Subject:
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Re: The Brick Testament - More Teachings of Jesus
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.debate
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Date:
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Sun, 22 Oct 2006 14:09:36 GMT
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Viewed:
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4427 times
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In lugnet.off-topic.debate, John Neal wrote:
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To say that it “rings true to you” almost makes it sound like you are
evaluating it based on evidence and logic, rationally determining it to be
the best explanatory theory. But this is quite different than saying that
you are absolutely sure of it based on a personal revelation, so I’m not
sure which it is for you.
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Must they be mutually exclusive?
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No, they need not be mutually exclusive, but I don’t see that that is more than
a trivial point to make. I suppose someone could, for instance, be rationally
convinced that nautral selection accounts for the diversity of life on Earth
because of the mountains of scientific evidence in support of it and in
addition to that have had a personal religious revelation that has convinced
him beyond a doubt that nautral selection accounts for the diversity of life on
Earth.
But my point is that there is an extremely significant difference in these two
ways of coming to be convinced of something, and that we are obliged to take
other people’s beliefs seriously only to the extent that they are based
rationally on evidence.
So in your case, you are welcome to say that you are rationally convinced that
Jesus of Nazareth survived death, was in some way divine or supernatural, or had
the correct interpretation of the Jewish scriptures (or any other proposition
that must either be true or false). And I will be quite interested to hear why
you are rationally convinced of these things, and interested to see if you can
make a compelling rational case for others to believe what you do. But to the
extent that your beliefs are admittedly dependent on personal revelation, I will
dismiss them on those grounds, and I believe that I am fully justified in doing
so.
You label this “intolerance”, and while that seems intended as a pejorative
aimed at making me look insensitive or unkind, I don’t think it is either. If
it is intolerance, it is simply intolerance for nonrationally-derived beliefs in
a rational discussion. And on my part, it’s really more on an impatience than
an intolerance, only because it seems to me that a rational debate will be quite
fruitless if people begin using nonrationally-derived beliefs, especially if
they are not recognized as such.
And it’s not really that I am intolerant of nonrationally-derived beliefs. I
realize people have them (I probably have some of my own that I haven’t even
realized I have), and I am not against you or anyone else stating them. My
larger point in all of this was that it might be to your own benefit if you
realized that you cannot hope to rationally convince someone of your own
nonrationally-derived beliefs. And that the same is true of arguments (whether
religious, political, or what-have-you) that depend on nonrationally-held
beliefs in their premises.
So for example, if someone posts to OT.debate to argue in favor of a certain
political position, they can expect to be taken seriously (and have the
possibility of rationally covincing others) only to the extent that their
arguments depend on rationally-derived beliefs. If, in defending that political
position, they ultimately fall back on a belief such as “This is what God wants
us to be like”, which was derived nonrationally, their whole argument becomes
nonrational and therefore not rationally convincing.
And of course, it’s possible there could then be a rational debate about
whether or not the propostion “This is what God wants us to be like” is
supported by evidence or not. But to the extent that such a conviction depends
on personal revelation, it will not be rationally convincing to others, nor will
their political argument that depends on it.
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Is it within the realm of possibility that you could be convinced otherwise?
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How? Via torture? ;-)
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No, via a reevalutaion of the evidence or a new rational insight. The point of
asking is to suss out to what extent your beliefs on these matters are
rationally-derived, and to what extent they are held with a nonrational
certitude.
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Upon what rational basis do you (presumably) deny the existence
of God?
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I deny the existence of the Christian god by the same basis I deny the
existence of the gods of any religion. Based on all the evidence, it seems
to me resoundingly more likely that these are all equally figments of the
imagination. I don’t attempt to prove their non-existence any more than I
would attempt to prove the nonexistance of Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy.
It would seem the onus is not on me to disprove the existence of any
hypothetical supernatural being someone might conjure up.
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I didn’t say “Christian” God, I simply said “God”. Better yet, “Creator”.
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OK, then let me restate. I see no more reason to posit the existence of a
Creator than I do Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy or the Christian God. It would
seem the onus is not on me to disprove the existence of any hypothetical
supernatural being someone might conjure up.
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Except one explanation provides meaning and purpose, the other provides
meaninglessness and hopelessness.
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I do not see how the positing of a Creator (or Creators--can’t see why there’s
any better reason to think there’d be only one rather than many, but I’ll stick
with the singular for now) provides any objective meaning or purpose to my life,
all life, or the universe itself. Even if we assume for a moment that there is
a Creator, and that this Creator had in mind a certain purpose for humankind,
that does not seem to logically or even morally compel us to accept that as our
own purpose. For instance, it’s pretty easy to imagine a malevolent Creator
whose puprose in creating humankind was to watch us struggle and suffer for his
own amusement. Even if this was the Creator’s purpose, it doesn’t follow that
this must be my purpose in life, nor even that I am obliged to respect that
Creator’s purpose.
It’s also easy to imagine a Creator who had no purpose for creating the
universe and was not even aware that life would result, much less sentient
lifeforms. In that case you have a Creator, and yet no purpose. And so it
would fall on me to come up with my own purpose in such a created universe.
And of course, the point must be made that even if you think the lack of a
Creator means that life is meaningless and hopeless, that makes it all of 0%
more likely that a Creator exists than that one does not. Wishful thinking does
not increase the likelihood of the existence of supernatural beings.
I’ve seen you raise the spectre of “hopelessness” in the absence of a Creator
(or absence of belief in a Creator) on OT.debate before, but I must imagine that
by now you have had dealings with enough atheists who are not wallowing in
hopelessness to convince you that life without such a belief is not doomed to
crushing depression. Personally, I feel comforted by the knowledge that even
if there is a Creator, there is no particular reason my purpose in life should
need to align with whatever purpose (or lack of purpose) that Creator had for
creating the universe.
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But how is “I don’t know” MORE rational than “non-rational” Creator
explanations? It is a simple equivocation.
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Equivocation? Hardly. If two people happen upon a closet whose door has been
hermetically sealed, who is more rational, the person who admits “I do not know
what is in that closet” or the person who says, “I am certain there is an
enormous elephant in that closet.” Obviously, the person who claims knowledge
of what is in the closet is being irrational, and the more the person claims to
know about the elephant, the more irrational their beliefs become. In the
absence of evidence about what is in the closet, the only rational response is
to admit the lack of knowledge.
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Yes, this is what seems so dangerous to me about religious faith.
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It simply is not fair to make moral equivalencies, unless you think it fair
that I lump you in with Stalin....
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I did not mean to lump you in with religious terrorists, and I would not expect
you to lump me in with Stalin. And yet, the fact remains, it is either true or
false that blind faith in religious dogma was a significant contributing factor
to the 9/11 hijackers taking the actions they did. And it is either true or
false that a culture that encourages blind faith in religious dogma thereby
raises the odds of religious terrorism. Is there a way for me to suggest these
are both true without being accused of moral equivalence? I may be incorrect,
and I’m quite sure we could have a rational debate on these matters, but not if
you simply accuse me of moral equivalence and drop the subject.
Likewise, you are welcome to make a rational argument that Stalin’s atheism was
a significant contributing factor to his atrocities. I think you would have a
much more difficult time making a convincing argument along those lines than I
would about the 9/11 hijackers and religious dogma, but go right ahead. And
while I would disagree with the idea that a hypothetical Stalin who had
nonrational religious certitude instead of atheism would have therefore been
less morally atrocious, I will not take offense to your attempting to make such
an argument.
If atheism actually leads people to moral atrocities, I want to know! Show me
the evidence. Make the argument.
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you might as well ask what on earth a person in this day and age
is doing basing their beliefs about the ultimate nature of the universe on a
centuries-old book that makes no attempt to establish itself as a source of
reliable scientific knowledge and instead simply makes claims about the way
things are and how they should be, appealing only to itself for authority.
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But AUTHORITY is what it all boils down to. Do you have the authority to
make claims? Do I?
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I would say that nobody has the “authority” to make proclaimations that are
instantly taken as truths without any rational support. Not you, not I, and
certainly not any 2,000 year old religious text.
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We slip into a moral equivalence pretty quickly.
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What? What are you referring to here? Am I understanding your use of the term
“moral equivalence” incorrectly? Above I thought you were saying that I was
suggesting you were the moral equivalent of a terrorist, and I sought to clarify
that. But maybe it’s me who is misunderstanding what you mean by “moral
equivalence”.
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I say we use our intellect to forever search for TRUTH which
is absolute, which I would then define as “God”.
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I’m not sure we can ever really attain absolute truths using our intellect (if
by intellect you mean rationality). Some people may be very discomforted by
that notion, but I think it just takes a little getting used to. Certainly
there are a great many things where we’ve gotten to the point where we’d might
as well act as if we had absolute knowledge. But it’s useful to remember
that we actually don’t, and that even things we seem quite sure of today could
be revised by increased knowledge and insight tomorrow.
Anyone whose belief in God is ultimately nonrationally derived seems to be
abandoning rather than embracing the intellect.
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Imagine you are driving down a road and a bystander flags you down and says
to you “the bridge ahead is out”. Are you not curious as to how this person
arrived at this knowledge? If you asked, “How do you know that?” and he
replied “Blorgar the invisible unicorn revealed this to me when I was five
years old” would that not affect how you judge his proposition about the
bridge being out? On the other hand, if his reply was “I heard the news
bulletin on AM 640, and just inspected it myself,” I have to imagine that
too would affect how you judge his proposition that the bridge is out.
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Either way he could be lying, and so it wouldn’t really help you know for
sure if the bridge was indeed out or not. You would have to go to the bridge
and see for yourself, and then judge the bystander’s response.
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OK, yes, I suppose this was a poor example, because you could go to the brigde
and verify either bystander’s report. But it’s very, very hard for me to
believe that the fact that one bystander told you that his information about the
bridge came from the personal revelation of Blorgar the invisible unicorn when
he was five years old would not make you far, far more skeptical of his claim.
Here is perhaps a clearer example. Your doctor informs you that you should
really eat 16 oranges a day. Now, that a lot of oranges even if you really like
oranges, but if the benefits were worth it, you just might consideer it. You
ask the doctor why you should eat 16 oranges a day, and are expecting he might
tell you that there’s excellent evidence to suggest that eating 16 oranges a day
will almost certainly prevent you from getting any sort of cancer or heart
disease. But instead he tells you that you should eat 16 oranges a day because
every day you fail to do so, 100 invisible unicorns suffer a horrible death. It
is therefore only morally right for you to eat 16 oranges a day. When you ask
how he came to this belief, he explains that he is absolutely certain of it
because of a personal revelation. It rings true to him logically, but he’s
certain of it because of an unexplainable personal revelation.
How do you evaluate his claim? There’s no bridge to drive up to and verify.
You simply cannot know if those 100 invisible unicorns are really suffering
horrible deaths or not because they’re invisible. You can’t know unless you
yourself have such a personal revelation. Can you evaluate the merit of his
belief “on its own”? What would that even mean?
When it comes right down to it: do you start eating 16 ornages a day? If not,
why not? Does it have anything to do with the fact that his belief came from a
personal revelation? Does it have to do with the fact that his belief posits
the existence of things (the unicorns) you don’t have any good rational reasons
to believe exist?
If he further tried to convince you to vote in the next election for a candidate
who wanted to pass a law to madate that kids in school be forced to eat 16
oranges day, how would you evaluate such an argument?
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Yes, that’s an artful way of acknowledging that they don’t agree with each
other in important respects and portray Jesus quite differently. Which
Jesus is the real Jesus? A sythesis? Just one of the four? Paul’s vastly
different Jesus? How can we know? If you want certainty of belief, I can
only imagine blind faith does the trick here.
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Say you and I got together and met Dave! After, we compared notes about his
personality. You found him to be “super”, and I found him to be
“supercilious”. Who is correct? Which is the real Dave!?
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To make an even closer parallel situation, let’s imagine that four books are
written about Dave!’s life, but even the first book is not written until 40
years after Dave! has died, and the other three over the course of the next 20
years. The books have authors’ names attached to them, but it later turns out
these books were not written by the authors they are attributed to, and the
first copies of them were published anonymously. Literay analysis provides
extremely strong evidence that two of the books were largely based on the
earliest book with additional material added, and the fourth may have depended
on the first as well. The books all make outrageous claims about Dave!,
including that he worked miracles and survived death. It is also clear that the
authors of the books were members of a religious cult surrounding Dave! and more
interested in promoting their own varying theological takes on Dave! than
accurate historical reporting. In addition, nothing of Dave!’s own writings
exist (sadly the LUGNET OT.debate archives were destroyed in the Great War of
2038) and outside these books there are no other contemporary reliable
indepedent sources to verify that Dave! even existed. There are several other
books about Dave! written soon after the four, and these ones everyone dismisses
as completely unreliable.
So in that case, what can we really know about Dave!? Should any of these books
be considered reliable? What about where they contradict each other? Given the
circumstances, it would seem we would have to approach these books with extreme
caution and skepticism, especially inasmuch as they make claims of supernatural
events having taken place.
Of course I’ve taken your hypothetical about Dave! and twisted it into a analogy
to highlight the historical unreliablity of the gospels. But that’s not what we
were talking about. I believe your point was more along the lines of “why
should we expect four accounts of Jesus’s life to match up exactly?”
And that’s a fair question, especially if you don’t believe Jesus to be divine
and in some way God on Earth. But if we allow for a moment that Jesus was God
on Earth, the scenario is quite different. Then all sorts of questions are
raised. Like: Why the hell didn’t Jesus just write stuff down himself? Does he
like ambiguity? Did he intend for people to derive a hundred different meanings
from the same ambiguous and contradictory set of scriptures? What kind of diety
would do something like that?
So, anyhow, it depends on which mindset you bring to the gospels. If you come
to them without assuming the divinity of Jesus, it is not at all surprising that
they widely differ considering the circumstances under which they were written,
and you come away viewing them as not-very-relibale historical documents. If
you come to them assuming Jesus’s divinity, you come away wondering why the heck
Jesus/God would have left his major source of communication to the entire world
for the next 2,000+ years in such a state.
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Rational arguments could be made in support of or against
either proposition. If a tremendous amount of evidence could be produced to
support the idea that Jesus of Nazareth never actually existed, this would
rationally undercut the proposition that Jesus is the final revelation of
God’s nature, just as a termendous amount of evidence has been shown to
undercut the proposition that the Earth is flat.
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Okay, that is about the ONLY rational argument I can think of, but so what is
your point-- that there is a tremendous amount of evidence that Jesus never
existed? Barring that, the argument is mute;-)
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My point was to counter your claim that “There are no ‘facts’ (verifiable by
science) in religion” which I think is outrageously false. The holy books of
any and every religion are full of ‘facts’ about things that happened (or didn’t
happen) and describe how the world works (or doesn’t). You must have some
extremely narrow view of religion if you are holding to this claim.
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What it really is is mockery.
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Is it? Imagine it’s mid-2004 and you’ve moved into a solidly liberal town
in a Blue State. • -snip-
So the question is, in this situation, would such a website be mocking Kerry
and his supporters? I’m not sure I know the answer, and I’m not sure I’d
say whether The Brick Testament does or doesn’t “mock” the Bible,
Christianity, and Judaism. I usually don’t think of it as mocking because
it simply presents excerpt from the Bible I think many people would find as
shocking as I do if they only knew about them.
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I was a little disappointed to see that you did not comment on my hypothetical
John Kerry scenario. I am honestly curious to know if you would find such a
website, under those circumstances, mocking? I may have taken too much liberty
in suggesting that you would be motivated to make such a website even under
those circumstances, and if that’s the case, just imagine someone else made the
site instead of you. What do you conclude? Is it mocking Kerry and his
supporters?
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We live in a day and age where it may simply be too dangerous for anyone to
create a Brick Koran, but surely the blame for that lies on religious
believers willing to kill for their dogma rather than the artist scared for
his life and the lives of others.
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So you are back-handedly complimenting Christianity while mocking their
beliefs, knowing that you are safe from retribution.
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If “not so insane and brutal as to likely kill an artist for an artwork
perceived as a mockery” is something you want to take as a compliment, then yes,
I suppose. (Though as I explained at length in my last post, I do not know if
mockery is really the right term.)
And “safe from retribution” is certainly not guaranteed. While the few
Christians I’ve heard from who would apparently take delight in harm coming to
me are patient enough to allow God himself to give me my comeuppance by way of
eternal torture in hell after I die of natural causes, I realize I do run some
small risk of being harassed, harmed, or even killed by someone willing to
murder for the sake of religious dogma.
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Maybe we’re using the word revelation differently here. There’s the secular
meaning of revelation, kind of like “aha! now I see the logic!” and then
there’s the religious sense of revelation, kind of like “I am now convinced
beyond any doubt of this proposition, and no evidnce to the contrary could
convince me otherwise.” I think there’s a very significant difference, I
had thought you were claiming to ultimately base your belief in Jesus (and
his being the son of God, and his “correct interpretation” of the OT, etc)
on a religious sort of revelation. But now I’m wondering if that’s not
the case.
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But it also has a basis in reason.
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So as I said above, I will listen interestedly for as long as you want to
explain how your religious beliefs have a “basis in reason”, but as soon as you
bring in the nonrational (especially as a shortcut to certainty of belief), your
arguments become nonconvincing.
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I am not sure what sense to make of the phrase “beyond proof”? Does it mean
something more than “not provable”?
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Yes. Or, if you will, outside the peruse of science.
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Ah, like the invisible unicorns. Got it.
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Well, let’s be honest-- the concept of an omniscient God is non-sense in that
we aren’t able to make sense of it with our finite intellects.
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I’m not sure I follow. I didn’t think omniscience was generally thought of as a
logical contradiction in and of itself. I feel like I can conceieve of an
omniscient being. The logical contradictions between God’s oft-attributed
attributes usually don’t come into play until you’ve added at least one more
omni-something.
But I feel like there is a fundemental mistake being made here. If you define
God in such a way that the definition is internally inconsistent, it does not
follow that you have posited a God that our puny finite minds cannot ever fully
conceive of. It follows that such a God could not exist.
In just the same way, if I define a hoohoo as a married bachelor, it does not
follow that hoohoos exist, we just can’t conceive of them. If follows that a
hoohoo could not possibly exist because the definition is inconsistent.
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My point is that, like “art”, God is not only undefinable, but also
unknowable. We can’t even imagine or ever hope to remotely understand.
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If something is utterly undefinable, utterly unknowable, and can’t ever possibly
be even remotely understood, it would necessarily be an utter waste of time to
give it any thought because what possible relevance could such a thing have to
human affairs? And yet this does not seem to be the way most people think of
God. It doesn’t even seem to be the attitude you adopt toward God most of the
time.
Why just the other day you were saying that God is perfect. You seem to know
something about an utterly unknowable entity. Neat trick. And the day before
that you were explaining how God is not concerned with the minutia of worship,
but is concerned with how people treat each other. That’s quite a bit of
knowledge about an utterly unknowable entity. Looking over your posts, so seem
quite adept at defining, knowing, and understanding this undefinable,
unknowable, non-understandable God of yours. So you’ll excuse me if I don’t
understand what’s going on here.
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The purpose isn’t to solve the riddle of life, but to give meaning and
purpose to it.
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And this meaning and purpose will be supplied by means of an undefinable,
unknowable, non-understandable God?
As stated above, I seem to do just fine imbuing my own life with meaning and
purpose even if it is necessarily, from an objective standpoint, meaningless.
Even if your God did exist, I do not see how that provides an objective
meaning or purpose to my life, all life, or the universe.
-Brendan
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Message has 2 Replies:
Message is in Reply To:
 | | Re: The Brick Testament - More Teachings of Jesus
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| (...) Must they be mutually exclusive? (...) How? Via torture? ;-) (...) I'm not sure I even understand what the term "Son of God" means. I do know that it isn't merely a synonym of "Son of Man", "Lamb of God", "Messiah", etc. As for His revelation (...) (18 years ago, 22-Oct-06, to lugnet.off-topic.debate, FTX)
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