Of course the question is, just WHAT are the teachings of Christ? Living according to the golden rule is a very good idea, even though it has nothing to do with Christ.- Status