If you think Mormonism is retarded, why you think the Bible is any different?

[garbon]

I was talking about the core text. After all, all religious collect commentary over the ages.

[The Minsky Moment]

I was talking about the core text. After all, all religious collect commentary over the ages.

The "core text" we know today as the NT was at the time one of many. 

[garbon]

I was talking about the core text. After all, all religious collect commentary over the ages.

The "core text" we know today as the NT was at the time one of many. 

Sure but I already spoke to that. The key books weren't written thousands of years apart.

[Viking]

By effect I mean a relevance to conscious creatures. We can study that effect by examining it's relevance to conscious creatures. The Deist or Panentheist God are not personal and do not act per se, they merely are. I'll grant that these two God ideas are virtually impossible to test (though the Deist god can be tested in examining the start of the universe), however, neither of these Gods are personal or relevant to believers.

How can one determine personal relevance other than what particular people find to be relevant to them?  God clearly was relevant to Aristotleans like Aquinas, to Maimonides, to ibn Rushd; God was also relevant to the American Deists (e.g.) of the Revolutionary era who invoked God's name in founding documents.

Yahwe, Allah, Chronos, Odin and Quetzcoatle are distintcly lacking. They refer to a creator, it does not invoke the name of god. It does not ask gods permission, nor ask his blessing, it just observes that the rights are innate and not granted by nor revokable by men. Aristotle used logic and reason to determine that there are 48 (iirc) gods. Arstotles Metaphysics is precisely an attempt to study the nature and being of the prime mover. In aristotle's view the nature of the world tells you about the nature of the creator.

These men agree with me that the existence and nature and attributes of god (maybe not maimonedes, I haven't read him, so I don't know) is observable in the world around us. One of those attributes, as one gathers from Aquinas' moronic ontological argument, is existence.

The god that gets you a mortgage, helps uncle danny quit drinking and helps Tebow throw that TD pass is testable precisely because he does these things.

This god isn't testable either because its motivations are unknown.

Al Gazali burned Ibn Rushd's books. Now you channel him. I'm merely going to assert that Occasionalism is wrong and it is the only case where, if true, false belief is better than true belief.

If this were the case then we would see miracles happening all the time rather than a world made of of understandable material causes.

Your argument that we cannot understand God because he is not limited by the laws of nature if applied to lightning, the movement of the planets or biological diversity would have left us without an understanding of electricity, gravity and evolution.

Clearly not so as the experiemental method is competent for achieving that understanding.

Yet you would assert that study of issues that you assume are within the purview of god are not worth studying. Once lighting, planets and life were just that.

[Viking]

Viking - I think you have already said as much above but my criticism is that you have confused the argument with a Dawkins-influenced scientific argument.  It's a fundamentally flawed approach.  One cannot address theological questions scientifically without pulling science beyond its own inherent limitations - and it is those very limitations that give science its effectiveness and power.

The existence of god isn't some kind of magical fact that we can not know or understand or comprehend (insert more gobbeltygook). It is a fact like any other. The god you propose is one without attributes or effect (or is hiding the answer to the great multiple choice test in the sky to see if you get into heaven). If god has an effect he can be tested and these effects can be observed. If god has no effect he is irrelevant or functionally equivalent with a non-god.

[Razgovory]

Hey, Viking.  I have a question for you.  Do you believe it's possible that there are concepts the human mind can't understand?

[Viking]

Hey, Viking.  I have a question for you.  Do you believe it's possible that there are concepts the human mind can't understand?

I'm a philosophical modernist and believe* that all that can be known and understood can only be so through examining the material universe. So I do not believe that there are concepts that a material mind** cannot understand.


* My other belief is materalism, which is the belief that all things that exist are material.

** I am open for a non-human material mind (alien or AI or something else material) having ideas which we simply do not have the brainpower to comprehend. The factor preventing us from any understanding is always a material one, never the nature of the concept.


now, hit me with your pre-packaged apologetics.

[Razgovory]

Pre-packaged.   Your the one he trolls rational wiki for your arguments.  Why do you believe the human mind can understand all phenomenon?  Is there any evidence of this?

[Viking]

Pre-packaged.   Your the one he trolls rational wiki for your arguments.  Why do you believe the human mind can understand all phenomenon?  Is there any evidence of this?

I'm pretty sure that I pointed out that this is a belief, which in my book is an assertion which is held as true despite a lack of evidence. Modernism and Materialism are my two beliefs, I wish I could prove them but I cannot.

[Razgovory]

Why do you hold them?

[Viking]

Why do you hold them?

Lex Parsimony. They are the fewest and least significant needed beliefs to make sense of the world.

[Razgovory]

Why do you hold them?

Lex Parsimony. They are the fewest and least significant needed beliefs to make sense of the world.

Why do you need them at all?

[Viking]

Why do you hold them?

Lex Parsimony. They are the fewest and least significant needed beliefs to make sense of the world.

Why do you need them at all?

Because only knowing that I exist is not sufficient for living.

[Valmy]

Why do you hold them?

Lex Parsimony. They are the fewest and least significant needed beliefs to make sense of the world.

How does that make sense of anything?  It sounds like a good philosophy for observing the world but it says little about the sense behind why things are the way they are it only says how they are.  I mean I am not saying there even is a way to make sense of the world...but maybe you meant something different than that by 'make sense'.

[The Brain]

Why do you hold them?

Lex Parsimony. They are the fewest and least significant needed beliefs to make sense of the world.

Why do you need them at all?

Because only knowing that I exist is not sufficient for living.