American Idol for Gods

[_The Nehor]

I would contend that the people who quite willingly did these things wanted to making them morally defective individuals. If you believe that God smiles on those who happily murder others and destroy their own bodies then I think you're looking for an Assyrian or Aztec deity, not mine. Would God have been pleased with Abraham had his command to Isaac elicited the reaction: "Oh, thank you. I can't stand the little git. Finally permission to off him and get him out of my hair." If you think he would have, then you don't know my God.

Don't you get it???

It doesn't matter what you think about their actions or character.

The only thing that matters, in regards to the point I'm trying to make with you, is that the people themselves had total conviction they were doing God's will. They had SOME sort of experience that fully convicted them of that fact. And the fact that they engaged in these actions (ok, maybe not "happily" but with faith that they were doing to right thing which gave them some sort of happiness in the end result), and you doubt that you could do so means that their experiences were far stronger than yours. And they were caused by a sham.

I don't think you get it. It is partially because of God that I'd be reluctant to do these things. Murder has been a sin since before Cain envied his brother. Violating the body God game is religious vandalism to me. If I were told to break these laws that would be an EXCEPTION to a rule. Rules God himself has been drilling into me since Day 1. True, some of this comes from society and the teachings of my parents but those pale to insignificance by comparison. I don't think 'these people' (they haven't been defined at all really) had to have some kind of experience that convinced them to do this. Do you really think every Roman soldier who went forth to conquer for Roman glory had a personal conviction and religious experience showing them that Jupiter wanted them to kill for him? If I'm missing who you meant by these people please clarify.

I don't think it's admirable to feel good about doing something God generally forbids. Also, I have found that God rarely commands such things. If those people willing to murder others and castrate themselves were also willing to love their neighbor as themselves, forgive others their trespasses, aid all those in need, and seek out truth to bless themselves and others (all in some ways harder) then their actions are commendable. If not, not. I guess I'm insisting that it does matter what their actions and character are. In the end, that's really all that matters.

[_beastie]

Nehor's original statement:

A sham couldn't let me taste and see heaven if it didn't exist.

His current statement:

I don't think you get it. It is partially because of God that I'd be reluctant to do these things. Murder has been a sin since before Cain envied his brother. Violating the body God game is religious vandalism to me. If I were told to break these laws that would be an EXCEPTION to a rule. Rules God himself has been drilling into me since Day 1. True, some of this comes from society and the teachings of my parents but those pale to insignificance by comparison. I don't think 'these people' (they haven't been defined at all really) had to have some kind of experience that convinced them to do this. Do you really think every Roman soldier who went forth to conquer for Roman glory had a personal conviction and religious experience showing them that Jupiter wanted them to kill for him? If I'm missing who you meant by these people please clarify.

"These people" are the people who were True Believers in Heaven's Gate (for the castration example) and Islamic terrorists.

If you are suggesting that these people did NOT have some sort of experience that convinced them God wanted to them to do these things, you are delusional.

EVERYTHING they said and did, the evidence they leave behind, points to the fact that they shared one thing - an overwhelming conviction that they were doing God's will.

Yet, this overwhelming conviction was the result of a sham.

You really imagine what YOU have felt overshadows what someone who castrated himself for God felt??? Please.

I don't think it's admirable to feel good about doing something God generally forbids. Also, I have found that God rarely commands such things. If those people willing to murder others and castrate themselves were also willing to love their neighbor as themselves, forgive others their trespasses, aid all those in need, and seek out truth to bless themselves and others (all in some ways harder) then their actions are commendable. If not, not. I guess I'm insisting that it does matter what their actions and character are. In the end, that's really all that matters.

They were living their religion to the fullest. And yes, they were following the mandates of their respective religions fully.

I didn't say it was admirable. I think it's a scary part of human nature, that we are capable of such True Belief. That isn't my point. My point is that shams can, and do, create overwhelmingly powerful feelings of conviction in human beings.

If you still don't get it, it's because you just don't want to because it means you have to admit your original statement was mistaken.

Yes, a sham can let you "taste and see heaven if it didn't exist".

[_The Nehor]

Nehor's original statement:

A sham couldn't let me taste and see heaven if it didn't exist.

His current statement:

I don't think you get it. It is partially because of God that I'd be reluctant to do these things. Murder has been a sin since before Cain envied his brother. Violating the body God game is religious vandalism to me. If I were told to break these laws that would be an EXCEPTION to a rule. Rules God himself has been drilling into me since Day 1. True, some of this comes from society and the teachings of my parents but those pale to insignificance by comparison. I don't think 'these people' (they haven't been defined at all really) had to have some kind of experience that convinced them to do this. Do you really think every Roman soldier who went forth to conquer for Roman glory had a personal conviction and religious experience showing them that Jupiter wanted them to kill for him? If I'm missing who you meant by these people please clarify.

"These people" are the people who were True Believers in Heaven's Gate (for the castration example) and Islamic terrorists.

If you are suggesting that these people did NOT have some sort of experience that convinced them God wanted to them to do these things, you are delusional.

EVERYTHING they said and did, the evidence they leave behind, points to the fact that they shared one thing - an overwhelming conviction that they were doing God's will.

Yet, this overwhelming conviction was the result of a sham.

You really imagine what YOU have felt overshadows what someone who castrated himself for God felt??? Please.

I don't think it's admirable to feel good about doing something God generally forbids. Also, I have found that God rarely commands such things. If those people willing to murder others and castrate themselves were also willing to love their neighbor as themselves, forgive others their trespasses, aid all those in need, and seek out truth to bless themselves and others (all in some ways harder) then their actions are commendable. If not, not. I guess I'm insisting that it does matter what their actions and character are. In the end, that's really all that matters.

They were living their religion to the fullest. And yes, they were following the mandates of their respective religions fully.

I didn't say it was admirable. I think it's a scary part of human nature, that we are capable of such True Belief. That isn't my point. My point is that shams can, and do, create overwhelmingly powerful feelings of conviction in human beings.

If you still don't get it, it's because you just don't want to because it means you have to admit your original statement was mistaken.

Yes, a sham can let you "taste and see heaven if it didn't exist".

No, the sham can't. I've heard the Islamic version of heaven and even what supposedly Heaven's Gate led to. Apples and oranges. My description (inadequate though it would be) is nothing like the one they gave. Also, what I felt and saw makes me LESS likely to commit murder. So yes, my experience was nothing like theirs.

Everything I've seen and read indicates that weak-willed people have a tendency to fly to extremes. I think your examples exemplify this. I don't know enough about Heaven's Gate dogma to comment much on this. However, the Islamic extremists focus on the political goals of their God. I have seen no evidence whatsoever that those involved in promulgating it by the sword pay any heed at all to the lessons of the Koran regarding kindness, forgiveness, and the like. Why do these devout believers willing to sacrifice their lives for their God think some of his word is worthless? There is more going on there then simple devotion to God. Apples and oranges.

To a degree you'll find this in my own faith. Those who trumpet their faith but violate God's laws routinely or those who spend their time trying to recreate consecration or becoming cranks about the Word of Wisdom but ignore lessons on charity and sacrifice.

[_beastie]

No, the sham can't. I've heard the Islamic version of heaven and even what supposedly Heaven's Gate led to. Apples and oranges. My description (inadequate though it would be) is nothing like the one they gave. Also, what I felt and saw makes me LESS likely to commit murder. So yes, my experience was nothing like theirs.

What differs is the details added to the core experience. The core experience - the power to convict the individual that the experience comes from God and shares some "truth" - remains constant.

Everything I've seen and read indicates that weak-willed people have a tendency to fly to extremes. I think your examples exemplify this. I don't know enough about Heaven's Gate dogma to comment much on this. However, the Islamic extremists focus on the political goals of their God. I have seen no evidence whatsoever that those involved in promulgating it by the sword pay any heed at all to the lessons of the Koran regarding kindness, forgiveness, and the like. Why do these devout believers willing to sacrifice their lives for their God think some of his word is worthless? There is more going on there then simple devotion to God. Apples and oranges.

Is that right? You are not well informed. Part of the reason that Islamic extremists are successful is that terrorism is only a part of their agenda - they also engage in strenuous charitable acts. They build roads, schools, provide food for people who would otherwise have nothing.

Besides, this is besides the point, Nehor. The point is that you are convinced - due to the intensity of your experience that it could not be triggered by a sham. The content of what these other people believe is irrelevant to my point. The only relevance is the intensity of their conviction that their experience MUST come from something real, that it could NOT be caused by a sham.

To a degree you'll find this in my own faith. Those who trumpet their faith but violate God's laws routinely or those who spend their time trying to recreate consecration or becoming cranks about the Word of Wisdom but ignore lessons on charity and sacrifice.

This is nothing but a rabbit trail to avoid the real point.

I'll try one more time: the point has to do with power of conviction.

Can people be powerfully convinced of things that are, in actually, a sham?

The obvious answer is YES, of course they can. So powerfully convinced they cut off their own genitalia.

[_Chap]

I also find a major fallacy in your position. You can NOT argue that the God who created you is less moral then you.

Oh I don't know. The answer might depend on what kind of 'creating' has occurred, and what one may legitimately deduce about the kind of relationship implied by the alleged type of creation.

Doesn't the LDS deity create us (as 'spirits') pretty well the way our parents did as physical beings - I.e. he begets us, hence bringing into existence beings essentially of the same kind as himself? (Correct me if I am wrong).

Now I know people who are clearly morally superior to their parents, and who have displayed this at quite an early age. I fail to see why it should be impossible for 'spirit' children to be morally superior to their 'spirit' parent - assuming, for the sake of argument, that such terms are meaningful.

The difference in degrees is vast. Am omnipotent, omniscient tyrant who wanted to be the center of the Universe could alter his children to fit his every whim. Why let the upstarts surpass him? He could stop it.

I note that you have dropped the contention that it is a logical fallacy to "argue that the God who created you is less moral then you".

Instead you retreat to the claim that as a matter of contingent fact (i.e. something that is not necessarily the case, but just happens to be so) your deity simply is very likely to be better than his 'spirit children', because he is (in your view) more powerful than they are.

But it is a question, is it not, whether being more powerful makes you morally better? Have you not heard the saying that "power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely"?

And (again, please correct me) am I not right in thinking that the LDS deity is not omnipotent in the sense that theists commonly use that word? Thus, for instance, he 'organised' matter to make the world, but had to do so according to pre-existing laws which he did not make. No?

[Dr. Sunstoned]

If your god is the a priori embodiment of perfect morality than he is also perfect in every conceivable way.

This seems unremarkable on the surface, until we point out that Amantha has modified God's embodiment of perfection with the term a priori. Yet the Gospel, as taught, mentions or implies nothing regarding God's attributes being a priori. Indeed, the true character of God cannot be known other than by revelation. Hence, as in the First Vision, or through the confirming witness of the Holy Spirit, God's nature comes to be known to mortals as a line upon line learning process, mediated by the Spirit. Our knowledge of him is hardly independent of experience.

Further, whether or not he is perfect in every conceivable way (which I would accept, including in ways not yet conceivable), is irrelevant to the manner in which he is known.

If he is perfect in every conceivable way, then we are speaking of a being who is self-contained and has no need of any imperfection such as human beings to participate in his perfection. This being lacks motivation. Morality is about choice making. A perfect being has no need to make choices because s/he already exists in a state of perfection. Any choice would necessarily be in the direction of less perfection.

This argument breaks down along several dimensions for the following reasons:

1. There is no necessary reason to believe that, although God is perfect respecting his own personal attributes, that this perfection extends to specific aspects or regions of the universe around him, as the argument itself implies. However, our author seems to accept, for some reason, the assumption (and this does not appear to be a sound logical conclusion from first principles) that since God has no need of further personal perfection, he therefore can have no desire to perfect other things/beings outside himself.

This does not follow in any necessary sense from God's perfect personal attributes, nor does in follow from what LDS theology actually teaches (and Amantha is, at all events, criticizing LDS theology) about God, ie., that he is a God of love and other feelings and perceptions that exist within him in perfection. Amantha, like the Medieval schoolmen, is trying to construct a deductive, semi-mathematical abstraction, a cosmic strawman with which to knock down the God whom LDS actually worship.

Our author claims:

then we are speaking of a being who is self-contained and has no need of any imperfection such as human beings to participate in his perfection.

Amantha here does not understand LDS theology, which does not teach that God is self contained in the neo-Platonic, transcendent sense in which she appears to think necessary. God himself, thought personally perfect, is himself embedded in a reality external to him, a reality of which he is master and commander, but which he did not create from whole cloth and the eternal laws of which he cannot himself deviate without becoming non-God.

To say that God "does not need" imperfect creatures to participate in his perfection is to claim that God does not need perfect creatures to participate in his perfection (assuming the imperfect creatures could become perfect). But if God is not motivated by abstract principles of logical necessity only, but by perfect passions, desires, and pure, perfect love, it is the case that he can desire imperfect creatures to exist that they may become perfect and achieve the same perfection he experiences.

In becoming perfect, these sons and daughters do not confer on God any further personal attributes of perfection. They do, however, increase the joy he has in being perfect. If our joy will be great in the Kingdom of Heaven over one soul saved, imagine this in the many billions, trillions, and numbers stretching into mind numbing infinity.

Amantha's position here, interestingly enough, in claiming for God both total perfection and, at the same time, putting strict restraints on what God can do and what might motivate his actions and designs, denies to her perfect God both free will and any perfections relating to desires or perceptions outside strict deductive logical rules, which she apparently thinks are all that would govern the mind and motivations of a perfect being. For Amantha, God could be perfectly logically (I need no further perfection), but cannot have perfect feelings and emotions (I want the other imperfect intelligences around me to share in my perfection, not so much because I need them to, as because I want them to).

This being lacks motivation. Morality is about choice making. A perfect being has no need to make choices because s/he already exists in a state of perfection. Any choice would necessarily be in the direction of less perfection.

Again, God would lack motivation only if that God were the ultimate, transcended ground of being itself, and needn't have created anything at all. A God, however, who was himself, coexistent eternally with that universe(s), among an infinite number of other intelligences like himself of the same inherent capacity and potential, and who was capable of experiencing love and desire for the joy of others in perfection, would have no reason not to desire the perfection of those other intelligences.

Love, by its very definition, is not self contained, but expansive and communal.

Although God need not make personal choices relevant to his own state of being, the other intelligences do need to make choices, and God is that being who provides them the opportunities and conditions under which to make those choices. That God need not make moral choices relative to his own life experiences is not in question.

You can then argue, that it is simply god's nature to create and therefore create imperfect beings such as humans. If this is the case, then a volitional god becomes superfluous and all that need be posited for the creation of moral man is avolitional and amoral nature itself.

Moral man exists because of attributes inherent in eternal intelligence, not in God. God did not bring man out of whole cloth. He provides intelligence the opportunity to engage and interact with physical element and the conditions of mortality, but our choices are a intrinsic aspect of our "beingness".

If your physically limited "superman" god created me, he made a choice to do so and therefore decrees his less than perfect morality. If no choice was involved then we are not talking about a distinct, thinking, volitional being.

LDS theology takes no such positions. The strawmen abound here. God did not create you in any ultimate sense. He created the conditions for the emergence of a coherent, individuated self, and organized and created the conditions for your eternal progression. You and I and God had no choice (the one aspect of the universe in which fee agency is really of no relevance) as to our existing. Our only choice is the level of existence at which we will exist.



Loran

[_Coggins7]

I

s that right? You are not well informed. Part of the reason that Islamic extremists are successful is that terrorism is only a part of their agenda - they also engage in strenuous charitable acts. They build roads, schools, provide food for people who would otherwise have nothing.

This is irrelevant. So did Pablo Escobar. The Islamist's charitable acts are essentially tribal and in-group oriented, while Christian charity is exactly the opposite.

Religion can be abused just as can any philosophy. But certain religions, Christianity notable, is much less liable to abuse then others, such as Islam, which is virtually unthinkable without its connection to the state, and secular politics, which, without Christian principles, degenerates, almost inexorably, into the most abject barbarism, comparable to the most fevered apocalyptic fantasies of the Jihadists.

Beastie, apparently never having experienced the authentic witness of the Spirit, is perhaps not in a position to compare and contrast what she has no knowledge of to other human perceptual states that may mimic or contain elements of the other.



Besides, this is besides the point, Nehor. The point is that you are convinced - due to the intensity of your experience that it could not be triggered by a sham. The content of what these other people believe is irrelevant to my point. The only relevance is the intensity of their conviction that their experience MUST come from something real, that it could NOT be caused by a sham.

[_beastie]

You, like Nehor, totally miss the point. These people are living up to the mandates of their own religious beliefs. You might as well argue against my point by saying "but my church is TRUE and theirs isn't".

[_Coggins7]

You, like Nehor, totally miss the point. These people are living up to the mandates of their own religious beliefs. You might as well argue against my point by saying "but my church is TRUE and theirs isn't".

All mandates are not the same. The traditional mandate for every Muslim male to periodically engage in sword point conversion of infidels bears no resemblance to the Christian injunction to go out and "convert every creature" by persuasion and example.

What one believes is true is beside the point. The collectivist ideologies of the last century killed and destroyed the lives of far more human beings than all the depredations of Islam and bastardized medieval Christianity combined.

Its not that one is convinced something is true, but the nature of what one believes is true. I do not see Buddhist's or Confusions strapping explosives on their children and sending them out to kill Jews or anybody else. I also do not see Christians or Jews doing this to each other.

At one time, fascist, collectivist, relativist Japan attacked Republican China. Now, fascist, collectivist, relativist China (relativist in the sense that all values are created by human beings according to political and ideological expediency) threatens all of Asia and the Pacific Rim.

Believing that the Declaration of Independence is true produces quite a different reaction, and a different society, than believing that the Communist Manifesto is true.

[_The Nehor]

I also find a major fallacy in your position. You can NOT argue that the God who created you is less moral then you.

Oh I don't know. The answer might depend on what kind of 'creating' has occurred, and what one may legitimately deduce about the kind of relationship implied by the alleged type of creation.

Doesn't the LDS deity create us (as 'spirits') pretty well the way our parents did as physical beings - I.e. he begets us, hence bringing into existence beings essentially of the same kind as himself? (Correct me if I am wrong).

Now I know people who are clearly morally superior to their parents, and who have displayed this at quite an early age. I fail to see why it should be impossible for 'spirit' children to be morally superior to their 'spirit' parent - assuming, for the sake of argument, that such terms are meaningful.

The difference in degrees is vast. Am omnipotent, omniscient tyrant who wanted to be the center of the Universe could alter his children to fit his every whim. Why let the upstarts surpass him? He could stop it.

I note that you have dropped the contention that it is a logical fallacy to "argue that the God who created you is less moral then you".

Instead you retreat to the claim that as a matter of contingent fact (I.e. something that is not necessarily the case, but just happens to be so) your deity simply is very likely to be better than his 'spirit children', because he is (in your view) more powerful than they are.

But it is a question, is it not, whether being more powerful makes you morally better? Have you not heard the saying that "power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely"?

And (again, please correct me) am I not right in thinking that the LDS deity is not omnipotent in the sense that theists commonly use that word? Thus, for instance, he 'organised' matter to make the world, but had to do so according to pre-existing laws which he did not make. No?

No, I didn't drop it. I assumed it could happen and tried to follow it to it's conclusion. I still think the idea is preposterous.

The original argument didn't hinge on whether power makes one morally better. It was a statement that a fiend couldn't create someone with virtue. Here we fall into a problem though because unless God is the source of all virtue (which he is) then God is subject to something higher then himself. Hence why God is virtue, not just a follower of it. If you imagine an omnipotent creator fiend then we would all be likewise.

God is not bound by law. God follows a law and also is that law. So, no.