Isn't God Awesome?

by Perry 450 Replies latest watchtower beliefs

  • AlanF
    AlanF

    Abaddon is absolutely correct, that the only reason anyone continues responding to Vinny is that he's such a good sounding board showing why fundamentalism is detrimental to one's mental health.

    Vinny can only respond to reasoned argument with the standard Fundy plethora of excuses, lies, strawmen, special pleadings, beggings of the question, sidestepping and so forth -- exactly what we expect from their brothers, JW apologists. Given Vinny's penchant for these things, it would be pointless to rebut his nonsense in detail again.

    For me, several things stand out.

    (1) Vinny focuses on the notion that atheism is A BAD THING, yet he forgets that most so-called atheists are not strict atheists, but as Richard Dawkins describes himself, what amounts to strong agnostics. An agnostic is someone who hasn't got enough evidence about something to make a certain judgment. Nevertheless, evidence can be strong enough to act in everyday life as if a certain judgment can be made. Dawkins gives the example of someone proposing that a magic teapot orbits the sun between Mars and Jupiter. No one can prove with certainty that this magic teapot doesn't exist, but then, no one can prove that it can. And acting as if it doesn't exist gives the same results as believing with certainty that it doesn't. So Dawkins is really an agnostic, and I am too, in exactly the same sense. Such subtleties of thought are lost on someone like Vinny.

    (2) No one knows for certain what the origins of the universe or any proposed gods are. Anyone who claims to know for sure is fooling himself. There's no difference in principle between saying, "I believe that God has always existed" and "I believe that the macro-cosmic universe has always existed". Vinny and his ilk engage in massive special pleading by claiming that one is valid and the other is not. How do they 'know' this? "I read it in a book!" they proclaim.

    (3) Vinny clearly answered my question, "If God said that it's fun to torture babies, and morally right to do so, and it was pleasing to him for you to do it, would you?", in the affirmative: "If God asked me to do something that I thought was wrong, would I do it anyway? That was a part of your question I missed. My answer is YES." So if God said it was fun to torture babies, Vinny would accede. And Vinny would proceed to torture babies for fun.

    Again, these things are what make such blind fundamentalism so dangerous to humanity. Included are the Islamic types who kill in the name of Allah. Such fundamentalists can't distinguish between their delusions and reality, so if they experience a delusion where some god says, "Go! Kill!" they don't have the mental or emotional wherewithal to stand up to the delusion and exercise the moral common sense that most people have and not commit heinous acts.

    Again, good job, Vinny!

    AlanF

  • fifi40
    fifi40

    I think maybe we are all being a bit too harsh on Vinny................

    It is obvious from one of his later posts that he spends an enormous amount of time in the sea and i think we may be overlooking the possibility that he is some kind of land sea animal, perhaps nearing the point of extinction and that he is only part evolved............

  • AlmostAtheist
    AlmostAtheist
    "I believe that God has always existed" and "I believe that the macro-cosmic universe has always existed".

    If I can predict an objection and answer it, the universe as we see it today appears to have had a beginning, but I think Alan is referring to the stuff of the universe that has taken this current form. The "stuff" that big bang'd into what we see today may not have had a beginning. To my knowledge, no scientist claims evidence that it did. (Or didn't)

    Personally, I love the idea of the stuff of the universe exploding, contracting into a single point, and exploding again, forever. It's not a "belief", nor do I claim there's evidence for it, but it's a beautiful idea.

    Dave

  • LittleToe
    LittleToe

    Dave:

    Personally, I love the idea of the stuff of the universe exploding, contracting into a single point, and exploding again, forever. It's not a "belief", nor do I claim there's evidence for it, but it's a beautiful idea.

    That would be consistent with the entrophy principle.

    I once posited to ZenNudist (now posting as DreamerDreaming, I believe) that supposing during one of the earlier incarnations of the universe a species evolved sufficiently to escape the cataclysm. Perchance it might even eventually gain the ability to affect later universal incarnations and the evolutionary processes therein. This might potentially explain the incredibly early rise of sentient beings in this universe?

    Might this species be described by said later sentient animals as "God"?

    Plenty of supposition and a priori reasoning, but such is the realm of philosophy to give science a starting point to its hypothesise...

  • AlanF
    AlanF

    Dave, by "macro-cosmic universe" I'm referring to something I explained more fully earlier in this thread -- a sort of "super-universe" infinite in time and space in which a possibly infinite number of local universes akin to ours form and die, each with different sets of physical laws. Something like this was the subject of a Scientific American article a year or two ago.

    As LittleToe touches upon, these things are completely speculative and philosophical, but no more so than the notion of a super-intelligent Creator infinite in time and space.

    AlanF

  • nvrgnbk
    nvrgnbk

    Actually LT...........that kinda makes alot of sense.

    Go on please!

  • Paralipomenon
    Paralipomenon

    >>Of course parellpsos%&^$## (what kind of name is THAT?)

    Paralipomenon is another name for the books of the Bible called "Chronicles", if I'm not mistaken. Which I very well may be.

    Dave

    =======


    You're right on the money Dave. Honestly I've never had a theist make fun of the name before. That just showed me that Vinny is still using the New World Translation.

    He may have disassociated himself from the Witnesses, but it's very obvious that he hasn't left.

  • LittleToe
    LittleToe

    nvr:That was the extent of my comments to ZenNudist. We never developed the idea further, though I note with interest Alan's comments above about a "macro-universe".

    At this stage of human scientific development its very much philosophical, which is where I would place pretty much most all of religious theology. However it is with creativity and imagination that scientists attack the frontiers of ignorance. Piece by piece the reality of the world about us comes into view, sometimes supporting and sometimes refuting the philosophies we've held.

    While I regularly harp on about my personal experience with "God", I have to candidly confess that I have no way of scientifically reporting on it. I can philosophise and debate with others on the subject of "God" and the afterlife, but the honest answer is that we don't actually "know" many of the things that we'd like to believe. To each their own explanation of what their senses reveal to them - hopefully a little peer-review and consensus enables us to arrive at a fairly realistic picture.

  • nvrgnbk
    nvrgnbk

    LT:

    Your open-mindedness is a credit to your personally-held faith and a large part of the reason you enjoy so much respect from your peers.

    Thank you for expressing yourself and your ideas in such an accessible manner.

  • ringo5
    ringo5

    Dave:

    Personally, I love the idea of the stuff of the universe exploding, contracting into a single point, and exploding again, forever. It's not a "belief", nor do I claim there's evidence for it, but it's a beautiful idea.

    That would be consistent with the entrophy principle.

    I once posited to ZenNudist (now posting as DreamerDreaming, I believe) that supposing during one of the earlier incarnations of the universe a species evolved sufficiently to escape the cataclysm. Perchance it might even eventually gain the ability to affect later universal incarnations and the evolutionary processes therein. This might potentially explain the incredibly early rise of sentient beings in this universe?

    Might this species be described by said later sentient animals as "God"?

    Plenty of supposition and a priori reasoning, but such is the realm of philosophy to give science a starting point to its hypothesise...

    Hey, LT, just wondering if you've ever read "The Last Question", a short story by Isaac Asimov. This story deals with this very idea and really made me think when i was about 14 or 15 years old.

    Wish I had carried through with more thought about it, it might have saved me about 20 years of dubdum.....

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