IS IT FAIR TO PAY THE SAME DEBT TWICE?? Divine Justice... (page 12)

Terry

The life we have is contingent upon how we maintain it. Make-believe waxed fruit does not nourish our physical body. What makes you think make-believe waxed beliefs can do any better?
Would you care if you had a placebo if it had the desired effects? Now we're getting into psychology. You're making psychological arguments while thinking your making objective observations. I think we need to distinguish the two.

Psychological arguments?

Hardly.

Psychiatric is more accurate!

Being taught (as most of us are) by parents, or society, or church, or friends that something fictional is reality induces a chasm in our world view. We see dangers where there are none and fail to see real dangers where there are.

Lies, lies, lies passed off as transcendant Truth destroys the ability of people (who are conditioned to believe in untruth) to make decisions of a practical nature.

The young, disaffected Muslim men and women who strap bombs on their chest and explode themselves in crowds of innocent strangers is an example of this.

You cannot be sane until you KNOW the difference between right and wrong.

The Bible's version of Truth is not a considered, logical, rational, philosophy of cause and effect as it exists in nature. It is entirely ad hoc.

Being a believing, devoted, submissive, practicing person of faith is to live a life of superficiality, narrow views, denial, cognitive dissonance and pretense.

All the while one is required to paste on a smile as false as the belief system which fuels it.

I find the arguments and lifestyle of so-called professing believers to be refutation enough of the superiority of their moralistic nonsense.

Terry

I think our disagreement comes down to what we assign as being abstract and what we assign as being concrete. You seem to take the position that the concrete is better in all cases than the abstract. I, however, disagree.

Yes, but WHY?

How?

When you fall off the roof you can believe you will land unharmed. You can pray. You can visualize, hope, argue and pretend all you want.

But, when you smash on the concrete below the concrete reality trumps the belief!

trevor

Is it fair to pay the same debt twice?

We have all paid the same debt twice and many times more. Each time we blame ourselves - again - for a past mistake. Each time we look back on the past actions of others and relive the hurt. It is all a trick of the mind that fills our hungry mind with emotion and entertains us.

Painful as this is it satisfies a need that the human mind has - the need to play tricks and to entertain itself with concepts that distract it from reality. We are inherently escapists and the pain and pleasure that this mental action causes are part of what gives the conscious mind its identity.

Was the greatest sacrifice, allegedly, ever made fair? Does it make sense or add up?
This thread analyses the absurd ramblings of a so called holy book and seeks to debate in a serious manner that which is admittedly hypothetical of fiction.

It could be said that it is sad that sane people buy into this sort of nonsense but if they didn’t buy into this then they would fill their lives with more TV of some other conspiracy theory.

It is all a trick of the mind, an illusion that distracts from the mundane business shovelling reality day after day. It doesn’t matter whether it’s fact or fiction because it is all part of the game we play to escape boredom.

Be seeing you

Trevor

Terry

Well, I've said my share and I'm going to bow out of this one and clean my room :-). Terry, while there is much I disagree with you on, you do give us some excellent points to think about.

It was enjoyable speaking with you even in this limited venue (we can't really see the body language or intonations.)

You have been a gentleman and never engaged in distraction or evasion. What more could one hope for in a discussion?

You've enriched this thread by your participation.

Thank you.

Terry

The real truth is that you do not know what life is and you cannot verify your definitions. Why not admit it? This is after all a discussion that attempts to get at the truth. I do not have to define it the way you attempt.

When a power outtage happens during a storm and your computer is shut down what is the situation?

Do you want the electricity back on for the sake of the electricity itself? Is ELECTRICITY the important element you miss per se? Or, is it the processing of the computer which allows you access to your data which is what you are after? You can't have one without the other.

IDENTITY is how you process your data. Your data is your knowledge. Your brain is your hardrive. Electricity is chemical reactions.

LIFE is the entire gestalt which allows knowledge, consciousness, personality, etc. to EMERGE as a particular living human.

Your definition misses the mark by a mile. You are fixated on electricity as a ghostly emanence which is more important that the actual data or the processing.

A person is not their body. But, without a body they cannot be a person. Christopher Reeve, you'll recall, lost most of his mobility. His brain (central processing unit) was kept active by artificial means.(Respirator, feeding, massaging of limbs, etc.)

His quality of life was reduced to his will to survive and remaining deliberately purposeful. He never gave up on the hope that science could mend his physical disability. But, when his brain shut down and no further consciousness was possible, then, Christopher Reeve no longer existed.

In your theory of what LIFE is; WHO was Christopher Reeve? Was it the chemical processing which ceased? Was it a magical infestation of a godlike ghost-soul?

You can't really say because you cannot define your concepts. You allow the printed pages of a metaphorical ancient mythology to replace your thinking.

Terry

Once again you are mistaken. Biblically which is the basis for such a discussion. Redemption means Life itself. Such life is no longer considered as having passed away but is sleeping.

LIFE is "sleeping"?

Your inability to define life meaningfully and not trip over metaphor has rendered your sense, well...senseless!

LIFE ITSELF is what? For something to exist it must possess IDENTITY. It must be SOMETHING.

What are you trying to tell us LIFE really is? You are telling us LIFE is LIFE. That is a tautology!

Something ("life") is sleeping without being anything which can sleep. Huh?

You can't go to a pawn shop and redeem a watch without a pawn ticket. The pawn ticket is the identifying representation of ownership of the item pawned.

The watch actually exists and the pawn ticket actually exists. The pawn ticket is not the watch.

LIFE is the pawn ticket. What is the watch?

You have REDEMPTION without anything to redeem other than your pawn ticket!

Terry

There is plenty of water and nutrients on this planet. But only blood can restore someone desperately needing it.

Only blood can restore...what? Restore what to someone? Blood?

Only blood can restore blood? Another tautology.

As any competent JW can tell you, most blood-substitutes are mostly sugar water. Even coconut milk can be used. Why? Because it is the volume of blood lost which is most critical. The loss of PRESSURE is what kills us when we lose enough blood to become critcally in danger.

A person seemingly brain dead and on machinery can recover

I notice you use the word "SEEMINGLY".

May I ask if you would regard the same sentence as true if you omitted the word "seemingly"?

If not, why not?

Brain death and body death are separated into two functions for a reason.

Your understanding of what constitutes a living person is left completely unclear.

There are babies born with only rudimentary brain stems. Are they people?

If you take a doll and give it a name and a dress it up and then, present it to your daughter, the child will treat it like a real baby. Does this make the doll real? Or, is it the projection of a fantasy onto the inert doll which seemingly creates a "friend" for the little girl?

This is exactly what YOU are doing.

Terry

Quantum physics posits that there has to be something else that is outside of the material, that's something that we really can't observe, but its consequences is observable, this thing that we can't observe. And assume that we can't observe in a language of quantum physics is given different names. It's sometimes called PSI, like the Greek letter. Or it's called a quantum wave function or it's called a quantum wave aplitude, or a quantum probability aplitude, or a quantum state vector. It has many different names but it essentially refers to something which is invisible which is a field of possibility rather than an a field of actuality like say for example a magnetic field is a field of actuality. We can see a magnetic field by shaking iron filings around a magnet for example. We can't see the field of possibility out there in space. All we can do is observe its consequences in time. We observe by making a number of experiments. We see that there was some kind of guidance principle through time that's expressing the things we see in nature.

PSI has pretty much been debunked.

JosephMalik

Terry,

Just more assumptions not facts. No proof just imaginary ideas and we are supposed to believe you?

Can you take the things you are talking about like electricity and chemical reactions and make life? No! My oh my, imagine that. So you really know nothing and understand none of this. That is the way I see it. Just how do you think you can enlighten others?

Joseph

journey-on

Terry, thank you for the reading suggestion. However, puleeez...The Skeptical Inquirer?...Phillips Stevens, Jr.? He's a damned anthropologist, not a quantum physicist.

IS IT FAIR TO PAY THE SAME DEBT TWICE?? Divine Justice...

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