God Creation

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canpakes
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Re: God Creation

Post by canpakes »

Hawkeye wrote:
Wed Aug 03, 2022 7:17 pm
canpakes wrote:
Wed Aug 03, 2022 7:12 pm
ajax, given that you’ve been asking some interesting questions for others, here’s another for you:

If tomorrow you were to discover - without doubt - that God (however defined by you) did not exist, what would change about your interactions with others?
It's hard to say with so much inertia. But everything would change for me. If you think I'm bad now, you wouldn't want to be around me as a nonbeliever.
canpakes wrote:
Wed Aug 03, 2022 7:28 pm
Is this to say that your behaviors now are more predicated on meeting some requirements for a heavenly reward after death?
I want to add to this.

You say, “If you think I'm bad now, you wouldn't want to be around me as a nonbeliever.”

But there are some behaviors that you’re arguably committing to now - even if you could ditch them later - because you perceive there’d be a reward in the afterlife, based on God existing.

Since we are considering a scenario in which you’d have then discovered that there’s no God, then you would have made your choices up to that point without a God-provided morality to have guided you. In other words, you figured out that moral code. Not God.

Would that realization affect your response above?
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Jersey Girl
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Re: God Creation

Post by Jersey Girl »

cp I found the Enlows. :shock: I'm SO sorry!

I'll be back...
We only get stronger when we are lifting something that is heavier than what we are used to. ~ KF

Slava Ukraini!
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canpakes
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Re: God Creation

Post by canpakes »

Hawkeye wrote:
Wed Aug 03, 2022 7:59 pm
… what if you're born with the DNA of a psychopath or a cleptomaniac? What would motivate you to go through the difficulties of trying to change that?
I don’t know that anything would, for folks with mental illness. For others not so far along that behavioral curve, there’s always the threat of a harsh justice to keep one’s actions in line with the majority of the neighbors. That reality is what I believe shaped the earliest moral conclusions and laws - i.e., folks don’t take too kindly to having their crops, animals, shelter or partners carted off all of the time by whomever seemed to be the biggest, or whoever was waving the sharpest stick. After a while, most of everyone else would get together to codify a set of behavior expectations, and the tribe would be expected to stick with it, to keep the peace. Otherwise, ‘every man for himself’ really wouldn’t take the neighborhood too far, would it? And then how fun would it be anyway to be the last man standing, having to build everything, grow everything, and fight off the critters every day, all by yourself, for all of your needs? What a miserable existence.

Seriously, the Ten Commandments basically boil down to (1) don’t take other people’s crap, and (2) a few mentions about not chatting it up with other gods. The second one isn’t necessary for a functional society. It all comes down to the first one, and folks figured that out long before anyone was aware of the possibility of any God.

Mormonism throws in some extra prizes - if you’re a male, you get to ‘know’ an unlimited number of females so that you can exhaust their egg supply one by one, for eternity (!), and you may get your own planet, to repeat the same screwed up scenario that has played out here, complete with needing to have sex with a mortal virgin, and then later setting up and killing the child that results.

Are those the things that would drive you to be your best person? Or can there be other reasons?
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Re: God Creation

Post by Chap »

Hawkeye wrote:
Wed Aug 03, 2022 7:05 pm
People like me and the people like me that I know give to various charitable causes (and also sometimes to people in person) mainly because of a sense of shared humanity with people in need. We don't need a belief in a deity to make us feel that way, any more than (I assume) you need belief in a deity to motivate yourself to help your own friends and neighbours. Or do you?
Is this shared sense of humanity just something that you're born with? What if you didn't initially have a shared sense of humanity with your neighbors? What reason would you have to change your attitude and start working a little longer and a little harder to provide for them?
That was me who said that ... can someone explain why Hawkeye doesn't use the normal quote function that identifies the poster cited? Is it to avoid the alert function calling the attention of the poster to the fact they are being quoted, so Hawkeye dodges any comeback? Why, I think that just might be the reason. Naughty little Hawkeye!

Anyway - yup, all normal human babies are born with capacities for developing adult empathy, and those capacities develop into adult empathy in the course of upbringing by normal human parents, and interacting with a peer group living in social circumstances that are not radically disrupted from the outside. Your hypothetical non-socialised humans have either missed essential elements in human upbringing, or are neurologically anomalous. I have no idea what might make up for those missing elements, but I doubt whether conviction of the existence of a Sky Daddy would help much.

Oh yes, and from observing some completely atheist families in more than one culture, I know for a fact that religion plays no essential role in the development of decent caring human beings.
Maksutov:
That's the problem with this supernatural stuff, it doesn't really solve anything. It's a placeholder for ignorance.
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ajax18
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Re: God Creation

Post by ajax18 »

canpakes wrote:
Wed Aug 03, 2022 10:13 pm
Hawkeye wrote:
Wed Aug 03, 2022 9:18 pm




So you've got nothing.

ajax, are you replying above to Chap, or me? There are quotes from both of us, there.
What reasons could you give the drug addict or child criminal to become a responsible contributing member of society. Contrary to Chap's assertion, there's plenty of them out there.
And when the Confederates saw Jackson standing fearless like a stonewall, the army of Northern Virginia took courage and drove the federal army off their land.
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Jersey Girl
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Re: God Creation

Post by Jersey Girl »

I am back as promised. Upfront, I misread something you stated on a quick first read that I was going to respond to and I now see that it is you making the claim (not relatives), so I'd like to get that out of the way to begin with. I'll bold what I intended to respond to.
canpakes wrote:
Wed Aug 03, 2022 1:47 pm
Jersey Girl wrote: :)
cp I went back and viewed your original post. You really said crap. :lol:
Yes, I ‘said crap’. :) I’ve seen at least two dear relatives decide to take the train to Crazy Town and go full in on the most batshit nutty election crap. And although they were on the evangelical side of things prior to 2020 (‘dinosaur bones’ are tools of Satan!), they’ve just let themselves be led further into that madness by folks who operate under the guise of being a mouthpiece for God, like the Enlows. There’s no longer any tether to reality along those lines for them.

I’ve only had a chance to skim your reply so far; I’ll read it more carefully in a moment. I will mention, though - with regard to your suggestion to engage these faithful folks with their own weapon - I once asked a relative to shed some light on their abortion rationale given that abortion isn’t mentioned as forbidden within the Bible, and that Numbers 5:11-31 actually contains an ‘abortion recipe’ and application (‘unfaithful wife = abort the kid’). Their response was a full page of the most tortured interpretive reading of scripture that I’ve ever seen, basically giving the message that what is literally written within the Bible is substantially less important for some believers than how they want to spin it to fit their position.

In other words, the source material for their faith is just as easily tossed aside in an argument if that makes it more convenient for some to maintain that they’re ‘right’. End result: God is on their side, even if God said something different or nothing at all … and you can’t argue with God. So everyone better do as God (i.e. the believer) wants, and God (i.e. the believer) will make you do it via legislation, if necessary.

It’s a great way to just push off the discussion onto the invisible entity, then sit back and stop thinking about it, while advancing an agenda.
canpakes I do not agree that what you referenced is a recipe for abortion. Even if it were, you will not get far with Christians in referencing Old Testament law that involved strict obedience to the laws, penalties, offerings and sacrifices thereof, for the simple fact that Christ himself served as sacrifice for our sins and said himself that he was the fulfillment of the law.

That is to say, he was IT. The final pure sacrifice for the sin of humankind, then, now, and in the future. Period end of story OR beginning of story depending on your perspective. 8-)

Christians do not believe they are held to Old Testament law. They do not believe that offerings and sacrifices are needed. They do not believe there is that separation between God and man as there was in the Temple Era. Christians believe that when Christ died on the cross the Temple veil was literally and figuratively torn in two thus allowing humankind direct access to God.

We believe that on account of Christ, we are under Grace, not the Old Testament Law. Watch this...

If you were to present that to me personally as a support for abortion rights, I would scoot my fanny right back into Levitical Law and dredge up everything I could find there as per legislative issues we see on the table today and those coming after it. Are you in favor of same sex marriage as a protected right? I can drag out an Old Testament law along with penalties to condemn your interest in protecting same sex marriage. I mean I can find all kinds of things and take you down a slippery slope with it. Whew! The impurity and cleansing of menstruating women and that sort of thing!

If you reach back into the Old Testament with a Christian to prove let's say a progressive political point, any Christian worth their salt can use that Old Testament argument against you. In other words, if you are going to cherry pick from the Old Testament Law, I'm going to try to make you eat ALL the cherries in the bowl.

So your premise falls flat on it's face in that regard. You don't want to go there. It doesn't work! The primary foundation text for Christians, is the New Testament. You want to go directly to the New Testament.

So...if you have a specific position of theirs you can present to me, something they've taken a stand on, put it right in front of me and I'll give it a go.

Give me something where they've made a political claim besides their belief claim that God is on their side.

ETA: If anyone chooses to criticize me for not capitalizing He and all that, please just stop it. Okay?
We only get stronger when we are lifting something that is heavier than what we are used to. ~ KF

Slava Ukraini!
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Res Ipsa
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Re: God Creation

Post by Res Ipsa »

Hawkeye wrote:
Wed Aug 03, 2022 7:05 pm
People like me and the people like me that I know give to various charitable causes (and also sometimes to people in person) mainly because of a sense of shared humanity with people in need. We don't need a belief in a deity to make us feel that way, any more than (I assume) you need belief in a deity to motivate yourself to help your own friends and neighbours. Or do you?
Is this shared sense of humanity just something that you're born with? What if you didn't initially have a shared sense of humanity with your neighbors? What reason would you have to change your attitude and start working a little longer and a little harder to provide for them?
I have no idea where this shared sense of humanity comes from. I think some combination of nature and nurture would be a good guess. It certainly was a part of my LDS upbringing. Do they still sing the hymn A Poor Wayfairing Man of Grief at church services? That kind of expresses the feeling right there. You find it in the notion that by helping the least of humans, you are helping Jesus himself. Or in Jesus’s answer to the question “who is my neighbor?’

How much of our DNA is identical? Do you feel any special affinity for family members? Well, in a very real sense you’re part of an enormous family. Why wouldn’t you feel a sense of commonality?

If you don’t have that sense, there are ways to develop it.
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Res Ipsa
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Re: God Creation

Post by Res Ipsa »

Hawkeye wrote:
Wed Aug 03, 2022 7:17 pm
canpakes wrote:
Wed Aug 03, 2022 7:12 pm
ajax, given that you’ve been asking some interesting questions for others, here’s another for you:

If tomorrow you were to discover - without doubt - that God (however defined by you) did not exist, what would change about your interactions with others?
It's hard to say with so much inertia. But everything would change for me. If you think I'm bad now, you wouldn't want to be around me as a nonbeliever.
I don’t believe that for one second.

I’ve been both a believer and a non believer. And the transition from one to the other didn’t change how I treat my fellow humans. Why would it?

But think this through: who actually has a genuine moral code? The guy who becomes a psycho if he loses his faith or the guy who treats his fellow humans the same way regardless of what he believes about God. Am I actually a more moral person than you because I Am good without God?

The answer, by the way, is no. But thinking about that shows the absurdity of the claim that people need an external moral code to be moral.
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When I go to sea, don’t fear for me. Fear for the storm.

Jessica Best, Fear for the Storm. From The Strange Case of the Starship Iris.
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Res Ipsa
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Re: God Creation

Post by Res Ipsa »

ajax18 wrote:
Wed Aug 03, 2022 11:31 pm
canpakes wrote:
Wed Aug 03, 2022 10:13 pm



ajax, are you replying above to Chap, or me? There are quotes from both of us, there.
What reasons could you give the drug addict or child criminal to become a responsible contributing member of society. Contrary to Chap's assertion, there's plenty of them out there.
Ah you’re doing the othering thing again. The person addicted to drugs is a human, just like you. There’s lots of good evidence out of Sweden, Portugal, and other countries showing that humans addicted to drugs can and will be responsible, contributing members of society if their addiction is addressed with evidence based medical treatment rather than your approach of treating them as defective humans. A child who commits crimes its first and foremost a human being, just like you. By labeling them as a defective human and writing them off, you’re just wasting an entire life that can’t be responsible and productive. Why would either of them want to be productive and responsible? Because it’s a hell of a lot nicer than choking on your own vomit and dying in the street or spending life in Prison. But you have to create the conditions that will permit them to become responsible and productive — not throw them away and forget them.
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When I go to sea, don’t fear for me. Fear for the storm.

Jessica Best, Fear for the Storm. From The Strange Case of the Starship Iris.
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ajax18
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Re: God Creation

Post by ajax18 »

If you don’t have that sense, there are ways to develop it.
What would be your motivation for developing this sense of commonality?
And when the Confederates saw Jackson standing fearless like a stonewall, the army of Northern Virginia took courage and drove the federal army off their land.
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