Was this uncalled for?

I seriously dislike Richard Dawkins and other militant atheist who seem to enjoy bashing on the relgious. I cannot watch the video at the moment, but it's easy to see that he put his foot in his mouth again. I can never condone insulting of other people based on relgion (unless they're ***holes about it. See: Fred Phelps, Pat Robertson)

Also, I know this isn't a debate on it, but... Expelled? An amazing documentary? Surely, thou jest. I was about to make another statement, but I realized it'd make the above statement moot.

 

Because passive aggressively insinuating that God's methods of relinquishment as being not admirable is totally not ridiculing it.

 

If he were a character from a television show, or some manga or anime, it would be a great tale of atonement and sacrifice. For any normal person, what God did would be admirable. However we must view things in context, and the context is an all powerful being. In that case, I hold him to slightly higher standards than Superman, Goku, or Harry Potter. Therefore I expect him to come up with a slightly better plan than what he did. While healing the blind is impressive for a mortal, for a god, I expect him to erase the mere concept of blindness. Instead of curing lepers, cure leprosy. Instead of sending your son who is really you down to talk to a few people, talk to everyone personally from on-high.

My criteria for a god is "If I were given the same abilities, could I do it better?" If the answer is yes, then I'm extremely reluctant to accept such a god.

But yes, Dawkins is being a bit of a dick. He's not exactly arguing sensibly. If his goal is truly to eradicate religion, he's better off trying to be reasonable. I much prefer him when he's standing as a professor of biology, as opposed to an atheist. He tends to be more coherent that way.

 

My thoughts exactly. He took a book which is obviously a collection of metaphors and tried to discard it by mocking the text using a literal interpretation. It' s like saying that the Lord of the Ring or Harry Potter overall moral is utterly stupid because magic wands and hobbits don' t exist in the first place.
In other words, he ruled himself out of any serious debate, I don' t think anyone should feel offended. Makes you wonder if he even read the damn book.

I' m gonna make an analogy, try to join the ride for a second :
Let' s say that Nomura is the god of Kingdom Hearts. If you were given the same abilities, could you do a better Kingdom Hearts ? Sure, regarding your personal tastes and wishes. Would it be more appreciated by KH fans than Nomura' s version ? Would it be perfect ? Certainly not ! If it was perfect and nobody could die cause there' s no trial of any sort it wouldn' t be a game anymore and would just be plain boring.

Think of God as an über programer. He created a universe based on physic rules, it doesn' t go without a few "bugs" and "glitches". If he really created us in his image then I guess he' s not as perfect as we often picture him, a little self-introspection as a species should make that pretty clear. Yes, he created a universe that at some point allowed the emergence of blind people. That same universe also allows a lot more people to see. One goes with the other. A Universe free of blind people is a universe free of eyes, or free of people. Wanna take a pick ?
To create light is to create dark. To create sane is to create ill. I really think the programmer analogy makes the whole picture a lot clearer, allowing some philosophical thinking. I guess that' s the reason I really dig the Matrix trilogy. Granted, I did study programing.

Just so you know, I was raised as a Christian but I don' t believe in God. Well, I guess I can' t say I don' t believe in Him either, I just don' t picture him the way most Christians do.

 

Remember though, I'm marketing this game as someone's reality, not as a game for people like me to play. So instead of marketing towards the fans, I'd be marketing towards Sora, Riku, Kairi, Mickey and all the rest of them. Sora would be perfectly happy if he could just explore other worlds. Let's have the love interest Kairi tag along. I'll save Riku from going emo for a year, and let's not have Sora go to sleep either. I think I'll make it so that the Realm of Darkness is just as pleasant to live in as the Realm of Light, meaning no heartless. Instead of having the apprentices or MX do a whole lot of evil stuff for the sake of science, they can just have a textbook. I'll also build easy methods of going between the worlds, so anyone cna do it without risking their sanity. Soon, Kingdom Hearts is a utopia. Because I can do stuff like that. The choice between Nomura's universe and my universe is like the choice between living in the time of Caesar, and the time of Obama. Being a soldier or gladiator in Roman times is a lot more fun for gamers than going to McDonalds, or doing stuff Americans do, such as drinking Coca Cola (i jest, I jest. :p) . Any gamer will choose the Roman game. Any person will choose the American reality.

Would the world be more boring for us, the player? Yes. We enjoy it because of the conflict. Sora does not. Likewise, God is (supposedly) marketing the world at us, yet he has all sorts of nasty stuff in here.

Bugs, glitches, and human error goes with humanity. I don't like to see it in something presented as the epitome of morality and power.

My idea of 'all powerful' is 'I can rewrite the very laws of physics, so gravity goes up, humans can think in eight dimensions, or Cthulu is real'. As soon as the ability to create a universe without blind people is denied, he's not all powerful. Besides, he's been shown to be able to magically cure one blind man. Why, on that day, should he not have magically cured all blind men, or denied the concept of blindness? This is a guy who can light a water-soaked pyre. Clearly physics isn't a problem for him.

To compare it to an MMORPG, people have discovered a glitch, where an item vanishes if they place it in the sixth slot of their inventory. As the master programmer, I can go through the code, and eliminate the glitch on a large scale. Or I can create an avatar of my own, and walk around fixing random people. The second option might be appreciated by some people, but the majority of them will say something along the lines of "Just fix the game already!"

Thinking is good. Much better than mindlessly following what others have told you. Even if I disagree with their personal conclusion, I have considerably more respect for someone who actually came to a personal conclusion.

 

To think that you know better than the system, designed by a supremely intelligent "unmoved mover" or otherwise, which has kept us going for this long already is plain hubris.

Please, erase leprosy. Erase blindness. Eradicate disease as a whole. Watch something else rise to meet it. Humans are bound to duality: Where there is light, there must be dark; where there is good, there must be bad. Remove all strife from the lives of people and you leave them to atrophy, for they will never appreciate all that's good in their lives. It will lose meaning without a contrast, something to generate moral resonance. This world is how it is for a reason, and unless you fully understand that reason and can create a world that, absent of that structure, offers the same benefits, don't put yourself above God, or the universe, or the Big Bang, or whatever else you believe in.

 

And us Christians wonder why Atheists generally have a problem with us....

First, try and not attach emotions to ideas. This thread was made to discuss an issue with an atheist doing what you just did. Being on the other side of the debate does not suddenly make this okay.

Second, he did say "If I were given the same abilities" and then you proceeded to attack him for not having said abilities. That was not the point of his statement.

To revise your statement and add in my own two-cents...

Human's are not god. This being said we do not have omnicience.and are unable to see the whole picture. Simply because what we see doesn't look right to us doesn't mean that it isn't what is best for the whole of humanity. Further more, simply because something is "good" does not mean that it should be uniformly that way. A classic example is a painting. Would a perfect painting one that is just a square of your favorite color? Most people say no. And on the flip side of the coin, is a painting instantly bad because it contains a color you dislike? Again we don't see this to be true. People need bad to appreciate good. Yet in theology people complain that humanity is not a uniform good. Just think about it. If we were to live in a world without anything bad (I'll even allow things to be neutral, just nothing bad can ever happen) Would it be a world you would enjoy being in for years on end? I don't know about you but it seems pretty boring. It isn't a world I would want to be in at any rate.

 

Well he could, but there would still be duality, a physical world is bound to rules, to duality.
A programmer can' t program a universe where there' s up but no down, that' s just nonsense.
All of this isn' t religious talk, it' s philosophy.

There' s no good without bad, the same way there' s no light without dark nor up without down, physics bind us to duality. The only way to get rid of bad (and get rid of right in the process, you can' t erase one without erasing the other) would be to get rid of mortality, which means get rid of our bodies, get rid of time itself. Sure, we could be eternal wave form minds, communicating with each others eternally, but what would we talk about ? Sex ? Weather ? Movies ? There' d be none of that anymore. We wouldn' t even see the point in talking since being bodiless also means we can' t experience anything anymore. There' d be nothing to experience, nothing to think about, nothing to make us evolve. Why evolve in the first place ? There' s no time anymore (time, in physics, is the unit that measures change). We' d be "perfect", we' d be God ! Xenogears anyone ?

 

Yes, it is hubris, because in my opinion, the all loving, all powerful, all knowing God isn't acting with supreme power or supreme love.

Humanity has erased smallpox. Humanity has created immunisation. Humanity has severely damaged diseases.Many children in this day and age have not had whooping cough, when it was so common a few years ago. Despite all this, you argue that removing a disease for an all powerful being would not work out? It's been done, but by humans.

Duality is a law, yes. However we often place God as constructing the world, and physics itself. Therefore God should be above duality. If God is not above duality, then why is he so happy to completely destroy entire cities, if something else will just "rise to meet it"? If he removes all that is evil, atrophy will strike? This is an all powerful being. Erase the concept of atrophy. After all, we're supposed to be happy in Heaven, where there is no sin, right?

Also, AFAIK, no one worships the Big Bang. It's just a scientific theory, not a religion. (Although it wouldn't surprise me :p.)

Thank you.

As for your argument: I agree with you, depending on how we define God. Coming back to the programmer argument, let's have a look at Sim City. You can play it, use God mode, and create unlimited stuff, raze entire cities to the ground, etc. It's the same in Black and White. If we're placing God on that level of power, then yes, there is a severe problem with what I'm suggesting. However I view God not as a user-level God, but as the programmer himself, who can rewrite the entire code, turning the 2D world into a 3D one, giving people two heads, and pretty much doing whatever he pleases. In that sense, he could negate the negative effects.

Also, isn't heaven supposed to be a "world uniformly good"? I have made the assumption that if God is able to create Heaven, and make people happy there, then he is also able to create a place that is happy on Earth. Then there's also the Garden of Eden, which was perfectly happy until the apple fiasco.

This is where we disagree. Despite the idea of there being down without up being silly in our world, I think that an all-powerful creator should be able to make down without up. This is more a matter of philosophy, and even if I weren't given those duality-ignoring powers, I'd still be able to do better than God. Consider: There is no disease where your limbs spontaneously fall off, is there? God should be able to place blindness in that category of disease which simply doesn't exist. If even that's too much, then curing every leper is fundamentally no different to curing a single leper, which would erase leprosy from the world.

I attribute physics-rewriting powers to God, because we're told "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth", yet from what we're told in theology, the two are extremely different places, the main difference being a lack of sin in Heaven. This much demonstrates that creating a world without unhappiness is not out of God's control, and is, presumably, a rather nice place to be.

 

We can be eternally happy in heaven (if such a place even exist, in case you didn' t notice everything' s a metaphor in my book ^^) cause we have memories of a physical life to remember in the first place. No bodies, no physics, no power to affect the environment in any way or force our will onto others equal no sin. It' s a place where you can think whatever you want but can' t do anything anymore, there' s nothing to do.
And yeah, I guess we could imagine immortal beings living in a physical world but the real evil is in our heads, it' s born from free will. No good/bad also means no free will. Science fiction literature (or mythology) ponders about what a world of immortal beings would look like and that picture isn' t any prettier than that of our own world.

That' s just a metaphor to me.
What I call "God" is merely what provoked the Big Bang, or what came before that, whatever, the thing that started it all. After that causality ensued and "he" just let it all happen. I can' t even begin to fathom his motives, not that any of us could ... Remember the document you linked in the Creationism thread ?

 

That seems more like purgatory to me. Also, it screws over children under 4 who die, as they have no memories.

Can someone with more knowledge on Heaven explain how it's portrayed in the Bible?

The document I linked to argued against that specific argument. The argument there goes that causality doesn't exist, because even introducing a god doesn't solve the problem of the line of soldiers. The only thing to do is to deny causality as an illusion. It's a powerful argument.

 

From what I've heard and read about, Heaven is basically an eternal paradise where those who beleive in God the Father, Jesus the Son, and the Holy Spirit. It is where you meet up with others who are just like you, those from the past whom you may not have met in your lifetime. You get to actually see Jesus and God (because any living person who actually sees God would die a while afterwards) and you worship at his side.

I just see Hevean as a contrast from Hell, which I have a little more knowledge about. In Hell, you burn for the remainder of time, paying for your sins (the greatest sin being not beleiving in Jesus's sacrifice). You are forever alone while you burn, like a jail cell on fire I guess. It is only you in the pit, crying out for mercy that will never come.

I know that some of the stuff I said (like the greatest sin thing) appears ingnorant, but there's no sugarcoating this one. The best way to explain is hoensty, but of couse, it is our choice to believe in God.

 

Thanks. I just wanted to check whether my knowledge on Heaven matched the usual one.

As it does, I present the following argument:

Because we know God to have created Heaven, Earth and possibly Hell, we know he is able to make multiple realities, all of which are starkly different to each other. Therefore it follows that he is all powerful, and removing an entire disease shouldn't be a problem. Therefore the events in the New Testament are not admirable, considering the circumstances, because God should have been able to do more, with less hassle.

So Dawkin's point is a strong one, and I'm inclined to suggest that he is correct. However the tone and method of presenting his point was extremely disparaging, and he should have been more tactful. Even if he views the belief in God similarly to the belief in Santa Claus, one would explain to a maturing child that Santa Claus is not real, using reasoning, tactfulness and a certain degree of respect for the child. One would not argue "Santa Claus goes so fast, he'd be incinerated by friction, so suck it up.", which is what Dawkins essentially did. Again, I prefer him when he argues logically, as opposed to demagogicly.

 

Huh ? The whole scientific reasoning is based on causality. Cause/consequence. You do believe in the scientific reasoning which brought us vaccines, right ? It' s also based on the assumption that we think therefore we are, which certainly never ruled out the fact that everything we experience and therefore think could still be an illusion, and never will. One way or another we are indeed trapped in a Matrix. I didn' t wait to read your link to realize that.

 

Causality denies itself. If we have a line of 20 soldiers, and they can only fire if the soldier before them fires, we're never going to get anything to fire. The argument I linked to works, because it denies the idea of causality, and instead says that everything that happens is instead the whim of god.

 

To go even deeper, there can't be a universe without the objects to create the up and down.

I.e. mass and laws of attraction. So where the **** did all that come from, then?