Yup. He used to be awesome. How he's a net negative.>> ^PalmliX:

>> ^messenger:
Don't wear fear
Just kill the blasphemer
"He [Salman Rushdie] must be killed. The Qur'an makes it clear - if someone defames the prophet, then he must die."
Just can't stomach this guy anymore. Textbook example of what religion can do.

Amazing how someone who thinks people should be killed for their opinions won multiple peace awards. One wonders if he would condemn members of his own family to the same fate...

>> ^messenger:

Don't wear fear
Just kill the blasphemer
"He [Salman Rushdie] must be killed. The Qur'an makes it clear - if someone defames the prophet, then he must die."
Just can't stomach this guy anymore. Textbook example of what religion can do.


Amazing how someone who thinks people should be killed for their opinions won multiple peace awards. One wonders if he would condemn members of his own family to the same fate...

Don't wear fear
Just kill the blasphemer

"He [Salman Rushdie] must be killed. The Qur'an makes it clear - if someone defames the prophet, then he must die."

Just can't stomach this guy anymore. Textbook example of what religion can do.

See now, here's a logical problem for me:

If the bible is the word and the truth then it is an absolute. It cannot be changed or added to or reinterpreted. It is set in stone - or more - it is set with the omnipotent will of god. Hence why you're able to quote it with such conviction.

And yet... That would suggest to me that if a man were to walk up to me today an claim to be a prophet from god. He is either a false prophet or insane. For that would allow him to 'amend' the word and the truth and the law - which surely, cannot be? For if the word can be changed and added to by man, then it cannot be an absolute. It becomes subjective. Competing amendments can exist. The Bible becomes a guide based on the latest prophet's interpretations of visions.

So what's different if a man claims to be a prophet happened less than 100 years ago?

Even rejecting the council of Nicea highlights a belief that the bible is an optional subjective interpretation - there for NOT a quotable absolute truth.

Holy crap.. Mitt's grandfather would have taught and made Mitt swear to this oath...

You and each of you do covenant and promise that you will pray and never cease to pray to Almighty God to avenge the blood of the prophets upon this nation, and that you will teach the same to your children and to your children's children unto the third and fourth generation

This was especially prophetic.

Those riots and killings, Sagemind, seem to me to be much more a function of politics than any specific religion. Also, the "Muslim people" you are invoking is an obvious abstraction of a complex, massive, and plural group of people/voices around the world. Isn't that much obvious?

I know where you are coming from, and a big part of me agrees with you, but I also feel that the way both of us want to react to the violence is based on propaganda we've been fed about Islam and its "violent" nature. Nick Kristof has a pretty good piece on this here (should you be interested): http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/23/opinion/sunday/kristof-exploiting-the-prophet.html

Why should he NOT have a wife? If he existed, then he was just one of the myriad prophets of the time, and just a man.

This whole thing is just crazy. Some people in another country make a video and suddenly a police officer from norway has to apologise?

Freedom of speech is as sacred in the west as a prophet is in the middle-east. The only one who should be apologising is the maker of the video if he wants to.

Also, this just happened:

Iran has seized on widespread Muslim outrage over a film insulting the Prophet Mohammad to revive the death threat against Salman Rushdie, raising the reward for killing him by US$500,000 (£320,000).

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iran/9546513/Iran-resurrects-Salman-Rushdie-threat.html

I found these to be presumptuous. They do happen to some people, maybe even most people, but they don’t happen to all. Many people of no religion, and despite immense tragedies, live happy and fulfilling lives, and feel happy and fulfilled on their death beds. I’d further argue that people with religious faith also get depressed. I suspect you’d counter that anyone who is depressed has insincere faith. That seems tautological to me, but either way, it’s moot, for now.

Well, the central argument of the video is that life without God is meaningless. You've already agreed with that point, so the argument now seems to be is whether someone can be happy and fulfilled with a meaningless life. I'm sure there are plenty of people who weren't believers who died happily in ignorance of the truth, but the question is, did they understand that their life was meaningless? I doubt it. It is not something that many people are able to face, and even if they could, they certainly don't live that way. In some way or another, they are deluding themselves and living as if their life does have meaning.

Some people do, at least in part. It’s a lot more complex than just a lack of hope though. For some people it’s due to a tragedy, or overwhelming cognitive dissonance, or it’s simply chemical, and has no correlation with anything in their lives at all. Maybe I’m nitpicking. I just want to make clear that depression is a mental disorder and is not a synonym for, "lack of hope because I don’t have God in my life."

Hope is what keeps people going. Without hope, you are just going through the motions. When you have hope and lose it, it is emotionally devastating. A person without any hope is a person most likely clinically depressed.

You can call depression a kind of mental disorder, and some people may be born without the right chemical receptors for instance, but most people are depressed because of a lack of hope. A person, for instance, who worked their whole life and lost their retirement in an afternoon, or a mom whose kids abandoned her to live in a nursing home. They are not mentally ill, they are simply facing the cold, stark reality of their situation.

Here you slipped into metaphysical talk that means nothing to me, full of judgemental words ("sick and depraved") and terms that I had just told you I don’t accept as objective concepts ("evil"). You also know that I don’t think there’s any hope in your Yahweh God since he’s a mythological character, so I’m not sure where that’s coming from.

The point being, that if there is no God then no one is in the drivers seat here on planet Earth. I would be surprised if the extreme fragility of our civilization escaped you. If you look at history, and you contrast it to what is going on today, you will find that the new is simply the old in different packaging. We're watching the exact same game show, simply on a grander and more dangerous scale. Humanity has never been closer to utterly destroying itself anytime in its history than it is today. I'm sure, like everything else in creation, you will attribute that to dumb luck. However, if you think everything is a numbers game, then sooner or later the odds say that cooler heads will not prevail and there will be a civilization annihilating calamity. The truth is, it is only the sovereign hand of God that is restraining this from happening.

The reason I made that comment about God is because of your comment about your depression. The reason you have that feeling that if you believed in God you wouldn't be depressed is because you know there is hope in God.

(Also, not that it’s critical to the discussion, but I’d like a reference for your poll about young people not knowing who Hitler was.)

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2012/06/29/half-german-teens-dont-know-hitler-dictator_n_163659 3.html

Now, about "bliss". I didn’t define what I meant by that, so you didn’t understand it. I’ll make up for that now. By “bliss”, I don’t mean immediate pleasure, or instant gratification, or fulfillment of a goal, or basically anything you mentioned. I do mean a great powerful feeling of being centred, being in tune, achieving self-fulfillment, overflowing joy, love, inner peace, elation, connection, lightness, "harmony", "rapture" or a feeling that many describe as "doing what I was born to do/meant to be doing" or "transcendent". It’s the kind of happy that boosts your immune system and makes people around you feel good about themselves as well. (The words in quotes aren’t words I tend to use myself—I’m employing them to help clarify the concept I’m talking about.)

If you understand now what I mean by "bliss" (as opposed to instant gratification, etc.), you’ll understand that people don’t follow their bliss and rape people, nor find inner peace by beating their wives, and so there’s no need to append any rules about not hurting. I can’t imagine how anybody’s bliss could ever include causing harm to other people, but I’ll even address that hypothetical, towards the end of this comment.

Thanks for the elaboration. I am familiar with the philosophy of Sam Harris, and I figured you were borrowing from him, but it is good to know where you stand. My original point, however, still stands. You say you can't imagine someone finding bliss in hurting people. Well, have you ever heard of psychopaths? They do indeed find their bliss in acquiring power and control and making other people miserable, and they feel absolutely no remorse for doing so.

You also say that you feel the best state of a human being is to be blissfully happy. I'm sure everyone will agree with you that feeling blissfully happy is good. However, why should we believe this is actually what good is?. Yes, it feels good to feel good, but this doesn't tell us why we *ought* to do anything. Maybe this is just incredibly selfish and the opposite of good, or somewhere in the middle is true, or maybe none of it. You give no actual reason (beyond arbitrary statements like that which makes the world better or worse) to equate feeling good with moral goodness. In a meaningless Universe, neither is there any basis for thinking that you have any moral duties. This leads me to some questions that you didn't actually address in the last post. Let me ask them again because they are central to this discussion:

In a meaningless Universe there is no actual right and wrong, so why shouldn't you just do whatever you want? Why waste your time trying to navigate some moral landscape that you don't even believe really exists? Why not just take what you can, when you can, before you lose the opportunity?

I'll also address some of your comments:

In all cases, whatever they did, it was because they were feeling bad about something, weren’t centred, and reacted from "lizard brain" instincts of individual survival rather than from human compassion

People do evil because they get carried away by their lusts and become enticed. You view this as some sort of ignorance, or automatic function. Not so. When a person is doing wrong, they are almost always entirely aware of this, but simply override their moral restraints with their desire to fulfill their lusts. People are responsible for the evil that they do, not society, environmental factors, their parents, or anything else.

Divine morality isn’t necessary. Having any collective understanding of what is good and what is bad is enough. For most of humanity’s existence, even up to now, there hasn’t been a clear standard. In patches of geography where there was one, it only applied well to that time and culture. Just as ordinary people supplanted kings and emperors as absolute leaders without society collapsing, and just as ordinary people supplanted religions are sole arbiters of the law without society collapsing, ordinary people can supplant religion as arbiter of what is good and what is bad as well, and society will continue not to collapse.

I've already agreed with you that we all have a God given conscience that tells us right from wrong. Therefore, we don't need to read the bible to know that it is wrong to murder or steal. However, what God has commanded is that we all repent and believe in the gospel. This is something you aren't going to intuitively understand without being told.

And better than a list of what’s good and what’s bad is a system that determines for us what’s good and what’s bad. I’ve seen one model that I like, delivered by Sam Harris. The most salient bit starts at about 10:00 and runs to around 27:30. If you don’t want to watch it now, I’ll summarise the most important ideas: For a moral code to have meaning, it has to apply to some form of consciousness – it cannot apply to rocks and dust. Then there’s the central point which requires you to imagine "the worst possible misery for everyone", and assume that this situation is "bad". "Good" is then defined in terms of moving people away from this "worst possible misery for everyone". That’s it. I recommend hearing it from Harris himself.

I am familiar with his system, to which I reiterate the point; what is the ground for associating moral evil with misery and moral good with "moving people away from misery". Where do you get moral duties in a meaningless Universe?

The three advantages that occur to me of this system over Yahweh’s morality are that it’s a simple system rather than a long intricate list, so it’s quick to teach, easy to absorb, understand and reference, hard to corrupt, and all-inclusive; there’s absolutely nothing random about it, so odd details like not being allowed to wear garments made from two different thread types won’t make it in and there’s nothing objectionable about it from the standpoint of people who just want to do the right thing; and it’s truly universal in that it applies equally well now as it would have in 4000 BC China, in 30 AD Mesopotamia, or will in 12 000 AD Mars, so it’s broadly acceptable too.

The morality that God gives can be summed up in two commandments: Love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and all thy soul, and all thy mind and all thy strength, and love thy neighbor as thyself. As Jesus told us:

Matthew 22:40

All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments

That's a very simple system. When you love God and other people everything else follows naturally.

Every act that is good makes things better for people. If an act makes the world worse, then it’s bad. Simple. Lots of generalities can be derived from it, like killing people is bad, respecting other people’s property is good, and there’d be no arbitrary crap about touching pig skin being bad or extra-marital sex being bad.

On the contrary, it's all arbitrary, because "what makes things better for people" or what "makes the world worse" is something determined by consensus. If everyone in the world agreed that torturing babies for fun made things better for people, it would be good in your view. If your moral system allows for this possibility, I think that's a sign its time to throw it away.

Even more generally, we clearly don’t require any god to tell us what’s good and what isn’t. We already have a conscience inside us that tells us what’s good and what isn’t regardless of laws. I know you believe that Yahweh made our conscience for us. Even if that were so, it doesn’t change the fact that if properly relied upon, a conscience precludes the need for an external set of laws. Any law that echoes what everyone naturally feels already is superfluous. Any law that contributes to human misery is morally wrong and deserves to be disregarded.

If this were true, there would be no need for courts, judges, prisons, or police officers. There are also laws which may make some people miserable but are necessary for the greater good.

You state that without a divine moral standard that exists outside our consciousness, there is no objective justice. This is true by definition. Without a true objective moral code, you further argue that nobody can condemn any action as bad without being hypocritical, so in effect, everything is permissible. This is not the case, however. Although the moral code I advocate isn’t "objective" in the sense that it exists beyond our consciousness, it is universal among humans. And if we’re only attempting to determine moral behaviour for humans, then a universally accepted standard among humans suffices, regardless of where we think it came from.

It doesn't suffice, though. Yes, we can both agree there is a universal morality among human beings. How is that fact supposed to serve as grounds to invent an arbitrary system of good and evil based on people following their bliss and avoiding misery? I could just easily reverse the two and say the existence of universal morality justifies that too. I could say that the existence of a universal morality justifies that we should all love eggplants and hate rutabagas. There is no logical connection here between the system you've created and universal morality.

If there is no objective morality, then nothing is really wrong. Any system you create in the end is a human invention, based on human interpretation, and agreed upon by human consensus. You still cannot get an ought from an is. Good could be defined as a world of people who love each other, or a world of people who love to eat children. What is wrong then is simply based on your personal preferences.

The arguments I make here don’t describe a perfect system. That’s wasn’t my intention. I believe they do, however, answer your concerns about non-objective morality being insufficient to guide humans.

I understand that this wasn't meant to be perfect. It has, however, raised more concerns than it answered.

>> ^messenger

The difference between religion and science is that science updates its knowledge based on evidence. That's how we make fun of religion: pointing out they do not update their knowledge based on evidence. Your question is about why we make fun of religion. The answer is that for a set of knowledge that is contradicted by evidence, we believe religion has undue influence, and we seek to reduce that influence. One example is that abstinence-only education programs correlate with rises in sexually transmitted infections (STIs). Abstinence-only education is religiously motivated. Science would recommend giving people condoms and educating them on how to use them, reducing both unwanted pregnancies and STIs.

People can read and believe whatever they want. When it starts to matter is when people who believe false things gain real political power and create laws that harm people based on the false information. Another's right to act on their faith ends when it begins to unduly affect the lives of others.>> ^dirkdeagler7:

Some nice hidden gems in there, like the doors reference
I do think that poking fun at the bible, and the old testament for that matter are seen as more clever than I feel they really are. I mean religious people could make endless videos about some of the most brilliant men in history PROVING to the world something that we now know to be not quite right, and then using them to make the point that science changes its mind and has inconsistency too (is matter points or waves people?)...but what would be the point?
Harping on the lack of logic in a book written by and for people in antiquity is a waste of time, even if the book was divinely inspired why assume that it would be any different than all the other books/literature at that time? If a prophet spouted off things about big bangs and everything being made up of tiny dots that sometimes acted like waves back then...he would have been laughed at or burned!

>> ^dirkdeagler7:

Some nice hidden gems in there, like the doors reference
I do think that poking fun at the bible, and the old testament for that matter are seen as more clever than I feel they really are. I mean religious people could make endless videos about some of the most brilliant men in history PROVING to the world something that we now know to be not quite right, and then using them to make the point that science changes its mind and has inconsistency too (is matter points or waves people?)...but what would be the point?
Harping on the lack of logic in a book written by and for people in antiquity is a waste of time, even if the book was divinely inspired why assume that it would be any different than all the other books/literature at that time? If a prophet spouted off things about big bangs and everything being made up of tiny dots that sometimes acted like waves back then...he would have been laughed at or burned!

Have you ever taken the time to look at what the apologists/"sophisticated theologists" of today are on about? Because they do not leave out the OT, even in its worst aspects: http://videosift.com/video/The-Obscenity-of-Christianity-or-Pro-Life

"Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions" Thomas Jefferson (on the concept of Trinity)

Some nice hidden gems in there, like the doors reference

I do think that poking fun at the bible, and the old testament for that matter are seen as more clever than I feel they really are. I mean religious people could make endless videos about some of the most brilliant men in history PROVING to the world something that we now know to be not quite right, and then using them to make the point that science changes its mind and has inconsistency too (is matter points or waves people?)...but what would be the point?

Harping on the lack of logic in a book written by and for people in antiquity is a waste of time, even if the book was divinely inspired why assume that it would be any different than all the other books/literature at that time? If a prophet spouted off things about big bangs and everything being made up of tiny dots that sometimes acted like waves back then...he would have been laughed at or burned!

I agree. And I'm a "religious person."

The vast majority of religious people are nothing like the members of Westboro Baptist Church. I have no problem with your general sentiment about being kind and loving to everyone. I have a problem when you say "religious people glorify in the hatred of others."

That's just a hateful thing to say about me.

>> ^UsesProzac:

Just because he didn't say hate doesn't mean it isn't in him. To act like that, to willfully turn away a customer because you look down upon them and their lifestyle? That's bigotry, intolerance of another. Especially in light of the bible explicitly saying not to judge others.
Terrorism, really? You're silly.
"Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's"
I bring this up because I feel that servicing a customer is part of operating inside of society and being an obedient and humble person, just as your religious text wants you to be.
Wielding judgement is for your god alone.
>> ^deedub81:
" I really don't understand why religious people glorify in the hatred of others."
Using the same hyperbole that you do, I can paint all non-religious people with as broad a brush by saying "I don't understand why all non-religious people are violent terrorists and threaten hard working families with death threats."
I'm religious and I wouldn't deny business to somebody for being gay just like you didn't (and wouldn't) call in a death threat to this guy.
>> ^UsesProzac:
Business has doubled since the incident? I really don't understand why religious people glorify in the hatred of others. I've seen it firsthand in extended family members and it chills me. How can Christians ignore the gospel of loving thy neighbor and judge not and all those other fancy things their prophet said in their own religious text?
@shinyblurry, how do you reconcile that hypocrisy within yourself? You're the only person I know to ask here, seeing as you called me a harlot and all that. When you judge another person and go directly against the words set down in your bible, do you immediately ask your god to forgive you or what?
Edit: I'll throw in one of my favorite quotes to further illustrate the rampant hypocrisy.
“If this is going to be a Christian nation that doesn't help the poor, either we have to pretend that Jesus was just as selfish as we are, or we've got to acknowledge that He commanded us to love the poor and serve the needy without condition and then admit that we just don't want to do it.” - Stephen Colbert