Not so. I’ll bet more respect is acknowledged for Dawkins around here than say … Ken Ham, or especially Kent Hovind; and even those would never be called devils except when somebody really has their dander up in a “get behind me, Satan, kind of way.” I know I’ve acknowledged Dawkins for his provisions of excellent scientific education on numerous occasions. But with regard to his theology … yeah … I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anything praiseworthy in that.
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Dear me Ani99. I hope your life is less problematic now.
You give the Devil his due I realise : )
What is his unpraiseworthy theology? Or anyone else’s praiseworthy one?
Somebody’s ‘a’-theology that believes / says: “there is no existence beyond the empirically sensible/testable, and anybody that claims there could be is delusional. Hard empirical evidence is the only kind of evidence that counts, and only knowledge based on that can be trusted. All other claims or convictions are irrelevant at best, and likely damaging and delusional.”
Types of theologies I aspire to (praise): “Truth matters - and there is an objective truth regardless of how right or wrong I or even all of us are about it. A willingness to knowingly start with premises and the humility to know they are just that - starting points - not proven or even necessarily empirically verified things - and among those premises that I do harbor and treasure for myself: there is a God - a benevolent God who, while beyond our understanding, is yet the ground of all being and is also good - i.e. loving - the very definition of Love. And (now to continue getting specifically Christian) that this God reaches to us in and through the person of Christ known by the Spirit and through testimonies from lives changed by Him and especially those recorded testimonies / teachings about and from Christ in scriptures. And finally that our hope is to be found in the person of Christ.”
That’s an example off the top of my head of the beginnings of good theology.
That is a bit hard to say because I feel the things he told me were too important to keep them to myself. Humane people need to understand how inhumane people operate.
So I have become an activist for social justice and now there is a horde of inhumane people wanting to “make me go away permanently” to put it in their jargon… because they say I am a loose tongued bitch. This is a war that has been waged for more than 20 years now since 2000. But God is on my side.
BUT if the experiments can be made without the proper conditions then they can deny the reality of a non-physical realm of information that is the basis of all material realities. This is the Mind or The Mind of God.
Here is how telepathy is being discredited.
Hello, Ani99.
I think any evidence for telepathy would first need to get established or ‘credited’ in the first place before there need be much concern over any of it being discredited. But in any case, that, like ESP, ufo-ology and such are fringe sciences at this point and won’t gain much traction in this forum. If you dispute those characterizations or want to discuss what qualifies as ‘fringe science’, then perhaps discussion of that in another thread (or you could even start one!) would be appropriate. This thread should at least loosely try to stay around Noah’s discussion of ethics and related theology.
Close. I like the premiss. But there’s a way to go on acknowledging how rational and completely reasonable materialism is and how good theology needs to come naked with a begging bowl and fullest possible respect for it. No hint of passive aggression.
I’m not sure how theology can “knock at the door as a beggar” at the same edifice of which it is the very foundation. In any case, Materialism would also be a philosophy itself then and also stuck in the foundation (or as a beggar at the door as you would have it).
But once inside, things can more or less function with their own internal consistencies - without anyone necessarily needing to find the exits or peer out the windows … is that what you’re saying? You’ll get no objection from me. I gather it is atheism you’re at pains to protect or respect here, and I think I’ve made it clear that I, at least, don’t insist that materialism as such must necessarily be inconsistent or irrational. Does that help put you at ease? I leave it to others to manufacture their own inconsistencies or irrationalities as they begin mounting their own philosophical offense campaigns, and from some authors like Dawkins, such things have been supplied.
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That’s been my impression. It seems all the regulars here make a clear distinction between Dawkins’ chops as an evolutionary biologist and his occasional tilt at slaying Christianity. Only one regular to my knowledge exclusively reads just the popular anti-religion screeds and generalizes from that to dismiss his science work - and plenty of other regulars have called him out about that.
Hmmmm. It’s rationally not a level playing field Mervin. It’s not 50:50, binary, a toss of the coin. And there certainly is no respect due to religion because it historically came first and dominates culture for all the thousands of years of history and tens of thousands of pre-history if not hundreds of thousands in its evolution. There is respect due to it for its genetic origin, our sacred moral taste receptor and respect due to the cultures and sub-cultures, ethne that are still bound by it.
But in the arena of pure reason, there is nothing beyond those respects; philosophical materialism comes first in a solo race. It isn’t chasing religion. Historically it’s leaving it dead in the dust and lapping it. The only competitor is its personal best. Reason has no competition, but itself.
To evangelize beyond the inertia of being born in to it, religion needs ignorance and weakness, desperation and even then conversion is about 0.1% - 1:1000 That was my fag packet calculation from some years ago, nobody’s ever refuted it.
Reason is Caesar and you get nowhere challenging him, telling him he’s wrong, ever. You just look a ragged fool in the marketplace of ideas. You’ll pick up, lift up some of the ragged sure and save them by eusociality. But not efficiently. By pass him. Ignore him. Subvert him. And truly serve the dispossessed as Christianity did for its first three centuries. Give people reason to believe without attacking reason and they will come out from under the hedgerows.
Enlightenment has brought social action in policy, has achieved vast increases in human well being. Reason as Caesar is the best we could have. Christianity needs to be a finer mesh network in that polity in which it is a beneficiary, a dependent, a supplicant. Or what’s it for? The elephant in the room of damnationism? That’s just ignorance. If its trying to save souls from a psychopathically self-righteous deity. it deserves to lie in the dust.
I see BioLogos on the way to standing up, as it allows creationism like mine, but it I more than suspect that it has the impediment of damnationism in its feet and DNA. But it is trying to network, catch, meet those falling out of fundamentalism where they are. I suggest it needs to direct people to Jesus’ first sermon somehow too. Have a reason to believe beyond being in dubious battle.
Happy Sunday.
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Thank you for your advice and guidance. I was just trying to make the point that while we are considered deluded by many in the scientific community for a belief in God, they themselves are not honestly doing the science that points to at least a non-physical reality.
And I feel that it has failed overall at that in this time of pandemic, despite some scattered churches doing a wonderful job of reaching out to the hurting and vulnerable.
Aye Phil. The vast majority preach to the converted, looking corporately, collectively inward. Desperate that the ‘unsaved’ have what they have and wondering how to evangelize it. It would be really great to see some morality coming from God. Until then we’ll just have to wait for the evolution of the arc of the moral universe.
Seems to me you are circling scientism like a moth to a flame. “In the arena of pure reason”, reason is no doubt king. But in the realm of reflection, particularly reflection on our own nature or on how to live, reason alone is impotent. I’m not saying off the rack religion is a sure thing, but many of the virtues Christianity extols are useful in those realms.
None of those virtues, whatever they are, is uniquely, distinctively, relevantly Christian.
I’m inclined to agree but still think Christianity can or could be entirely adequate so long as the rituals were an entree to an open ended process and not an end in themselves.
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Couldn’t agree more. Jesus would too.
What’s wrong with that?
I would argue that a subjective morality is much more preferable to an objective morality. A subjective morality is based on what humans want, our emotions, how we experience pain and loss, empathy, reason, logic, and everything else from the human experience. These are the MOST important things to us humans, so why is it such a terrible thing to base our morality on the subjective human experience?
Moreover, the arguments for objective morality fall apart, IMHO. It really boils down to Euthyphro’s Dilemma: Is something moral because God commands it, or does God command it because it is moral? If morality is separate from God, then we can determine what that morality is for ourselves.
Moreover, what if an objective morality went against everything humans believed and felt? What if objective morality said to kill all people who are left handed? How would you even know if what God commands is actually moral, or if it is simply what God’s subjective views on morality?
What people need to justify is their rejection of subjective morality.
If God commanded the Nazis to kill all Jews, would that have made it moral?
Others would also have the right to overthrow the regime that practiced what they considered to be an immoral system.
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So it would be “might makes right” then, eh? It’s a good thing the Nazis didn’t win that particular round then. And since the majority of Americans may feel at the moment that reparations or any affirmative action for past “sins” like slavery or treatment of Native Americans isn’t really any grave concern any more, I guess our treatment of them was not really immoral on this view, so long as the prevalent culture gets to decide what’s moral? (Lest we think the ‘Nazis’ are always on the losing side…)