Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's needs, but not every man's greed. - Mahatma Gandhi

Since she says her flyers are from God, I thought it fitting to leave this here...

In the Summa Theologiae, Medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas said Greed: "it is a sin directly against one's neighbor, since one man cannot over-abound in external riches, without another man lacking them... it is a sin against God, just as all mortal sins, inasmuch as man contemns things eternal for the sake of temporal things."

This thread is a prime example of why I try to not argue with believers.

@shinyblurry: You do not argue a point, you state "facts" that you "know". All your "points" come back to "Because it says so in the bible" -> "The Bible must be true because it's God's word" --> "God's word must be true becuase he says so in the Bible"

It has been argued for centuries by atheists and theist alike. Some of the greatest thinkers that our world knew have tried to argue it and even with the greatest minds of christian theology, the likes of Thomas Aquinas, Agustine of Hippo, Anselm of Canterbury etc. etc. etc. it all comes down to the central circular logic fallacy of "There is a god because there is a god"

There is no way to prove the existence of any god. It has been tried for thousands of years and no one has ever acomplished it.

Since every argument in theology derives it's weight from God's existence....

I wasn't really a Alexander fan, but a Diogenes fan. Probably one of my most famous favorite philosophers, what other philosopher got into fights with people for being a dick?! One thing I did like about Alexander was his courage that was down right fool hearty. My favorite story is about Siege of Tyre where they build a road to an island, and the he climbed the battlements ahead of his troops and jumped over the wall and started fighting. His soldiers didn't, and slow to realize of his decision, they finally noticed Alexander fighting the city Guard completely by himself. This rallied his troops to the point that the Island of Tyre was taken by an ancient army without a navy, a thing of legend.

Sad to say, I have only a superficial knowledge of the teachings of the famous Thomas Aquinas. Most of my energies have been on more secular minds. With that said, though, some of my favorite Christian minds are Søren Kierkegaard and George Berkeley. I didn't realize that Existentialism actually has a Christian heritage, I found that rather shocking as most christian's seem rather dogmatic when it comes to finding meaning in their lives. It struck me as interesting that there wasn't a unified feeling among christions to the deeper questions of meaning in life.

George Berkeley's metaphysics are awesome. He represents the only metaphysical experience of the universe that I think humans minds could fully comprehend. Granted, that doesn't mean it is correct, but I think the human mind is really only satisfied with the notion of minds, it is why "Gods" have always been with us, we need minds to be in control.

Sadly, though, even those great christian minds could not save my faith. There were to many problem I had with Christianity and the Bible that my faith was finally crowded out by doubt. You might call me the seed that fell among the thorns that was quickly drowned out of the sun. To me, though, my "Thorns" are truth and knowledge, so I hardly feel embittered or lessened.

In reply to this comment by Lawdeedaw:
Ah, Alexander. I don't know why I think of him a hero--he was bloodthirsty and ruthless, but I guess I admire him neverthelss. (Saw your quote by him.)

BTW, a really good religious scholar (The only one I like) is Aquainis (SP?)

>> ^Opus_Moderandi:

Look for the comma...

By the time I found the comma, the apostrophe already had me thinking about nano-sized sphincters.

Oh, and you might want to edit you last post. Grammar is even more important in html than it is in prose.
--- ---

Shepppard, you are probably thinking of Thomas Aquinas and the Miracle of the Herrings. I suppose being one of the most-influential philosophers of all time, religious or otherwise, does not qualify you for sainthood.

"Occam's razor is the principle that the simplest solution is usually the correct one.

"The origins of what has come to be known as Occam's razor are traceable to the works of earlier philosophers such as Maimonides (1138–1204), John Duns Scotus (1265–1308), Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225–1274) and even Aristotle (384–322 BC)." en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam's_razor

nice post.
look up the true story of st patrick and the pagan women of ireland.
thomas aquinas was a FUCK.
st augustine wrote beautifully and poetically but was ultimately a hypocrite.he liked little boys and girls and whores..lots and lots of whores.
teihard de chardin is one of my favorites but he got in to a boat load of trouble with the church and near the end of his life started to back pedal.cant be having woman be as equal spiritually as men now can we?thats a big no-no in the church,original sin and all that jazz.
conclusion:men are pansies in the face of a strong woman.
it is like boobies have a mystical power.

^Why must you lower the level of discourse, rougy? Name calling and labeling are a bit childish, don't you think.

You're being outclassed and out-debated by a university student in her early 20's (and everyone else involved in this thread) while you, a self proclaimed "smart person," lament the fact that you haven't yet left the most wonderful country in world. As far as I can tell, the reason you feel you should leave is because people exist in America with views that oppose your own. I don't know what to say to that. I'm speechless so, I'll just site MLK on Socrates: "Socrates felt that it is necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half-truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal."

In short, debate is good for you, rougy!


MOVING ON...

To me, one of the most important things to remember in regard to civil disobedience is that authority is given to all to make the world the place that we want it to be. We are "endowed by [our] Creator with certain unalienable Rights." Remember that Socrates, Gandhi, and MLK had no formal authority. They were able to impact the world through MORAL authority.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote "One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws...

Now, what is the difference between the two? How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law."

St. Thomas Aquinas said, "An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust." He also said, "An unjust law is no law at all."


While we may have cushy jobs that we don't want to risk losing at the moment, it is OUR responsibility to keep our government in check. When the time for action comes, not a job nor jail time will dissuade me from "nonviolent direct action." Our governments continue to pass legislation that slowly whittles away at our self reliance and personal freedoms, and if we keep on this path we will one day wake up to a nation in shambles.

Two things come to mind when talk of real "change" or discussion of a "revolution" comes up: 1.) There has been a trend away from self-reliance in this country and increasing dependency on social programs. Are the social programs the cure for the dependency or are they the cause? As the citizens become more and more dependent on the government, they become less and less motivated to defend the common good. We are ever more selfish (hence the rise in mental disorders and depression, in my opinion) and 2.) Living in America (or in the affluent nations across the world) is becoming a spectator sport. We feel it is inconvenient to have to: research something for ourselves, become self-reliant, read a book, get out of debt, study history, engage in thoughtful discourse, be a good neighbor, take responsibility for our own actions and situation, etc. We are so "connected" to television, the internet, MP3 players, and mobile phones that we are becoming increasingly disconnected from each other.

What am I getting at?

Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego were willing to give their lives for religious freedom. Socrates gave his life for the law. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. devoted their whole being (and ultimately their lives) for the cause of freedom and equality. Change takes a lot of hard work and dedication. I mean, it takes EVERYTHING from at least one man. If we want policy change, we write letters to the editor, we start a website, we knock on doors, and so on. When it really matters (such as what the world protested against in2003, civil disobedience is in order. Anything worth civil disobedience is absolutely worth our cushy jobs. But, we'll need moral justification and moral leadership. I don't think that we're past that as some have said. I DO, however, think that wading through opposing propaganda would be more difficult today than it has historically been, but I digress.

The question I have is, "Which modern day issues/hypothetical scenarios would require civil disobedience to be solved?"


>> ^rougy:
>> ^thepinky:
As much as I respect your opinion, rougy, I think that your suggestion is utter drivel.
Pinky, this goes without saying, but you are exactly the kind of person that I want to get away from when I sell everything I own and move to Europe. I'm sick of butting heads with people like you, deedub, QM, WP, and all of the other rightwing chickenshits here on the Sift, and in real life.
It's just not worth it any more, to me.
But I did rethink my statement and realized it wasn't really civil disobedience, so here's one for you: blue collar sick-outs.
Every blue collar person in Washington D.C. should call in sick once per month, preferrably during the same week.
Delivery people should stop delivering things to health care insurers as a form of protest. Waitstaff and bartenders should stop serving food and drinks to industry bigwigs.
It won't work unless it's done en masse, so this being America, it probably won't work at all.
Marching in the street doesn't cut it. We have to hit them where it hurts: in their pocketbook.

Felix culpa is a Latin phrase that literally translated means a "blessed fault" or "fortunate fall". As a religious term it refers to Adam and Eve's fall and the loss of the Garden of Eden, known theologically as the source of original sin. The phrase is sung annually in the Exsultet of the Easter Vigil: "O felix culpa quae talem et tantum meruit habere redemptorem," "O happy fault that merited such and so great a Redeemer." The medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas[1] cited this line when he explained how the principle that "God allows evils to happen in order to bring a greater good therefrom" underlies the causal relationship between original sin and the Divine Redeemer's Incarnation.

The phrase "Oh happy fault!" is used in colloquial English, especially among intellectuals.

>> ^BicycleRepairMan:
Hydrogen atoms are not "creators" or Gods in any reasonable sense of the words. Therefore, on some level, anything that fit the description "god" has to be by definition, complex.

That does not follow.

To simply reply "no, no, god is SIMPLE, you see" isnt an argument, unless you can provide a convincing argument to support that, at the very LEAST. its like the kid who says he has fire-breathing dragons in his house, and when confronted comes up with all sorts of excuses. ie: "they are only visible to me", "they dont always spew fire" and "they are really, really quiet" Whats left isnt much of a fire-breathing dragon at all, and it boils down to imagination and wishful thinking.


You mean like the kinds advanced by Thomas Aquinas?

http://www.newadvent.org/summa/1003.htm#article7

The theological literature on divine simplicity is quite diverse, however, and the arguments for and against it are not exhausted by a single article from the Summa Theologica. One could bring up Saint Augustine's defense of the idea from the viewpoint of a Christian Platonism.

The doctrine of divine simplicity long predates Dawkins' argument (which is the only one of its kind that I am aware of, by the by). To advance it as a serious attack on theism betrays ignorance of the idea he's trying to attack. If you don't know what theologians mean by the word "God," you're going to have difficulty, as Dawkins does, raising an argument that does not involve a straw man fallacy.

You seem to characterize the theist response to Dawkins as some kind of ad hoc excuse for theistic belief. The fact is, however, that the response follows straightforwardly from the very theistic belief Dawkins attempts to criticize.



And finally, as I said earlier, even if it's true that God cannot be simple, a maximally complex God defeats Dawkins' argument just the same as a maximally simple God does. Unfortunately for Dawkins, the idea of a maximally complex God is one of the most popular alternatives to divine simplicity.

I think you missed my point. Dawkins says that God must be complex because he otherwise could not have created a complex world. I was calling that assumption into question; there is little reason to think it would be true of God, and numerous reasons (as many theologians have argued) to think that it's false. I was not attempting to redefine "God," but merely using the word as it was understood by, e.g., the medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas.

I think you get close to the heart of the theist vs. atheist debate when you point out that a particular notion of God is empirically unfalsifiable. Indeed, I think this is true of many notions of God. It is not the case that we can, by any empirical test, disprove the existence of God under many different conceptions. Those who attempt to prove the existence of such a God through empirical research, as the Intelligent Design crowd does, are making just as big a mistake in their thinking as the atheists who try to use empirical evidence to disprove the existence of God.

However, there are notions of God which can be disproven, or at least rendered unlikely, by empirical evidence. I think Hitchens makes such a case against Christianity--and it's a difficult one for the Christian to respond to, I think.

>> ^SDGundamX:
> Could you enlighten the rest of us as to when life starts since you seem so sure it doesn't begin at conception?

Saint Thomas Aquinas didn't believe that a fertilized egg had a soul.

he didn't agree with abortion, but still thought it took at least 40 days after conception.

>> ^Kraz:
Not to sound cheeky, but can you kindly point out where the bible states that the Earth revolves around the Sun? I've heard this before and it piques my interest because I know of no such passage.

It doesn't say anything about it, which is why the first popes took the most recent and celebrated work on geography and cosmology at the time, that of Ptolemy, as the base of their temporal doctrine. Later some Aristotle was thrown in retroactively by Thomas Aquinas, on the epistemological level. To make an analogy, this means that if the Christ would have been born in the 17th century, the first popes would have used Newton's Laws of motion and gravitation. They would have then condemned Einstein as a Heretic for his special and general Relativity.

>> ^Dadeeo:
This is what happens when "scientists" accept theory AS fact.

Theories explain known facts and predict (as yet) unknown facts. Theories are not facts, but their predictions can be taken as such until proven otherwise by experiments.

Too bad the theory's are constantly changing, yet every new one gets embraced as the truth without ever acknowledging the error of accepting the now former "defunct" theory.

Accepted scientific theories are never "defunct": they are expanded, generalized, etc. For example, euclidean geometry still has good predictive value under certain circumstances, as when the surface you examine is sufficiently flat. So are Newton's Laws of motion a good appromixation when speeds are not near the speed of light. Pythagoras' theorem still holds and his divisions of the octave still divide the octave.

How could you ever trust anyone that refuses to admit their errors?

Scientists admit their errors all the time. Einstein admitted that the cosmological constant was the biggest mistake of his life. When they're stubborn, death makes their outdated views irrelevant, as with Einstein vs. Quantum mechanics. In religions, being dead makes you a Saint, and your opinions that of God himself (or close enough).

The Bible speaks of them is "ever learning but never able to come to the knowledge of the truth".

Wow, postmodernism at its 1st century's best! It's true that ultimate, absolute knowledge by observation is now thought to be impossible, but careful observation over many centuries has shown that those who don't learn can't know and are doomed to repeat their mistakes.

Of course a baby's eye develops as it grows from egg to full term, but does that prove the theory of evolution? No! Do creatures with varying degrees of eye function prove evolution? No! Does a blind cave fish prove there is no God? No!

Maybe they don't prove anything, but they don't need to, since empirical science doesn't need and can't have "proofs" in the same sense as logic and mathematics. There are facts and theories that explain the particular facts. The theory that explains all of the particular facts and that is consistent with the greatest number of other accepted theories in other fields of knowledge, is said to be the most adequate. It is not impossible that new facts should reveal a hitherto less adequate theory to now be the most adequate &mdash it happens &mdash and sometimes two or more theories will seem equally adequate. But not all theories can fit the facts and be globally consistent. Of course, if you reject all of science or all of empirical science, then you may as well go live with the Amish, 'cause it's not God that gave anyone the knowledge required to build the computers we both used to transmit these electronic messages.