Original Sin

[DJK100]

continued

**Sorry to be so picky and quote you on tiny sections, but I do not share in that “fallen nature”. I wish to defend the dignity of the significant proportion of humanity that does not share this doctrinal view, and respectfully suggest it would be more appropriate for you to couch it in terms that are less offensive, for example speaking for those who agree with your view that they are “fallen” in their nature, and not for those who do not. After all this is not a fact, it is not something that is supported by so much universally accepted evidence that it would be perverse to ignore it, it is actually a religious doctrine which is a matter of opinion. **

Sorry, if I offended you that was not my intention. But I still hold to my truth, maybe not yours, that all men have fallen. I will be more careful though of how I word it in the future. Sure, we can call it a matter of differing opinions.

You are suggesting we should all atone for someone else’s mistake. Maybe the world would be a better place if that was the general principle, but given that the Garden of Eden scenarios are not real, this mistake is one that was invented by ancient Jews, so for what are we atoning?

Well, I am suggesting that mankind atone for mankind’s mistake. Again, what you are asserting about the Garden of Edan is an opinion. While it may be mostly allegorical, it doesn’t mean that actual truths are not contained within the allegory. That is only your opinion. Surely, you can see how allegories can be used to teach truth it is done everyday.

Fair point, I do have a right of reply. I have thought about what I would do if Catholic doctrine was actually true, a possibility for which I must reserve a tiny sliver of consideration. Let’s say I was in front of god being judged. I would take the opportunity to ask this god on what basis it judges me, when according to scripture god killed Uzzah when he was only trying to help by steadying the ark of the covenant. I would ask what universal principle was being demonstrated there that might lift humans from their “fallen state”. I might also mention that the Jewish bible has god killing up to 24,000,000 of my fellow humans. I could ask how a god that boasts about that is worthy of judging me, who has never killed anyone. Why should I not be judging that god? You might claim I am already!

Well, maybe you will have the opportunity to ask all your questions. We’ll all get to find out someday. As for Uzzah, or course, I can’t speak to the mind of God because I am not him, but I would point out that it stress’ the importance of follow God’s commands. He expressly forbid any but the Levites from touching the ark (I think it was the Levites) and Uzzah violated his express commandment. Was it fair or just? Maybe, maybe not but again we start falling into the realm of opinion statments.

When you speak of god killing and boasting about killing, firstly I hardly think he is boasting. Secondly, could it be that this was a way of giving mankind another chance? Do we have all the details of what happened? What if he continually tried to call those people to repentance and they did not listen? What if it was a hopless situation like Sodom and Gomorrha (sp?) where God gave repeated chance to the people? Remember I believe people have free will. Do I agree with killing people? Of course not, but I can’t always know why things are done and what purpose they play in the overall plan for our salvation. Lets ask it this way… If your data told you that it was better for you and for all of humanity to take one life to save 100 would you do it?

Continued

 

[DJK100]

Continued

I don’t think of science as a faith position. It finds great satisfaction in being proved wrong, and indeed part of its fundamental makeup is to disprove as much of it as is possible in order to weed out that which is wrong. I don’t see many Catholics here who would delight in their faith position being proved wrong. For example, the faith position you hold regarding the origins of humanity appears to be completely disproved. It is not even compatible with your acceptance of evolution (which, may I say makes for a much more sophisticated kind of conversation that I have endured with christian fundamentalists!). Do you feel delight or frustration at that contradiction?

First of all you do take science as a faith postion. You take it as faith that science will be able to answer everything. Sure it may be wrong sometimes, and maybe that gives you satisfaction in the correction, but you hold to the position that it will eventually reach the correct conclusion. But again you cannot possibly know that so you take it on faith that it will.

Would I as a Catholic be delighted that my faith is proved wrong. No of course not, just like you having anything you hold dear to you be proven wrong would be upsetting. How would you feel if science eventual proved the existence of God — frustrated or delighted?

Again you speak about evolution completely disproving mankinds origin – as being at odds with religion. And once again, I have to disagree with your assesment because you cannot know what makes up mankind. Are we only just cells being dictated to by electro chemical signals or are we more than that? How does one prove or disprove that?

Are you sure you are not confusing the word faith with the term untestable assumption? We all have those, but while religions just let the untestable assumptions pile up out of control, science is brutally trying to eliminate as many as it can. I figure that I have two fundamental untestable assumptions and you have four.

But isn’t that the point entirely of faith? Science can only measure what it can measure. Meaning it can take the natural world and attempt to measure that the best it can. Oftentimes the actual measurement changes the outcome or even raises new questions. Is not a lot of science based on assumptions to begin with? Are not a lot of computer models of events based on mankind’s assumptions (even if the with the most recent and relative data as (name removed by moderator)ut) of how things work. Does not this mean that the results are assumptions because they are predicated on an intial assumption – which one presumes but does not know if they have all the data? Maybe they give you macro answers and work as a good intial and workable model but as you fine tune the information the micro answers that leads up to the macroanswer could change ie the mechanism of the macroanswer changes. In any event your assumption would be wrong because the mechanism for the answer was wrong.

And about having fundamental untestable assumptions … could it be you only have two untestable assumptions because we have yet to figure out how to test the “spiritual assumptions?” You also must take in consideration what these assumptions are. If one of your assumptions is the basis for all that you believe or feel you know, than that assumption becomes very very important.

But then god must have invented the notion of responsibility also.

Yes. And left it upto you on how to utilize this gift.

 

[Stuu]

DJK100

Have you considered because that in each of these peoples lives God has manifested himself to them slightly differently. The overall nature of God is the same but how you relate to him may be slightly different thus giving you a different but not less true answer. For example I can say I feel God, you say you don’t. Which is true?

I say I feel the same as you. Why do you attribute those same feelings to a being that I consider to be your Imaginary Friend?

… you are holding up the Spiritual realm which man cannot know everything about with the Natural realm. You choose to be completly empircal but there are many things your empircal data cannot answer or even within groups of scientist where data is disputed.

Can you define “spiritual realm” for me?

Stuu: So strictly they say nothing of any meaning.

You can’t possibly think this. If even you don’t agree with it or think it is wrong or a fable, you cannot say that many people have not derived strong morals and even altruistic behavior from it. Of course, you can assert you don’t have to have it to have these morals, but I feel you cannot possibly say it doesn’t say nothing of meaning when the whole book is focused on loving and caring for you fellow man. Even if you think it drives man to be evil and cruel is that not still saying somethiing of meaning and providing a foil for your nature as well?

We might disagree on the point of whether christianity is ethical, but that was not really what I meant to articulate and perhaps I have not been clear. It is when god is invoked as an authority that the statements are meaningless because gods are not testable.

…this is why you have your reason to help you through those claims. It is also why you have free will to make the choice on what you want to believe. As for Medieval times and those nasty doctrines, well we have science that helped straightened out those misconceptions did we not. The same science that the Church accepts. You can’t tell me though that if you lived in that age, and the best minds of the time concurred that Sin was causing ill health that you wouldn’t at least subject yourself to that opinion. Face it, at that time maybe the most empircical data you had pointed in that direction, so by your logic you would accept it based upon its “empircal truth.”

I don’t think there ever was anything empirical about doctrines of sin and disease, was there? Not even today. Are you familiar with the comparison of the rates of claimed cures attributed by the church to a visit to Lourdes with the rates of spontaneous remission of disease in which apparently no intercessionary appeal has been made? They are virtually identical. To be skeptical about it, in the end the difference is not measured in health statistics but in dollars and some unit of gullibility. To be fair, the Vatican does mount investigations, and invite in devil advocates, but they don’t let a rational analysis get in the way of good PR, do they. Magic is invoked, mystery must be maintained at all costs. On what basis will the inevitable canonisation of Karol Wojtyla be justified? It will not be on a properly testable claim, it will be on some appeal to an allegedly successful posthumous intercession, in this case one that I believe is being pursued despite doctors denying there was anything unusual about the medical cure (which they effected using standard therapies!). Does medical science = medical science + miracles? Subtract “medical science” from both sides of that equation!

Stuart

 

[Stuu]

con’t

Actually the best data right now points to Y Adam being only 10,000 years apart from mitoEve. …

These are just the Adam and Eve to be found by tracing exclusively through the female line, or through the male line only. Go back a few tens of thousands of years, or even less, and every person you meet will either be an ancestor of no one alive today, or an ancestor of everyone alive today.
.

Of course God has responsibility for administering the consequences. But we have responsibilty for choosing those consquences. You choose the left or the right path. You make up your mind what you want to do. But you are not doing this blindly, you know what the consquences and choices are.

So it is true that god says, you made the wrong choice so I will have to punish you? Free will is Hobson’s Choice isn’t it? Is that honest?

If the part of the purpose of man is to obtain such a state of Grace to be able to live with a perfect god, then as imperfect beings we would not be able to be one with a perfect God – that would mean that our imperfection now makes God imperfect. Either you are able to obtain that perfection and live with God or you do not and suffer a separation. It is your choice and your responsibilty. God gives you the free will to choose it. As for the scripture part that is not necessarily true.

Are you familiar with the arguments against god from the imperfection seen in nature?

You should look up Doctrine of Baptism by Intention, I think it is called. It means that even if you didn’t know God you can still be saved because you responded to his grace enough to practice his principles. This is also seen I think in the concept of Natural law where even pagan religions contain an element of truth in them because we as humanity can observe the natural world and deduce certain facts from it.

I would love to have seen the fights Paul and Peter had over questions like this. They should recreate it on Celebrity Death Match.

How about to achieve a wholeness of person that one is lacking.

Are you lacking what other people have told you that you are lacking? Do you think you lack something described in scripture? I am lacking ability at ballet dancing: there is a good reason why I am not principle ballerina at the Bolshoi… well OK, two good reasons. Now, I might read a book in the library that enthusiastically extols the virtues of dance and highlights my singular inadequacies in that genre of expression. Does that mean I should think of myself as lacking wholeness? Remember, unless you have heard voices that are unambiguously divine, you are judging yourself in terms of what other humans have written down on paper based on their own claims of having heard divine voices in their heads, AND you are taking that criticism to heart based on no personal relationship with the writers. They call you a sinner although they never met you. Is that a decent basis for self-deprecation? Or is it actually that you have wholeness already but have fallen short of the meaning you have given your own life, no value judgment required?

Stuart

 

[Stuu]

con’t

But even you must admit that there are other was of thinking about ethics than Kohlberg, so your comment about it being the ethical thinking of someone younger than four really doesn’t apply.

Well it is, and it does, but yes there are other views. One question that interests me, which does relate to Kohlberg, is how christians justify their claim that the creator of the universe should be worshipped. Aside from questions of existence, why is it not ethical in principle to pay no attention at all to the creator?

Sorry, if I offended you that was not my intention. But I still hold to my truth, maybe not yours, that all men have fallen. I will be more careful though of how I word it in the future. Sure, we can call it a matter of differing opinions.

I am not so easily offended, but I think humanity should be, even if only to match the extreme offense triggered in some god believers when they are challenged not on their own personal dignity or identity, but on the ideas that occupy their heads. An insidious thing about islam in particular is the concept of submission. Your identity IS your religion. Isn’t the invocation of THAT in the believer’s psyche a clever adaptation for survival possessed by that meme?!

I am suggesting that mankind atone for mankind’s mistake.

Why? What about those of us who do not think there ever was a mistake? What responsibility is god taking for this? After all we are really talking about the incompetence of the creator here. If an omnipotent god had goals in mind, it would have been a simple matter to make humans that did what it wanted. So what is god’s motivation here? To watch most of humanity fail to see the point, then punish / reward us for it? I’m no psychologist, but that matches symptoms of pathological mental illness. As a person with an intelligent respect for the scientific method, what do you make of that “evidence”, leaving aside doctrine for a second? What conclusion would you draw given that as a working scenario?

Again, what you are asserting about the Garden of Edan is an opinion. While it may be mostly allegorical, it doesn’t mean that actual truths are not contained within the allegory. That is only your opinion. Surely, you can see how allegories can be used to teach truth it is done everyday.

But surely you see the problem with that? Taken allegorically, there is no actual “mistake” identified!

By the way, my opinion on the question of the science as it impacts on the mythology of Genesis is irrelevant. However it is, it is. Genesis is not historical. If god did not really flood the earth then it is an empty threat. Allegorically that story has no meaning that should concern anyone.

Well, maybe you will have the opportunity to ask all your questions. We’ll all get to find out someday.

You see the difficulty is that I disagree, in my view neither you nor I will never be confronted or enlightened in the way you are suggesting. The only effective route to greater knowledge I can see is the scientific method applied within this lifespan, and I can’t think of a single example where revelation has trumped it.

As for Uzzah, or course, I can’t speak to the mind of God because I am not him,

Perhaps you should go back and edit out all the instances where you have said what god wants!

but I would point out that it stress’ the importance of follow God’s commands. He expressly forbid any but the Levites from touching the ark (I think it was the Levites) and Uzzah violated his express commandment. Was it fair or just? Maybe, maybe not but again we start falling into the realm of opinion statments.

So you agree, there is no way to identify a useful principle in this fable of Uzzah? All we can conclude is god sees killing as a way of being impressive?

When you speak of god killing and boasting about killing, firstly I hardly think he is boasting.

How else could it possibly be interpreted? The ancient Jews were asserting the impressiveness of their god. It was they who were boasting on god’s behalf, of course. But then was scripture divinely inspired? If so, god was boasting.

Secondly, could it be that this was a way of giving mankind another chance? Do we have all the details of what happened? What if he continually tried to call those people to repentance and they did not listen? What if it was a hopless situation like Sodom and Gomorrha (sp?) where God gave repeated chance to the people? Remember I believe people have free will. Do I agree with killing people? Of course not, but I can’t always know why things are done and what purpose they play in the overall plan for our salvation. Lets ask it this way… If your data told you that it was better for you and for all of humanity to take one life to save 100 would you do it?

So, you have gone from telling us what god wants, to telling us that the mind of god cannot be known, to then saying that you can’t say whether there is a purpose to the killing attributed in scripture to god. Can you know anything about this god reliably enough to know what it wants you to do?

Stuart

 

[Stuu]

con’t

First of all you do take science as a faith postion. You take it as faith that science will be able to answer everything.

You have not established this as a faith position, and in any case physics has shown us that it is not possible to know what goes on at lengths shorter than the Planck length, 10^-35m, to take one example. Faith is defined in scripture as the “evidence of the unseen”. I invoke the evidence of the seen.

Sure it may be wrong sometimes, and maybe that gives you satisfaction in the correction, but you hold to the position that it will eventually reach the correct conclusion. But again you cannot possibly know that so you take it on faith that it will.

You have completely misrepresented the scientific method there. All conclusions are permanently provisional, there is no “eventually” about it. You can never shut the door to new evidence.

Would I as a Catholic be delighted that my faith is proved wrong. No of course not, just like you having anything you hold dear to you be proven wrong would be upsetting. How would you feel if science eventual proved the existence of God — frustrated or delighted?

Scientifically delighted, aesthetically miserable. While the new discoveries that would underpin this new knowledge would have to be revolutionary, the very concept of the christian god makes the universe ugly because it introduces unknowable intent. It is a negation of human curiosity, because you can no longer know when you have come across the divine magic of a deceiving god. And the christian god is a deceiving one, according to scripture. The universe appears empty of gods, and beautiful: the beauty is contained in the honesty of discovery. The universe could not be beautiful with gods in it. The universe might have gods in it that are generating the illusion of beauty, and that itself is an ugly idea. I write this as a human with curiosity, that if god-given would be a cruel hoax.

Again you speak about evolution completely disproving mankinds origin – as being at odds with religion. And once again, I have to disagree with your assesment because you cannot know what makes up mankind. Are we only just cells being dictated to by electro chemical signals or are we more than that? How does one prove or disprove that?

You go where the evidence takes you. Where does the evidence take you? Ask a testable question with meaning, and you get modern neuroscience and psychology as your tools. Ask an untestable question and you get a blank expression, and no progress. What does neuroscience say about those qualities of the “soul” you listed earlier? A great deal, nowdays, and increasingly more and more. Does that prove we are only electrochemical? No. Is the absence of evidence evidence of absence? No. Has Occam’s Razor been demonstrated to be the most useful principle of epistemology ever developed? Yes. That is all that anyone should be convinced by. Tales of magical spiritual ethers are identical in usefulness to claims of flying saucers giving off dangerous rays. Meantime, if there is an electrochemical mechanism for conscience and other such characteristics, what is the point in pursuing religious claims that are not based in evidence? Because you cannot possibly allow a world without the concept of an independent soul? Sounds like an impoverished way of dealing with it to me.

Stuart

 

[Stuu]

con’t

But isn’t that the point entirely of faith? Science can only measure what it can measure. Meaning it can take the natural world and attempt to measure that the best it can. Oftentimes the actual measurement changes the outcome or even raises new questions. Is not a lot of science based on assumptions to begin with? Are not a lot of computer models of events based on mankind’s assumptions (even if the with the most recent and relative data as (name removed by moderator)ut) of how things work. Does not this mean that the results are assumptions because they are predicated on an intial assumption – which one presumes but does not know if they have all the data? Maybe they give you macro answers and work as a good intial and workable model but as you fine tune the information the micro answers that leads up to the macroanswer could change ie the mechanism of the macroanswer changes. In any event your assumption would be wrong because the mechanism for the answer was wrong.

No. Any good science will treat the assumptions very carefully and honestly, and do its best to eliminate them. Also, as mentioned above, conclusions about mechanism are always open to new evidence. In fact that is the exact nature of the theory of natural selection at present.

And about having fundamental untestable assumptions … could it be you only have two untestable assumptions because we have yet to figure out how to test the “spiritual assumptions?” You also must take in consideration what these assumptions are. If one of your assumptions is the basis for all that you believe or feel you know, than that assumption becomes very very important.

It is not my problem that your “spiritual” assumptions are not testable. If they become so, then your number of working assumptions will decrease. The consequences of that for your theology might not be very desirable. I think that is why christians rarely make specific testable claims. When mystery dies, gods of the gaps die too.

Here are the two untestable assumptions we share:

1. We exist (after Descartes)
2. What you see is what you get

Here are the extra two you maintain:
3. There is a god
4. It is possible to know what that god wants

Those two sort of cover the assumption you have made here many times, that what you see is not all of what you get. Well I share that in regards to certain things too, where it has been demonstrated that there could be things that you will never see. That in itself is circularly related to assumption 2.

Stuu: But then god must have invented the notion of responsibility also.

Yes. And left it upto you on how to utilize this gift.

The idea of vicarious atonement of wrongdoing through the aegis of a human sacrifice is not my idea of a gift. It looks more like the mockery of a dictator.

Wow. 101 topics, a marathon. If you’ve read all that down this far you deserve a medal!

Stuart