See my response to ChuckV. I used a crap source that I am not going to defend.
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Okay, no problem.
the only point I wished to make with my original reply to you was that not all Christians are dogmatic assholes who don’t care about the rest of humanity (tribalism of one variety). For some people, their faith propels them to do deeply affirming things with their lives that can benefit all of humanity. I just mean that we should look at the individuals and their actions in life, rather than just making assumptions based on something that can be as amorphous as their faith. King’s faith led him to sacrifice his life in order to create a better America. That wasn’t only because he was a Christian, or because he wasn’t. It was because he felt drawn to that kind of service work (which some Christians most certainly are, as well as plenty of secular/atheists).
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Yeah; I’m quite to prepared to believe that death is oblivion. If it isn’t, we’ll know afterwords, and I don’t think that my belief anything is required, or will change anything.
We’re going to get lynched. Aren’t we?
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Surprised it took so long for somebody to drop that. Yes.
I think the 72 are meant to be houris (nymphs basically) rather than deceased human women. But yes indeedy to the rest of what you say.
And frankly, always be suspicious of any moral code that spurns certain actions as immoral and then promises to reward you for compliance by allowing you to indulge in them for eternity.
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What I wanted to say before.
I would say that these are great people in of themselves. Just like religion doesn’t make people act like assholes. It just enables people to act in a way or use allusions which are socially acceptable.
Religion is less the source of their moral and outstanding behavior as much as it is an expression of it. Much like religion is used as an expression of people being assholes to others.
King’s beliefs and acts were far more universal than the confines of of his given sect, or its dogma. Incorporating ideas from many outside religious sources such as Gandhi’s writings, from Jewish activists, Anabaptist traditions of resistance to authority.
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I don’t think I implied that it was just his faith that drove his activism. HE certainly saw his faith as part of the reason that he did the work he did, however. I’m suggesting that we look at how faith can indeed be put to liberatory uses instead of just assuming that all people of faith are ignorant or bigoted, especially considering that bigotry and ignorance exists in places other than religious communities.
I’d also argue that morality, is in part driven by the structures/institutions that we live within. We don’t live outside those structures, but are in part shaped by them… like Marx discussing how men make their own history, but not entirely independent of existing material conditions.
But all of those are themselves religious sources, are they not?
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Works for me. 
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Glad we can come to a satisfactory conclusion for all! Hope you’re having a great Friday!
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I get it that this guy was a whiz-bang math boffin, but that genius does not carry over into other fields.
“Does global warming dictate that we must out-migrate to other planets” let me re-frame that question: Why didn’t the apollo spacecraft come equipped with an “escape pod” so if the astronauts got in trouble, they could leave the craft and get back home? Anyone who understands the difference between space history and space opera, gets it that the craft was the escape pod. There was nothing smaller than that, that could still function.
This is true of the planet we are on right now. There is no “escaping” our world, no “plan B”. Any hope of surviving the next century, has got to be directed at keeping this biosphere afloat, never mind constructing a whole bunch of new ones.
This is what Kim Stanley Robinson was trying to illustrate in his Aurora fable.
The environmental movement could take a lesson from how Cortés burned his ships. These dangerous fantasies of escape, only serve to distract from the work. ( that those who survive will have successfully accomplished.)
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Really wish more space cadets would read Aurora.
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And the TOS episode Who Mourns for Adonais?
Naturally, there’s a endless time sucking rabbit hole TV Tropes entry…
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“Everyone”?
Jeez, even I have my doubts about some of Hawking’s ideas, and I’m only just barely qualified to even understand them.` (-:
“Can not be questioned”?
That’s not how we do science.
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I’m an agnostic on strictly philosophical grounds. The question is impossible to parse. It is impossible to prove the existence of the divine empirically and the ontological arguments put forward by Anselm and Aquinas have been pretty much undercut by Kant and more recently by Malcom.
On the other hand, I do believe that it is miraculous that we can even ask the question 
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So… where did I say anything about “worshipping” God in my post?
As with a lot of these definitional argument discussions, there are assumptions on all sides, which makes having the conversation difficult.
Personally, I think that a God that needs worship is a pretty crap sort of God - that would just be a boringly enhanced version of a needy tribal chieftain, which is, again, all Zeus/old man with beard on a cloud is, really.
As we haven’t manage to grow out of the needy tribal chieftain stage of human development (or, rather, we seem to be rapidly regressing back to it, alas), I guess it’s not a surprise that this version of God seems to be making a comeback.
However, #notmygod…
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The question I meant to imply is, what besides being a creator makes God(s)? Power? Well, okay, but how powerful? Does their power need to someone causally independent from the physical laws constraining us and everything we can directly observe? Causal independence seems as illogical as 2+2=5.
Do they simply need to be more powerful than us, yet still constrained by the laws of physics? Could we be god or part of god? If so, how is that not diluting the definition so far as to be merely a direct synonym for humanity or the universe?
I suspect most pantheists are just using godhood as a way of referencing the mysterious aspects of the universe. But quite often they seem to believe they have some special access to knowledge about those mysteries that make it less unknown to them…a.k.a… mysticism…that they claim is fundamentally inaccessible by reason and logic. That’s fine, but since logic is at its core built on causality and anything knowable should be knowable through understanding cause and effect, that kind of mysticism doesn’t make sense.
Maybe mysticism is a way for them to say they’d rather seek understanding through emotion and intuition, not that it’s the only path to that knowledge. That’s cool, we all do that in certain aspects of our lives whether we acknowledge it or not. But as a tool for understanding cosmogony and the Big Picture, the results are bound to be fairly inaccurate.
Just so I’m clear, I have no beef at all with any of those options or any I’ve failed to consider. But I won’t accept that what’s sacred to someone else needs to be sacred to me thus I shouldn’t criticize the idea, while maintaining respect for the believers. What I sometimes find with faith is that because the ideas are so personal to their believers, they’ll tolerate debate of them only so far, and when they realize their arguments are failing to get me to concede the ideas are true, they no longer want to talk about it. Which is fine. Some get viscous instead of simply ceasing engagement, because they see arguments against their ideas as attacks against themselves, which isn’t fine, but there’s nothing to be done about it either. The latter is especially true with evangelicals, and a lot less common with others including mystics.
Sorry, I think you misunderstood what I meant. I don’t merely mean a god or person who needs worship. I mean a god who’s only actual property is the worship of it’s believers, in the same way that a word’s only actual property is its use by its speakers.
I agree that one of the main obstacles to theological discussion is the lack of clarity about assumptions about fuzzy terminology.
Oh, yes, I agree with this - it’s the First Amendment paradox in another form, really, isn’t it? Combine that with the solipsism fallacy (“it works for me, therefore it is correct and must work for you”) and a bit of tribalism (“we protect you from them”) and it’s not really a surprise that it all goes pear-shaped so often.
And, of course, the reverse of your argument is true too, which is why I get just as irritated by the evangelical athiests as I do by the evangelical “Christians” - they both try to tell me what I believe and, usually, why I am therefore wrong. And it’s usually fairly easy to spot the folk who are willing to have an interesting conversation and the ones who are not…
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Yes. This is just a sacred cow fight. Needs a gif.
Agree entirely. I used to suspect it came down to insecurity, that the need to convert others was rooted in doubt that could be quieted by getting others to agree. But that was mainly a view based on my experience with Christian evangelists. As I began to spend more time online I saw more of the militant/evangelical atheists. I don’t think most of them are insecure in their disbelief. That’s admittedly partly due to my own bias, I’m confident to my own satisfaction that they’re technically correct (while still being obnoxious jerks about it) in their disbelief in theism and certain forms of deism, and consequently can understand that they, like me, are secure in that disbelief. Whereas never really believing in Higher Powers, I’d had a sneaking suspicion those who did harbored a kernel of doubt that especially bothered evangelicals.
But objectively, the latter was pure supposition with a little bit of projection on my part, since I could not imagine myself being secure in those same beliefs. And the more I’ve gotten to known non-evangelical Christians, or at least ones that aren’t pushy, I no longer think that kernel of doubt is the prevailing cause, though I still suspect it plays a role in the pushiness of a subset of believer and atheist evangelicals.
My best replacement hypothesis is that the pushy evangelicals and militant atheists are mostly driven by ego, the intolerance of others thinking and believing differently.
True. Some of the pushy ones are more cunning, but they’re true colors always come out before too long. Most of them just start out belligerent though.
Anyway, I appreciate your willingness to have an interesting conversation, and hope I’ve reciprocated respectfully.
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