Indeed.
It seems to me the reverse … love is more than a state, it is something we have or don’t have that brain and body know. To say that love is a “state” is to say that love really doesn’t exist or is unreal since it is just part of the state of the brain.
No, I believe that adjectives have objective reality or existence. Else everything thing would be mishmashed together. It is all in how “things” are seen or the slant of our mind. As I look at reality, I can see that everything I know and see has a separate identity because if it didn’t then everything could be something else, like red could be blue, or brown in this dog is the very same brown in that dog, but each dog has his own brown. That the color brown of one dog belongs to that one dog.
Sure we can go with that. There may be contexts where this is not the case, but in general, yes. I do not bother too much with absolutes because every case has its own nuances and I prefer to address them one at a time.
This is where I’ve landed in my world view, that I use logical conclusions and identities that are grounded in referencing reality. So the more I learn about about object A and object B, the less likely my original logical conclusion of A=B is still correct. However, if every time I have studied the relationship of A=B in reality, and other people have studied A=B as well and still come to the conclusion that A still equals B, then I would be willing to bring that idea into the description of a Law. A and B are just the Facts, the data. The equation is the Law, Theory, etc.
I’ve never said that religion must answer those issues, just I am asserting that the answers that it claims to have answers to do not appear to be justified in it’s assertions to claims of the supernatural. Answers to answers that apply in reality like social issues are a separate conversation.
I’ll leave this to the points that I’ve made. Everyone knows this conversation and knows the public outcry of the church to finally correct itself in an adult sense.
I don’t believe you are being serious here on this issue. Everyone knows the punishments the church lays out to it’s members and that is not owning up to it’s responsibilities to it’s role in these issues in any serious way. Continued remarks like this will just be ignored and left to the fair minded readers to see why this is a waste of time to address points like this.
So this gets to the point of how do people ground their moral rules. First you pick a reference point through a system that worked for you. In your case you picked a powerful deity. I’ll pick humanity. Once a reference point is picked, you can construct moral absolutes, but the implementation of these absolutes may take on many paths to accomplish them. Such as, for secular humanists, I observe the overall human condition wants to promote health over nonhealth. So to promote health, culture A may want to eat apples while culture B wants to eat pears. However, it is a universal truth that drinking battery acid is detrimental to health. This analogy works the same with psychological wellbeing. A normal social human will prefer socialization over not socializing. This is an observed fact that people will suffer psychological damage in isolation. So culture A socializes in X fashion while culture B socializes in Y fashion. However, it is a truth across cultures that isolation is a bad thing for people.
This is not a problem for me because truths are grounded in your reference point. Such as arbitrarily picking to play chess, you can have absolutes within that game structure. It is really really bad to loose your queen, but not an absolute. But it is an absolute bad idea to intentionally checkmate yourself. So you’ve picked your reference point to a powerful deity and I’ll pick a reference point of humanity. You have divine command theory that tells you what is right and wrong, while I’ll look at the human condition to see what the norms of humanity are that cross all cultural barriers, such as “Fire hot bad”, “Socialization is preferred over isolation”, “Health is preferred over nonhealth”, etc. So in my world view, I can make absolute statements where drinking battery acid is bad for your health while eating an apple or a pear is good for your health. Culture A prefers apples, and culture B prefers pears. Culture C that preferred battery acid feel into decline and died off or got absorbed into other culture. It was a failed experiment. My process is harder because we have to ask everyone in the room to see what the common overlaps are for universal human truths, while your method appears to be only appealing to the biggest bully in the room
I prefer if you make your point and then expound on why you came to that conclusion instead of the leading down the road questions.
So it’s not that the Church in non-material. It’s that the Church is supernatural…
So no retort…
Wrong. You don’t construct them. That’s part of their requisite transcendence in order to even function. They predate you, and will exist after you. If you pick them, they’re arbitrary.
Social dominance hierarchy is real whether you like it or not. You cannot appeal to everyone, thus you must have a nucleus of authority. Rule of Law is a great example.
I completely follow you on this process, but it doesn’t work in my world view. It seems we have a difference in explaining these events. I accept what the scientists conclude. If you can find a fault with their methods, please correct it and run your study to see if it produces something new. That would be great. But how could you falsify your explanation of these events through a testing process? I do not use the word “merely” when I understand a process and that somehow removes the majesty of that process and it’s beauty and significance. I can fully understand something in reality and still be excited that it is part of the experience of reality. I don’t see the need to invoke more to its story than is there. That is not to say that we would find a point of “that’s enough to know” and then stop the search for more. This world view keeps looking to answer all the questions we can still come up with to follow.
If you look close enough to those individual characteristics of animals, then I believe you will find nuances that are different. But the brown for pet A can be different from the brown of pet B for certain instruments to detect those wavelengths. But since we are using our human eye, we may not be able to tell a difference. It’s like math nerds arguing over the 15th decimal place of pi instead of using the 20th decimal place for the calculation while the scientist keeps telling them that any value past the 5th decimal place makes no statistical difference in the application of the equation for the problem they are trying to solve.
I’ve addressed these points and leave it at that for the readers to make their own conclusions on.
As “people of faith” are growing in population percentage while the religiously “unaffiliated” are shrinking by the same metric, they obviously are.
Mix of articles:As “people of faith” are growing in population percentage while the religiously “unaffiliated” are shrinking by the same metric, they obviously are.
Thanks. It’s been fun.
So why don’t you give a concrete example of how your worldview that there are no good reasons to believe in God could be falsified.
No one should have any real quarrel with “their methods”, Russell.
So, religion, then? You’d be okay embracing a religious belief that can’t be falsified?
Why are you so angry at God if he doesn’t exist? Are you truly happy as an atheist? Atheism is really a denial of reality. It denies who we truly are and who we are meant to be. We have natural desires like desires for food, water and sex. For each of these desires we have some way to fulfill them naturally. Yet, we have a huge dissatisfaction with the world. We are never happy. If we are only made by this world and for this world then why are we constantly searching for something that will make us happy? Isn’t the world enough? We may think If we only had this thing or this person or this accomplishment in our lives we would be happy. And yet when we achieve those things there is still something missing. It seems we have a desire for something that can not be satisfied by anything in this world, like we were created for more.
Why do you assume he is angry? One can be perfectly happy without any god in their life. There are successful marriages of atheists for many years. I am not 100% sure but atheists have less hang ups about sex. Look at the Family Life section of this forum, nearly 60% of them is sex questions. Also atheism is only saying belief in no gods. That is all.
I can tell he is angry by what he wrote. He blames God for not reaching him. Ultimately, he blames God. Maybe something bad happened in his life and he blamed God for it. I don’t know. But, one can not be truly happy under such circumstances and one can not be happy for long if they are living in a self made delusion, a false world view, especially atheism that reduces reality to something less than it is. And even if someone is temporarily happy in a delusion it doesn’t mean he should stay there. Because after all it is not true. If Christianity explains reality better, and if miracles are an indication of God working in the world then to constantly deny them is a sign of a delusion rather than clear thinking. I can not deny God because of what he has done in my life. It just wouldn’t be rational to deny him based on what I know and have experienced. The fact that there are other people that don’t know God doesn’t change that fact. But, they can come to know him if they wish. But are they willing to change and do things according to the reality of how God made them to be or do they persist in doing things their own way?
You are assuming a lot. Also please define atheism.