Science must destroy religion

[tonyrey]

Evolution is not sentient, or conscious. It doesn’t have pressures nor is it guided. It is nothing more than the process of random genetic mutation in a population over generations. It’s the same process in all species. If that process can’t account for a moral code of which there is no real survival disadvantage, and is socially acceptable in hyenas, but not in humans, then the reason humans have a different moral code has to fall out side of evolution. Humans would survive just as well as hyena’s if we ate our young and killed our siblings.

Survival value is a hopelessly inadequate explanation of anything rational or worthwhile - which excludes the rational basis and value of the “survival-value-explains-development” hypothesis!

 

[tonyrey]

Really, is this intended to be a joke or just faceatious? You are as well to say that humans would survive just as well as birds if we lived in nests built in treetops. But the obvious fact is that humans are not birds, so the selection pressure on us is not the same as that on birds. So the adaptations which work well for birds would not work well for humans.

In exactly the same way humans are not hyenas so the selection pressure on us is not the same as that on hyenas. So the adaptations which work well for hyenas would not work well for humans. Equally the adaptations that work well for birds would not serve hyenas either, they’d struggle to even build their nests up there, let alone live in them.

Does this really need to be explained?

Are your explanations the product of unreasoning events?

BTW There is no need to go into the details of your presumed explanation - which is a banned topic. A simple “Yes” or “No” will suffice to cast light on the coherence of your views…

 

[Gaber]

I’m surprised no one has brought up sam harris’s latest attack on religion in his paper titled “science must destroy religion”. I’m assuming the reason its not being discussed is that its a banned topic here. If it is does anyone know where Catholics are discussing it? So far i’m seeing it largely unchallenged on the internet and wondering why Catholics are ignoring it.

So what exactly are you equating Mr. Harris “attack” with? An attack on Catholicislm, specifically? Because it is distinctly not that. And btw, proper names and titles are Capitalized, as in “the Pope” and “Mr. Rogers.”

Why is your question about Catholics discussing it, rather than people of faith discussing it?

Why would there not be a sincere discussion, after such an article, based on Why and How We Believe as belief being a container distinct from arguing about different and contentuous points of faith as contents?

Mr. Harris emphatically states “The difference between science and religion is the difference between a willingness to dispassionately consider new evidence and new arguments, and a passionate unwillingness to do so. The distinction could not be more obvious, or more consequential, and yet it is everywhere elided, even in the ivory tower.” Is this not an accurate description of what happens? You as a faither, and all in that category do this, as is evident even on these pages, as do those in other venues and of other faiths with equal vehemence and conviction. And yet the only actual commonality between them all is a) the fact of conscious awareness that is usually not nearly consciious, and b) the world that science describes. The “origin” of that worlds, as Mr. Harris correctly notes, is in great contention according to various symbolic speculations of dieverse parochial origins, some of which made it big, ussually by political means and force of arms. Look at the history of our own Church, if that doesn’t seem right. Or are you reading one of the internal self verifying and sanitized versions of how we got to be here?

Mr. Harris also says, significantly and in a way that pulls the rug out from his article being against Catholics, I would say, that “The distinction between science and religion is not a matter of excluding our ethical intuitions and non-ordinary states of consciousness from our conversation about the world; it is a matter of our being rigorous about what is reasonable to conclude on their basis.” (my bold) Indeed, from my perspective, the only valid way of having a relatinoship with what religionists call God is by means of coontemplation, whatever it might be called in any particualr faith, and therefore of an altered/altared state. Even in our faith we say that prayer is a “lifiting up of the heart and mind to God.”

Short of an actual palpable transformative result from such an expereince, we have faith, and that amounts to book learning as distinct from experiience, or in other words, speculation as distinct from knowledge. In this case, Knowledge. It is arguable and seen upon sincere examination that commonality in “spiritual” life is in the realm of the mystical, not in the vast numbers of the masses. I find only agreement among the Saints and Sages of the Ages in exactly the place where there is contention, argument, and war among the faithful. And further, what I find very fascinating, is that the model of Reality proponed by the ones I am refering to is, like science, exceptionally consitent and arrived at indep[endently in way far more than chance proportions by pwople not in traditons or teachings.

If we take seriously the idea that Man is made in the image and likeness of God, that ought not to be a surprise: the map and model are not only at hand, but constitute the substance of the seeker himself. A that would make every single individual a potential Sage on the basis of a Universal condition as differetiated from a parochially attempted discription based on local conditions and needs that is distributed over the set of not only the world, but the Universe and God Himself.

And given the ordinary low state of mystical understanding and experience, never mind a critical and accurate exegesis of a highe-end contempaltive insight, we have what is called “anthropomorphism.” And that very act of making the God in one;s own image and likeness, needing to conform to the local ways of a Pater Familias, proves, if anything, the infantile state of most religious understanding. Even the highest and clearest of Catholic exegesis of mysitcism moves in the direction of an impersonal God, all the other trappings of that being a necessity of popularization and education. And from that standpoint it can be seen how even the Teachings of Our Lord fit clearly inot the form of non dualim.

And that needs to be the actual relationship of what actually constiutes and inner life and science, the description of what it looks like from “outside,” or surfaces. Both are necessary. Without science, most of the faithers on tha planet, including me, would be dead by one agency or another.

What Mr. Harris does not do is go far enough: his idea ought as well be extended to politics and any other veleif system publiclly impacting the chances of survival of our Race. So we kind of have a question to answer here: Do we wish to proceed as the sons of men and inherit contention, argument, ire, parochilaism, and the convenience of our personal constructions regarding Deity, or do we wish to be actual functional Sons of God in an elevation of heart and mind to what is *Before the formulation of the Ineffable into legalisms, rules, and catechesis?

So as emotionally striking as Mr. Harris’ article might be to some, due to eisegesis, and as incorrectly it might be taken as an attack on Catholicism, which it is not, that piece ought well be excavated for functional and useful peace making tools along with the panoply of other such that are readily available and studiously ignored. Even those in the Bible.

So it is important to note here, that the kind of expereince which you had and put forth as evidence, Cranster, and which I have had as well, is not what Mr.Harris is militatiting against. What he is for, as I am for, is a critical understanding of what exactly it was that happened as a Universally possible experiencebefore it was run through the filter of one’s particualr faith. Yours, or anyone’s. So it is not a questioning of the genuineness of it. Or the transnormal nature of it, or the part of it that points to what is inevitably so much bigger than human comprehension can measure. It is about how and why we adapt such magnificence into a much smaller container tthan it deserves and privatize it from what is, in fact, a far more common experience in any faith or lack of it than we might at first glance imagine. Remember Paul of Tarsus.

 

[cranster]

Really, is this intended to be a joke or just faceatious? You are as well to say that humans would survive just as well as birds if we lived in nests built in treetops. But the obvious fact is that humans are not birds, so the selection pressure on us is not the same as that on birds. So the adaptations which work well for birds would not work well for humans.

In exactly the same way humans are not hyenas so the selection pressure on us is not the same as that on hyenas. So the adaptations which work well for hyenas would not work well for humans. Equally the adaptations that work well for birds would not serve hyenas either, they’d struggle to even build their nests up there, let alone live in them.

Does this really need to be explained?

I’m not talking about physical adaptation, I am illustrating a point about moral and social adaptation. We are all just directionless bags of atoms as far as evolution is concerned. We don’t need a highly evolved moral code for survival. No more so than any other species. All other mammals have successful social structures where all kinds of bad behavior is tolerated that is not tolerated by humans. There is no reason for it to be different with us than any other species. If there is a reason for humans to have such an extraordinarily disproportionately higher moral standard in comparison to other mammals then why?

 

[cranster]

So what exactly are you equating Mr. Harris “attack” with? An attack on Catholicislm, specifically? Because it is distinctly not that. And btw, proper names and titles are Capitalized, as in “the Pope” and “Mr. Rogers.”

Why is your question about Catholics discussing it, rather than people of faith discussing it?

Why would there not be a sincere discussion, after such an article, based on Why and How We Believe as belief being a container distinct from arguing about different and contentuous points of faith as contents?

Mr. Harris emphatically states “The difference between science and religion is the difference between a willingness to dispassionately consider new evidence and new arguments, and a passionate unwillingness to do so. The distinction could not be more obvious, or more consequential, and yet it is everywhere elided, even in the ivory tower.” Is this not an accurate description of what happens? You as a faither, and all in that category do this, as is evident even on these pages, as do those in other venues and of other faiths with equal vehemence and conviction. And yet the only actual commonality between them all is a) the fact of conscious awareness that is usually not nearly consciious, and b) the world that science describes. The “origin” of that worlds, as Mr. Harris correctly notes, is in great contention according to various symbolic speculations of dieverse parochial origins, some of which made it big, ussually by political means and force of arms. Look at the history of our own Church, if that doesn’t seem right. Or are you reading one of the internal self verifying and sanitized versions of how we got to be here?

Mr. Harris also says, significantly and in a way that pulls the rug out from his article being against Catholics, I would say, that “The distinction between science and religion is not a matter of excluding our ethical intuitions and non-ordinary states of consciousness from our conversation about the world; it is a matter of our being rigorous about what is reasonable to conclude on their basis.” (my bold) Indeed, from my perspective, the only valid way of having a relatinoship with what religionists call God is by means of coontemplation, whatever it might be called in any particualr faith, and therefore of an altered/altared state. Even in our faith we say that prayer is a “lifiting up of the heart and mind to God.”

Short of an actual palpable transformative result from such an expereince, we have faith, and that amounts to book learning as distinct from experiience, or in other words, speculation as distinct from knowledge. In this case, Knowledge. It is arguable and seen upon sincere examination that commonality in “spiritual” life is in the realm of the mystical, not in the vast numbers of the masses. I find only agreement among the Saints and Sages of the Ages in exactly the place where there is contention, argument, and war among the faithful. And further, what I find very fascinating, is that the model of Reality proponed by the ones I am refering to is, like science, exceptionally consitent and arrived at indep[endently in way far more than chance proportions by pwople not in traditons or teachings.

If we take seriously the idea that Man is made in the image and likeness of God, that ought not to be a surprise: the map and model are not only at hand, but constitute the substance of the seeker himself. A that would make every single individual a potential Sage on the basis of a Universal condition as differetiated from a parochially attempted discription based on local conditions and needs that is distributed over the set of not only the world, but the Universe and God Himself.

And given the ordinary low state of mystical understanding and experience, never mind a critical and accurate exegesis of a highe-end contempaltive insight, we have what is called “anthropomorphism.” And that very act of making the God in one;s own image and likeness, needing to conform to the local ways of a Pater Familias, proves, if anything, the infantile state of most religious understanding. Even the highest and clearest of Catholic exegesis of mysitcism moves in the direction of an impersonal God, all the other trappings of that being a necessity of popularization and education. And from that standpoint it can be seen how even the Teachings of Our Lord fit clearly inot the form of non dualim.

And that needs to be the actual relationship of what actually constiutes and inner life and science, the description of what it looks like from “outside,” or surfaces. Both are necessary. Without science, most of the faithers on tha planet, including me, would be dead by one agency or another.

What Mr. Harris does not do is go far enough: his idea ought as well be extended to politics and any other veleif system publiclly impacting the chances of survival of our Race. So we kind of have a question to answer here: Do we wish to proceed as the sons of men and inherit contention, argument, ire, parochilaism, and the convenience of our personal constructions regarding Deity, or do we wish to be actual functional Sons of God in an elevation of heart and mind to what is *Before

the formulation of the Ineffable into legalisms, rules, and catechesis?

So as emotionally striking as Mr. Harris’ article might be to some, due to eisegesis, and as incorrectly it might be taken as an attack on Catholicism, which it is not, that piece ought well be excavated for functional and useful peace making tools along with the panoply of other such that are readily available and studiously ignored. Even those in the Bible.

So it is important to note here, that the kind of expereince which you had and put forth as evidence, Cranster, and which I have had as well, is not what Mr.Harris is militatiting against. What he is for, as I am for, is a critical understanding of what exactly it was that happened as a Universally possible experiencebefore it was run through the filter of one’s particualr faith. Yours, or anyone’s. So it is not a questioning of the genuineness of it. Or the transnormal nature of it, or the part of it that points to what is inevitably so much bigger than human comprehension can measure. It is about how and why we adapt such magnificence into a much smaller container tthan it deserves and privatize it from what is, in fact, a far more common experience in any faith or lack of it than we might at first glance imagine. Remember Paul of Tarsus.

Um… I asked why Catholics weren’t discussing it because it’s a Catholic forum, and thanks for the spelling tip.

 

[Candide_West]

I’m not talking about physical adaptation, I am illustrating a point about moral and social adaptation.

I know, and moral and social adaptation are both varieties of behavioural adaptation. Just like building nests is a behavioural adaptation. That’s why I picked nest building as an example.

We are all just directionless bags of atoms as far as evolution is concerned.

Incorrect, evolution says nothing of the kind, and I think you know that full well.

We don’t need a highly evolved moral code for survival. No more so than any other species.

Incorrect. We are a very highly social species so we inescapably need a highly evolved social and moral code in order for our groups to function successfully.

All other mammals have successful social structures where all kinds of bad behavior is tolerated that is not tolerated by humans. There is no reason for it to be different with us than any other species. If there is a reason for humans to have such an extraordinarily disproportionately higher moral standard in comparison to other mammals then why?

Incorrect, humans have evolved in social groups which are much more dependent on co-operation than any other species. Our dependence on each other lead inevitably to much more complex social interactions than happen in most species and accordingly our rules for social behaviour and morality in general are also much more complex.

 

[Gaber]

Um… I asked why Catholics weren’t discussing it because it’s a Catholic forum, and thanks for the spelling tip.

Yes, I understand that. I’m here too. but the more fundamental quesiton remains as a contextual issue. It is similar to those emotionalized questions on the cover of Cosmo that makes more universal issues appear to be the sole concern oaf the very small subset of their readership. Asking for a “Catholic” response or discussion of it makes the issue much smaller than it actually is, even in the context of our fora. as it tends in your terms, to keep it relative to our particualr faith, whereas in the context of the article you construe as an attack, it is presented as an issue about faith as such, not ours in particular. So any useful crioticism needs to be on the foundatinal idea of the piece, not how it might appear to apply soley to our little green acre.

 

[wheels10]

Please see above. I don’t believe God exists, and see no credible basis for thinking he does. But it’s not a proposition that can be ruled out with certainty, and regardless of that, many Christians obviously believe in earnest that God does, in fact, exist, even if they are stumped to tell me what “exists” actually means in that context. For the purposes of conversation, it has to be stipulated, provisionally, that God exists. And it’s a logical possibility, even if an untenable one in light of the available evidence.

So, no, I don’t believe God exists. But assuming for the sake of argument that he does, he would be an evil tyrant of the most execrable kind.

I think so, especially if that God also commanded that some of those people be stoned to death (for…, uh, non-virginal marriage, cf Deut 22). Or command the genocide of a whole ethnic group the next valley over (cf. the slaughter of the Midianites). In light of such actions, such a command just compounds the evil of God, yes.

Yes, and I’m always surprised at the superficial thinking that persists on this. Let’s grant that God “troubled the waters” in some cases and healed epilepsy, or a sore back, or in the case of the woman who touched Jesus’ coat, repaired her bleeding problem.

That’s great, no? Well, no. This is a cruel taunt for all the other millions of people who suffer from all that, and worse, people who are just as willing to prostitute their minds and believe “God can heal meal”, in the just the slim hope it might be true.

A 5 year old boy who is a son of a colleague where I work just died this past March of a brain tumor. A cruel, painful, terrible and slow death, with parents as committed and faithful and hopeful for a miracle from God that I’ve ever seen. And yet, God, in his evil genius ways, deigned it right and well that the girl Padre Pio healed miraculous had her vision restored. This monster of a god can see fit to work a “miracle at Fatima”, but this young, innocent boy is ravaged and ruined before he is extinguished by cancer.

Christians, and many Catholics among them, are quite ready to tell me of their petty, pathetic “miracles” that bring them closer to God. I have to much desire to not admit the depths of God’s evilness to believe them, because if they are right, YHWH is way more of a cruel demon than I can bear to contemplate. Frivolously wasting his supernatural interventions while so many innocent, desperate and deserving people go unhelped, alone, unanswered, forsaken by this “God of Love”.

There is really no stronger indictment of God than the miracles that are assigned to him. Far better for salvaging the acceptability of God for Christians to deny that any of the reported miracles really were miracles, and have those reflect God’s actual priorities in this world. It’s too awful to contemplate. Such a God could only be condemned, and vehemently, if the reports are true.

And God himself spectacular fails this noble picture. God IS jealous, he DOES boast, he IS proud. Rude, self-serving, easily angered, and he never forgets. All humans are stained with the defect of Adam’s Original Sin, because God is perfect and ruthless in keeping a record of our wrongs. This passage condemns YHWH from start to finish, and the Christian God cannot begin to compete with even mediocre humans on the ideals Paul is advancing here. And God is supposed to be perfect!

-TS

Suffering and evil exists in this world because of the choices that man has made. You condemn God because He allows suffering and evil to exist in this world. Do you also condemn God for allowing Love and joy to exist in this world?

Each person is given the choice to Love people or to hate people, to choose Good or to choose evil. Is it more difficult to Love during times of suffering? Yes, but at least in our current state and in this world, it is during the times of suffering that one knows whether they have True Love or not.

Can you Love your neighbor during times of suffering? Can you Love your enemy during times of suffering? Do you value Love (as defined in Corinthians 13) at all?

 

[Touchstone]

It’s subnatural sorcery to derive insight from blind particles.

Tony, this is projecting your hangups on to me. There’s no sorcery posited anywhere in the chain, here. It’s a hypothesis that is completely devoid of sorcery or anything like it.

Matter explaining itself is the maniac’s fantasy. Mechanical machinery can produce nothing but mechanical machinery which doesn’t even know it exists, let alone understand itself. There is no such thing as “a view” in the materialist’s scheme of things. It’s just an isomorphism of inanimate objects which just happen to exist for no reason or purpose whatsoever.

How do you know this, Tony? If you were, as atheists believe, “the universe experiencing itself”, how would you disprove that idea? With your intuition? I can’t help but think that’s all you’ve got on that side of the ledger. If so, well, I don’t need to go any further.

According to TS, worship is restricted to impersonal “nature”, whatever that may be (given that it has never been clearly defined so that it can cater for any unexplained phenomena).

No, I’m saying worship is not a part of the picture here, at all. Nature it what it is. It’s impersonal, and there’s no basis for worship. You get to this view, in part by understanding problematic nature of worship, and its inapplicability, here.

The only type of aspiration in your weltanschaung is that of a vacuum cleaner! You keep forgetting hope, love, beauty, art, humor, joy, and all the rest are no more than permutations of submicroscopic phenomena moving around in space.

I don’t forget that, which is why I understand that a human is not a vacuum cleaner. A vacuum cleaner does not have these features, right? Right? If love, hope, beauty, etc. are real, and on my view they are, they realized, reified as configurations of matter. That’s what makes them real. That isn’t “mere” or “just” in some deprecating way, and neither is it magic. It’s just the what anything real obtains as real. Which is more than I could say about my understanding of these things as a Christian, which held them as unreal fantasies, immaterial “things” – a cognitive dissonance right there – that had all the features of non-existence, but I believed in as a kind of magic, a supernatural fantasy.

The mysterious transmutation of matter into mind is an article of faith constantly overlooked in your process of “reasoning” - which should be restricted - if you are consistent - to strictly quantitative descriptions of material events.

We have evidence of matter’s existence. That doesn’t take faith. We observe nature and the way matter and energy are configured, changed, preserved, etc. over time. Based on what evidence we have, mind as matter has a huge advantage over any other hypothesis in terms of evidence, falsifiability, and economy. It takes no more faith than a computer would have analyzing the situation according to the rules we give it (“Prefer evidential support, falsifiability, economy”). Again, you are projecting your own hangups onto a view that doesn’t have them.

Unfortunately “ideals”, “values”, “superstitions”, “view”, “wonderful”, “terrible” and “glory” are meaningless terms from a scientific point of view - which is after all the only isomorphism (to which the isomorphism described as Touchstone is linked…)

No, these are all real, natural phenomena. Concepts and emotions humans develop and experience in their minds, naturally. There’s nothing about them that puts them out of the reach of science, or renders them meaningless. They are meaningful because they are really, actual phenomena that govern human actions and interactions.

The foregoing is no more than a meaningless collocation of scientifically unrecognisable terms and therefore of absolutely no significance…

“constructs”! The physicalist Q.V.Quine pointed out that material objects and gods are in precisely the same epistemological category. It is worth reading “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” (online) to understand (hopefully) that your entire concept of reality is vitiated by your blind adherence to a logically untenable mechanistic doctrine falsified by every rational (?) statement you utter and the occupational hazard of those whose lives are immersed in the unreal world of computer systems (the nightmarish apogee of a dystopian, inhuman elimination of persons by an amoral scaffold erected to satisfy your desire to justify your own notions of what you are entitled to believe and how to live - thereby unwittingly depriving yourself of any power to choose what to believe or how to live if you take your determinism to its logical conclusion… but then logic is unimportant, isn’t it?

I’m quite familiar with Quine, if you mean W.V.O. Quine. I do not know of any Q.V. Quine, physicalist or no. That would be a discussion for another thread, but Quine’s argument that all belief frameworks are ultimately pragmatic, and cannot be cleanly and fully separated into synthetic and analytic camps I agree with, largely, and materialism has no problem with that, so far as I’m aware. My materialism is not dogmatic, but thoroughly pragmatic in a way Quine would understand, and to a large extent, shared. It isn’t that “something beyond” cannot or doesn’t exist, by dogma or necessity. That kind of thinking is problematic in and of itself. Rather we have no practical basis to think anything “beyond” obtains.

-TS

 

[wheels10]

And it being considered immoral appears to be relatively recent as well. For example the ancient egyptians seemed to have no issue with doing it 3500 years ago, and the chinese 5000 years ago.

No, the fact that the foetus has no nervous system and is thus unable to feel pain is what means that there is no pain.

There I must disagree with you, even if I accepted that abortion is a form of murder, then i would still judge that it is worse to torture a person to death than to simply kill a person painlessly. Would you really argue that a doctor performing an abortion is morally worse than a serial killer who hunts down, tortures and kills children?

If so then I think we must agree to differ and suggest we drop the topic as we are very far from the subject of this thread.

When you can create a human being out of nothing, then you can tell me that an unborn child feels no pain.

I still say that abortion is the most cruel and evil form of murder for the reasons stated earlier.

I agree that we disagree on this topic.

 

[wheels10]

The concept of evil has evolved. Christopher Hitchens considered Mother Theresa to be one of the most evil people of the 20th century.

He also said it should be child abuse for a parent to teach their children that abortion is immoral.

Where did he get his moral code? from Hitler

This is Truly sad.

 

[ReapReason]

I’m surprised no one has brought up sam harris’s

I’m surprised Sam Harris doesn’t have a rational understanding of the true goal of Science and what its epistemological limitations are; otherwise he would never have used that title.

Its very Sad and Embarrassing, and it is anything but scientific.

 

[cranster]

Yes, I understand that. I’m here too. but the more fundamental quesiton remains as a contextual issue. It is similar to those emotionalized questions on the cover of Cosmo that makes more universal issues appear to be the sole concern oaf the very small subset of their readership. Asking for a “Catholic” response or discussion of it makes the issue much smaller than it actually is, even in the context of our fora. as it tends in your terms, to keep it relative to our particualr faith, whereas in the context of the article you construe as an attack, it is presented as an issue about faith as such, not ours in particular. So any useful crioticism needs to be on the foundatinal idea of the piece, not how it might appear to apply soley to our little green acre.

let me rephrase, all are welcome to the discussion, believers and non believers alike. I guess I wasn’t paying attention to this corner of the world, and just recently became aware that atheists had started displaying such antipathy towards God. I agree that it is a huge issue. It doesn’t just involve Catholics, it involves all religion.

 

[Touchstone]

Suffering and evil exists in this world because of the choices that man has made. You condemn God because He allows suffering and evil to exist in this world. Do you also condemn God for allowing Love and joy to exist in this world?

I don’t think allowing suffering in all cases is a problem. Gratuitous suffering is certainly a problem, and gratuitous suffering abounds, if we understand God to be all powerful.

As for love and joy, they only serve as background to emphasize God’s cruelty and apathy toward those who do suffer, and suffer gratuitously. Aunt Martha is rejoicing and the family is overcome with joy because God in his infinite goodness and mercy has decided to miraculously heal Aunt Martha’s goiter. It just miraculous disappeared after prayer and laying on of hands last Tuesday night. That is a genuine joy, no doubt, for Aunt Martha and her family, and I can’t fault them for being happy. God is the creep here, (granting for the moment Christian notions of the reality of God’s miracles) for choosing to heal Aunt Martha’s goiter while letting 5 year old Timothy die slowly, agonizingly over the course of year because of a tumor slowly eating his brain.

If you are the boss, and you control how everything is, you are responsible for how things turn out. The buck stops with God, full stop. And in light of that, if we understand God to be the creator, designer and supervisor of all creation, he’s one vicious and cruel demon.

Far better if we understood God in some deistic sense. Then, because God is “hands off”, and doesn’t choose to help and Martha, and necessarily by absence of help, does not help Timothy, DeistGod is not such a capricious and cruel jerk. But any Christian who believes God does work miracles in the world must then assign responsibility for those choices to God: God decides whom he will favor and whom he will not.

In light of this, even joy and love become the instruments of cruelty and oppression for the masses God does not favor by his caprice.

Each person is given the choice to Love people or to hate people, to choose Good or to choose evil. Is it more difficult to Love during times of suffering? Yes, but at least in our current state and in this world, it is during the times of suffering that one knows whether they have True Love or not.

Yes. But this is all the more profound when looking at the Christian God. Will we choose to love, to empathize, to share, and to build, to participate in the brotherhood of man, or will we choose to capitulate to the demands of a totalitarian God? Are you brave enough to risk eternal torment and suffering to love in the face of an evil YHWH? This will be a severe test of your mind and character. Will you capitulate to the sheer might of YHWH and agree to whatever he says? Will you proclaim your love for all men while you pray in a church that teaches that homosexuality is sinful? That is to betray love, and be in league with evil.

Can you Love your neighbor during times of suffering? Can you Love your enemy during times of suffering? Do you value Love (as defined in Corinthians 13) at all?

Yes, enough that I’ve realized the clash between human, noble love and subservience to YHWH (assuming, as always, for the sake of discussion, that YHWH does in fact exist, which I do not believe he does.

I love Timothy enough that I understand and curse God’s cruelty in refusing to aid and heal him, even as he found it in his good pleasure to heal Aunt Martha’s goiter, or the girl Padre Pio helped (via this capricious and cruel God) with her sight, miraculously. If you cannot curse God for such a choice, I suggest you do not have love for man, you do not have love. You simply have cowardly subservience to a tyrant. Anti-love. It’s not love to spread joy and happiness around the world as God does. It’s less of a problem for a God who is not involved at all, who doesn’t heal the leper, or Padre Pio’s patient.

But that’s what the Catholic Church believes, so God is implicated. Guilty. Evil in the dispensation of his charity. The joys and love he shows through his miracles only serve to rub salt in the cosmic wounds of the masses he chooses not to favor, masses who are more deserving, more desparate, more noble than God’s favored.

-TS

 

[cranster]

I’m surprised Sam Harris doesn’t have a rational understanding of the true goal of Science and what its epistemological limitations are; otherwise he would never have used that title.

Its very Sad and Embarrassing, and it is anything but scientific.

When I first saw the title, “Science must destroy religion” I thought maybe Sam Harris had given Stephen Hawking an ak 47.

 

[wheels10]

I don’t think allowing suffering in all cases is a problem. Gratuitous suffering is certainly a problem, and gratuitous suffering abounds, if we understand God to be all powerful.

As for love and joy, they only serve as background to emphasize God’s cruelty and apathy toward those who do suffer, and suffer gratuitously. Aunt Martha is rejoicing and the family is overcome with joy because God in his infinite goodness and mercy has decided to miraculously heal Aunt Martha’s goiter. It just miraculous disappeared after prayer and laying on of hands last Tuesday night. That is a genuine joy, no doubt, for Aunt Martha and her family, and I can’t fault them for being happy. God is the creep here, (granting for the moment Christian notions of the reality of God’s miracles) for choosing to heal Aunt Martha’s goiter while letting 5 year old Timothy die slowly, agonizingly over the course of year because of a tumor slowly eating his brain.

If you are the boss, and you control how everything is, you are responsible for how things turn out. The buck stops with God, full stop. And in light of that, if we understand God to be the creator, designer and supervisor of all creation, he’s one vicious and cruel demon.

Far better if we understood God in some deistic sense. Then, because God is “hands off”, and doesn’t choose to help and Martha, and necessarily by absence of help, does not help Timothy, DeistGod is not such a capricious and cruel jerk. But any Christian who believes God does work miracles in the world must then assign responsibility for those choices to God: God decides whom he will favor and whom he will not.

In light of this, even joy and love become the instruments of cruelty and oppression for the masses God does not favor by his caprice.

Yes. But this is all the more profound when looking at the Christian God. Will we choose to love, to empathize, to share, and to build, to participate in the brotherhood of man, or will we choose to capitulate to the demands of a totalitarian God? Are you brave enough to risk eternal torment and suffering to love in the face of an evil YHWH? This will be a severe test of your mind and character. Will you capitulate to the sheer might of YHWH and agree to whatever he says? Will you proclaim your love for all men while you pray in a church that teaches that homosexuality is sinful? That is to betray love, and be in league with evil.

Yes, enough that I’ve realized the clash between human, noble love and subservience to YHWH (assuming, as always, for the sake of discussion, that YHWH does in fact exist, which I do not believe he does.

I love Timothy enough that I understand and curse God’s cruelty in refusing to aid and heal him, even as he found it in his good pleasure to heal Aunt Martha’s goiter, or the girl Padre Pio helped (via this capricious and cruel God) with her sight, miraculously. If you cannot curse God for such a choice, I suggest you do not have love for man, you do not have love. You simply have cowardly subservience to a tyrant. Anti-love. It’s not love to spread joy and happiness around the world as God does. It’s less of a problem for a God who is not involved at all, who doesn’t heal the leper, or Padre Pio’s patient.

But that’s what the Catholic Church believes, so God is implicated. Guilty. Evil in the dispensation of his charity. The joys and love he shows through his miracles only serve to rub salt in the cosmic wounds of the masses he chooses not to favor, masses who are more deserving, more desparate, more noble than God’s favored.

-TS

God values the health of a person’s soul much more than a person’s physical health. God is concerned much more about how a person will live their life for all eternity vs. the short life they live on this earth.

If God chooses to heal a person’s physical health, it is because this healing is what is best for the person’s soul and for the souls that come into contact with this healed person. If God chooses not to heal a person’s physical health, it is because this person’s sickness is what is best for the person’s soul and for the souls that come into contact with this sick person.

Almost everything in this world belongs to God. Our family, friends, our worldly possessions, even our very own bodies belong to God. He can rightly call these back at any time. If you don’t think this is True then please create any of the things that I have mentioned out of nothing. You can’t. But God can and does all the time.

The only thing that is Truly our very own is our decision to do Good or evil. So why does God allow us this freedom to choose Good over evil? Because without it we would not be able to Love (as defined in Corinthians 13), which is the greatest Good.

 

[ivebeenshown]

…God is implicated. Guilty. Evil in the dispensation of his charity.

Why exactly would an all-good and all-powerful God be morally obligated to immediately end (or altogether prevent) every suffering that befalls mankind, excluding those sufferings which are deserved for personal transgressions?

 

[Touchstone]

Why exactly would an all-good and all-powerful God be morally obligated to immediately end (or altogether prevent) every suffering that befalls mankind, excluding those sufferings which are deserved for personal transgressions?

He’s not so obligated, nor have I said he would be. I mentioned the opposite, in fact, better if God did no miracles at all, as that’s at least not to pour salt in the wounds of the suffering who do get passed over by God when he does act capriciously in restoring the sight of Padre Pio’s young patient, miraculously, for example.

If you ran a social experiment, and chose 20 out of 100 people to be afflicted with some terrible, but treatable disease that you have the cure for, you aren’t a “loving God”, if you pick 4 of the afflicted 20, and randomly reward them with the curing treatment.

The “random 4” are happy, of course, but only in a selfish sense (applying that to Padre Pio in real life, he should have been appalled at a God that would act so capriciously in restoring the girl’s sight). Their treatment is just an extra measure of cruelty to the 16 remaining afflicted. Through no fault of their own, for no reason at all, they’ve been denied available treatment. It’s not just tragic enough that they’ve come down with the condition. They are now conspicuously the subjects of cruel caprice in the withholding of treatment.

This does not demand that the only better solution is treating everyone (although that strikes me as the loving and good thing to do, given all the available options, and given that we’ve already either permitted the disease to take hold or introduced it directly as part of our experiment).

-TS

 

[Candide_West]

Are your explanations the product of unreasoning events?

Well that depends what you mean by “unreasoning events” if you mean “real physical interactions which occurred in my brain” then the answer is yes. Incidentally a common name for these interactions is “thoughts”.*

If you mean something else by the term “unreasoning events” then you’ll have to enlighten me what you mean before I can respond.

BTW There is no need to go into the details of your presumed explanation - which is a banned topic. A simple “Yes” or “No” will suffice to cast light on the coherence of your views…

Well unfortunately your question is far too vague (due to using imprecise terminology) for a straightforward yes or no. So I’ve done the best I can. Let me know if you need any further assistance.

 

[edwest2]

So what exactly are you equating Mr. Harris “attack” with? An attack on Catholicislm, specifically? Because it is distinctly not that. And btw, proper names and titles are Capitalized, as in “the Pope” and “Mr. Rogers.”

Why is your question about Catholics discussing it, rather than people of faith discussing it?

Why would there not be a sincere discussion, after such an article, based on Why and How We Believe as belief being a container distinct from arguing about different and contentuous points of faith as contents?

Mr. Harris emphatically states “The difference between science and religion is the difference between a willingness to dispassionately consider new evidence and new arguments, and a passionate unwillingness to do so. The distinction could not be more obvious, or more consequential, and yet it is everywhere elided, even in the ivory tower.” Is this not an accurate description of what happens? You as a faither, and all in that category do this, as is evident even on these pages, as do those in other venues and of other faiths with equal vehemence and conviction. And yet the only actual commonality between them all is a) the fact of conscious awareness that is usually not nearly consciious, and b) the world that science describes. The “origin” of that worlds, as Mr. Harris correctly notes, is in great contention according to various symbolic speculations of dieverse parochial origins, some of which made it big, ussually by political means and force of arms. Look at the history of our own Church, if that doesn’t seem right. Or are you reading one of the internal self verifying and sanitized versions of how we got to be here?

Mr. Harris also says, significantly and in a way that pulls the rug out from his article being against Catholics, I would say, that “The distinction between science and religion is not a matter of excluding our ethical intuitions and non-ordinary states of consciousness from our conversation about the world; it is a matter of our being rigorous about what is reasonable to conclude on their basis.” (my bold) Indeed, from my perspective, the only valid way of having a relatinoship with what religionists call God is by means of coontemplation, whatever it might be called in any particualr faith, and therefore of an altered/altared state. Even in our faith we say that prayer is a “lifiting up of the heart and mind to God.”

Short of an actual palpable transformative result from such an expereince, we have faith, and that amounts to book learning as distinct from experiience, or in other words, speculation as distinct from knowledge. In this case, Knowledge. It is arguable and seen upon sincere examination that commonality in “spiritual” life is in the realm of the mystical, not in the vast numbers of the masses. I find only agreement among the Saints and Sages of the Ages in exactly the place where there is contention, argument, and war among the faithful. And further, what I find very fascinating, is that the model of Reality proponed by the ones I am refering to is, like science, exceptionally consitent and arrived at indep[endently in way far more than chance proportions by pwople not in traditons or teachings.

If we take seriously the idea that Man is made in the image and likeness of God, that ought not to be a surprise: the map and model are not only at hand, but constitute the substance of the seeker himself. A that would make every single individual a potential Sage on the basis of a Universal condition as differetiated from a parochially attempted discription based on local conditions and needs that is distributed over the set of not only the world, but the Universe and God Himself.

And given the ordinary low state of mystical understanding and experience, never mind a critical and accurate exegesis of a highe-end contempaltive insight, we have what is called “anthropomorphism.” And that very act of making the God in one;s own image and likeness, needing to conform to the local ways of a Pater Familias, proves, if anything, the infantile state of most religious understanding. Even the highest and clearest of Catholic exegesis of mysitcism moves in the direction of an impersonal God, all the other trappings of that being a necessity of popularization and education. And from that standpoint it can be seen how even the Teachings of Our Lord fit clearly inot the form of non dualim.

And that needs to be the actual relationship of what actually constiutes and inner life and science, the description of what it looks like from “outside,” or surfaces. Both are necessary. Without science, most of the faithers on tha planet, including me, would be dead by one agency or another.

What Mr. Harris does not do is go far enough: his idea ought as well be extended to politics and any other veleif system publiclly impacting the chances of survival of our Race. So we kind of have a question to answer here: Do we wish to proceed as the sons of men and inherit contention, argument, ire, parochilaism, and the convenience of our personal constructions regarding Deity, or do we wish to be actual functional Sons of God in an elevation of heart and mind to what is *Before

the formulation of the Ineffable into legalisms, rules, and catechesis?

So as emotionally striking as Mr. Harris’ article might be to some, due to eisegesis, and as incorrectly it might be taken as an attack on Catholicism, which it is not, that piece ought well be excavated for functional and useful peace making tools along with the panoply of other such that are readily available and studiously ignored. Even those in the Bible.

So it is important to note here, that the kind of expereince which you had and put forth as evidence, Cranster, and which I have had as well, is not what Mr.Harris is militatiting against. What he is for, as I am for, is a critical understanding of what exactly it was that happened as a Universally possible experiencebefore it was run through the filter of one’s particualr faith. Yours, or anyone’s. So it is not a questioning of the genuineness of it. Or the transnormal nature of it, or the part of it that points to what is inevitably so much bigger than human comprehension can measure. It is about how and why we adapt such magnificence into a much smaller container tthan it deserves and privatize it from what is, in fact, a far more common experience in any faith or lack of it than we might at first glance imagine. Remember Paul of Tarsus.

It’s quite clear from his other writings that Mr. Harris hates religion and Christianity in particular. When one is given the truth and has the ability to understand it, the fact is, some people will reject it. Filter or no filter. Long before “modern science,” men thought and believed that there is no God.

I have sensed, especially in recent years, a desire for some type of ‘other,’ totally pure and neutral experience that comes from nowhere. I heard it from the Hippies in the late 1960s. They would tear down everything and give us a Woodstock Nation. All we got was porn and hedonism.

The truth of Jesus Christ is available to all. It is not private and job one for the Catholic Church is to preach the Gospel to all nations and baptize them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.

Lengthy, eloquent statements and an evangelization of a vague, “one size fits all” religion have been tried before. Nothing’s going to change.

Peace,
Ed