I'm bound to what they [the Judeo-christian scriptures]say.
No you're not. You have chosen to be bound by them, so therefore you are not actually bound. You don't live in a christian theocracy. You can just walk away. Many do.
You, on the other hand, just invent the worst possible ideas and ascribe them to the Bible.
Isn't it that I show you where the worst possible ideas can be found in the bible? I didn't invent christianity. Some other people invented it. Have you ever questioned their motives?
We aren't talking about worship and neither do either of the passages.
So you think it is possible to worship something without any love for it? The two words are almost interchangeable in some settings. But I think you know perfectly well that you are commanded to love in the bible.
Matthew 22:37 Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.
"Shalt". Not may, or might consider it... and of course Mark and Luke repeat it. And they are just repeating Deuteronomy 6:5. This is what you have bound yourself to, and the imperative language gives you no leeway to choose not to love in this particular case. And don't forget the penalty for not following scripture. It's compulsory love on pain of hellfire.
Stuu: I'm not sure how you interpret my comments as deserving of worry on my part.
You keep talking about it, fretting.
Still not sure how you interpret it thus. Does something in my language display a tiny hint of concern? Let me reassure you then that there is none.
Your analysis leaves no means to judge which of us might be on the right track. You accuse me of being infected by a meme, but the same thing could be used against you.
Yes, as I discussed myself. But if it is a case of memes, my one doesn't expect me to believe absurdities like humans walking again after death, and humans born of one parent, and humans walking on the surface of water, and in cases like yours particularly, believing the
earth was created a few thousand years after the great agricultural revolution in which nomadic tribes settled to an agrarian existence, and some
40,000 years after the Australian Aboriginal people had begun inhabiting that continent (or possibly even longer).
I almost have a grudging respect for a meme that can corrupt a perfectly good human brain
that much. I am sure you would mock the comparison, but the scale of the error that this meme has induced in your judgement of likelihood in regards to the age of the earth is to believe that the distance from Taichung City to Hamilton, Waikato, is a little under 20 metres. That's impressive misdirection! Even you must agree if you could accept it for arguments sake.
Why is it not fitting? Why should we accept your assertion? Solely because you say the ideas are no longer popular?
Well I tend to agree that 'human nature' is very slow to change, and some aspects of it are probably close to static over millennia. But your own mythology must tell you that something had to change with the arrival of Jesus, so the ethics of ancient Judaism don't apply in the same way in 1000 BCE as they were 'intended' by the thinking of christians in 50CE. So why would that not also apply to other kinds of change in ethical thinking in the next two thousand years? I think it pretty obviously has changed radically, and especially in the light of science. Should we lock up mentally ill people and consider them deranged of possessed? While some christian cults (like Catholicism) still have exorcism, the rest of us accept that there are much more ethical ways to treat people, say, whose brains don't work in a way that makes it safe for them to be at large in public. I'm not taking some kind of moral high ground against you, I'm just saying there is and should be enlightenment that makes life better for more people. I don't think a bronze age view of morality is going to be very just in such an enlightened age. If by popularity you mean ethical consensus, then yes, popular ideas should rightly form part of our collective morality.
It all comes down to what you prefer and how you think people should act. What makes your assertions of how the world works something we should consider seriously? Evolution? Democracy?
Well, biological evolution is a fact and anyone who doubts it is either ignorant or a liar. That is not a matter of 'preference'. The really brilliant thing about science is that it is true whether or not you believe it. If you want to be taken seriously by any competent person then either you accept evolution is the process that led to your existence on this planet, or else you disprove it. No one has ever done the latter. In the time since Darwin the basic principles of physics, chemistry, geology and cosmology have been completely overturned. But evolution hasn't. I wonder why that might be. Incompetent creationists? No, competent scientists have failed to disprove it despite honest attempts. It's just a fact. It's probability is so high that it is perverse to deny it, especially when the alternatives proposed by the religious so often rely on claims of magic. That's not explaining, that's wishful thinking.</rant>
But of course you are suggesting that biological evolution should be some kind of basis for an ethical system. Well, no it shouldn't, that would be grossly, er, gross. On the other hand, it is not possible to really understand ethics without understanding evolution by natural selection, which is where some lawmakers go wrong in my opinion.
Yes, democracy. Your country of origin was the first democracy in the world, as long as we are happy to limit universal suffrage to adults. NZ hasn't done so badly, has it. And we certainly don't like being told what to do by the religious. Christianity is dying here, and that is a good thing. I like to think I might do something small to hasten its demise, but it has been found so badly wanting on so many social issues that it is doing itself in quite well without me, although not in the Pacifica communities or in Maoridom.
For example, christians (and no one else!) warned of the most ridiculous consequences of decriminalising homosexual acts in 1986, and in 2016 on the anniversary of the passing of that law, many of them were on TV saying actually it had been fine after all. And prostitution was decriminalised, and overall it made a big difference for people working as prostitutes that they could be open about it when seeking legal redress and health services, but of course we know who the main bodies out there who were wringing their hands about that one. And now an assisted dying bill is on its way into law, and once again it is the religious making themselves look silly with their dark warnings, despite contrary evidence from the experiences of other countries. It's not so much that the religious with their totalitarian and infantile ethical thinking have no place in the public debate, it's just they have made themselves unpopular because so often what they have to say is contrary to the evidence, or scaremongering, or has a history of turning out to be poor judgement.
Your worldview has no foundation.
What constitutes the acceptable properties of a worldview's foundation?
Whatever the foundations of my worldview, they are not based on lies like a human walking again after successful execution, or crocodile smile promises that you'll live forever. I like to think that my worldview is based on things that can reasonably be said to be true. I don't think you can make the same claim, although of course I am always open to being disproved.
"Justice by vengeance" is a tautology. Justice requires payment. If I steal from you, justice would be that you get what is yours back multiplied a few times, while I would get the strap.
Well I have already explained how justice can (and should) work without vengeance, so I'm not sure how much more help I can be. I think you have a lot of reading to do. This is another frustration I have with christianity. You would think, for a religion that claims high ground on ethical questions, that its adherents would be excellent ethical thinkers, able to move flexibly in and out of the range of different ways there are to consider ethical questions, and perhaps even understand how that relates to the development of an individual's opinions and actions throughout life. Well, even with my limited reading on the subject, I can see how poorly prepared the faithful and the preachers so often appear to be to engage in even the most inward-looking way of developing ethical arguments, and by that I specifically mean the degree to which christians, especially evangelicals / fundamentalists have not developed past the kind of thinking that small children do when justifying ethical choices. And this is not about excuses for bad behaviour, it is about choices to be made in any ethical situation. And that's what I think earns some christians in NZ many thumbs-down when they try to articulate in public an ethical argument on a social question: they so often show stunted ethical development.
Stuu: The promise of eternal life is an easy cheque to write but a difficult one to cash. If we are going to talk evidence, it is the religionists who claim a reality of living after physical death, so the burden of proof is with them.
Sure. Justice, freedom, love, mercy. These are real things.
How do they constitute evidence of living forever?
They mean nothing in oblivion. They also mean nothing if oblivion is all that awaits, because we know justice will never be completed on Earth.
Or, in your version, you know that vengeance will never be completed on earth, so you need a vengeful god to set up the grandstand where you may join Tertullian as you both gain pleasure from observing the suffering of the condemned. Sadism seems to be a principle of christianity, and if you include Catholicism then it's sadomasochism.
I think this might be about evolution by natural selection, actually. If you reject biological evolution then you don't have any basis for investigating why human brains go so disastrously wrong. Well you might have a religious fantasy that explains everything but nothing specifically, but actually since humans weren't created it will get you nowhere. Original sin and evil spirits and so forth aren't the cause of crime, because none of those things actually exist. Natural selection, bodging together bits of recycled phenotype that will just do the job of making the species fit enough to survive and reproduce, is the reason we have brains liable to go haywire because of their haphazard engineering-which-isn't-engineering. Without that, you haven't even started to improve anything.
Stuu: A model of death being final is consistent with everything we observe.
No, it's not. We see people striving for life and meaning.
Logic is not exactly your strongest point, is it.
Stuu: Nothing we observe is consistent with further existence.
Your circular argument: the reason an eternal life must be real is because justice is real, and justice is real because eternal life makes it real.
That's not only inconsistent with empirical evidence, it's inconsistent with logic also.
Perhaps it is just imagination that you lack.
Or perhaps my imagination is too vivid? Or both lacking and vivid?
This goal [of my vision of justice] is futile, yet you derive meaning from it.
No, I never said that.
Your life can have no meaning.
Did you choose christianity? If so, then you have still decided the meaning of your life, exactly as I have decided the meaning of mine. With a free choice, as much as we can have such a thing, there is absolutely no difference between us. If you didn't choose christianity, then something else has made the meaning for your life, and you are a robot.
This is a non-answer. The question challenges the very core of your worldview and your response is a joke.
Ladies and gentlemen, I'm here all week. The matinees are usually quieter.
Stuart
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