So, @Soldier4christ, you’ve got a book that says a bunch of stuff. Okay. I have a book that does that too. Can you demonstrate that everything in your book is true? Mind you, I said demonstrate not merely claim. Stuff in my book can be demonstrated. In fact, the stuff in my book had to be demonstrable to get into the book.
There have been others here before you with the same claim you have brought. When asked, each was unable to demonstrate that their books were completely true. Are you any different?
If you are unable to demonstrate that validity of all the fantastical stuff in your book, then you lose.
The bible contains claims, but no objective evidence, it no more evidences a deity than the Harry Potter novels evidence Wizards.
There are no eye witnesses, only claims, the gospels are anonymous second hand (at best) hearsay, and the names were assigned them arbitrarily over 3.5 centuries later, in order to lend gravitas to the narrative those early church leaders preferred.
Nope, there is no objective evidence to support that claim.
Their, not there (sic), dear oh dear. Again unevidenced hearsay, and dying for a belief does not in any way objectively evidence that belief.
Now one more time, what are you here to debate, because your posts are looking more and more like proselytising preaching.
@Soldier4christ, I agree with other posters that it appears you are preaching rather than debating. So if you want to continue to post, please debate your stance, in your words…WHY do you believe? WHY should your book be accepted as factual or divine? Etc….
Whenever someone preaches unevidenced claims, especially when it comes to Christianity…it comes off silly like this example:
Let’s imagine that I tell you the following story:
There is a man who lives at the North Pole.
He lives there with his wife and a bunch of elves.
During the year, he and the elves build toys.
Then, on Christmas Eve, he loads up a sack with all the toys.
He puts the sack in his sleigh.
He hitches up eight (or possibly nine) flying reindeer.
He then flies from house to house, landing on the rooftops of each one.
He gets out with his sack and climbs down the chimney.
He leaves toys for the children of the household.
He climbs back up the chimney, gets back in his sleigh, and flies to the next house.
He does this all around the world in one night.
Then he flies back to the North Pole to repeat the cycle next year.
This, of course, is the story of Santa Claus.
But let’s say that I am an adult, and I am your friend, and I reveal to you that I believe that this story is true. I believe it with all my heart. And I try to talk about it with you and convert you to believe it as I do.
What would you think of me? You would think that I am delusional, and rightly so.
Why do you think that I am delusional? It is because you know that Santa is imaginary. The story is a total fairy tale. No matter how much I talk to you about Santa, you are not going to believe that Santa is real. Flying reindeer, for example, are make-believe. The dictionary defines delusion as, “A false belief strongly held in spite of invalidating evidence.” That definition fits perfectly.
Since you are my friend, you might try to help me realize that my belief in Santa is a delusion. The way that you would try to do that is by asking me some questions. For example, you might say to me:
“But how can the sleigh carry enough toys for everyone in the world?” I say to you that the sleigh is magical. It has the ability to do this intrinsically.
“How does Santa get into houses and apartments that don’t have chimneys?” I say that Santa can make chimneys appear, as shown to all of us in the movie The Santa Clause.
“How does Santa get down the chimney if there’s a fire in the fireplace?” I say that Santa has a special flame-resistant suit, and it cleans itself too.
“Why doesn’t the security system detect Santa?” Santa is invisible to security systems.
“How can Santa travel fast enough to visit every child in one night?” Santa is timeless.
“How can Santa know whether every child has been bad or good?” Santa is omniscient.
“Why are the toys distributed so unevenly? Why does Santa deliver more toys to rich kids, even if they are bad, than he ever gives to poor kids?” There is no way for us to understand the mysteries of Santa because we are mere mortals, but Santa has his reasons. For example, perhaps poor children would be unable to handle a flood of expensive electronic toys. How would they afford the batteries? So Santa spares them this burden.
These are all quite logical questions that you have asked. I have answered all of them for you. I am wondering why you can’t see what I see, and you are wondering how I can be so insane.
Why didn’t my answers satisfy you? Why do you still know that I am delusional? It is because my answers have done nothing but confirm your assessment. My answers are ridiculous. In order to answer your questions, I invented, completely out of thin air, a magical sleigh, a magical self-cleaning suit, magical chimneys, “timelessness” and magical invisibility. You don’t believe my answers because you know that I am making this stuff up. The invalidating evidence is voluminous
Blind assertion, and discardable on that basis. Indeed, until you provide genuine evidence that your cartoon magic man from your goat herder mythology actually exists, all your assertions on the subject are discardable. Going to learn this elementary rule of discourse sometime?
The scientific data tells us something different. Namely, that the brain is the product of around 750 million years of evolution.
And you’ve decided to waste yours, by treating the unsupported and frequently ridiculous assertions of a Bronze Age mythology uncritically as fact.
So why do so many mythology fanboys behave like robots, and particularly unintelligent ones at that?
Unsupported assertion and preachy bollocks, and discardable on both grounds. As are all your assertions until you provide evidence that your choice of cartoon magic man actually exists.
Plenty of us here are living and thriving without needing your imaginary cartoon magic man. You might want to ask yourself how this is possible, if your assertions are something other than the product of your rectal passage.
Ahem, there are 17 species of Mudskipper belonging to the Genus [i]Periophthlamus[/], which not only live out of water for extended periods of time, but in some cases are able to climb trees. Why do mythology fanboys always resort to simplistic bad analogies?
Again, numerous aerophytic plants exist, such as Bromeliads, which don’t need soil in order to thrive, and some of those aerophytic plants belong to the Family Apocynaceae, which includes several Genera of trees. The Genus Hoya is part of that Family, containing 500 species of aerophytic plant, some of which grow large enough to be considered small trees.
Here’s a clue for you: the Bronze Age came to an end 3,200 years ago. The human species has moved on from this.
Again, discardable blind assertion and preachy bollocks. Discardable also because no mythology fanboy has ever provided proper evidence for the so-called “spiritual”. We’ve seen lots of ASSERTIONS about this from mythology fanboys, but that’s all we’ve ever seen.
More discardable blind assertions and preachy bollocks. Do you have any substance to bring to the table here?
Ah, a variation on the Euthyphro Dilemma. Which no mythology fanboy has ever escaped from.
More discardable blind assertion and preachy bollocks. Also, “sin” is an imaginary offence invented for purposes of social and political control of the masses by a self-declared “elite”.
More preachy bollocks and discardable blind asssertions. Do you have anything other than this drivel to offer?
More preachy bollocks and discardable blind asssertions. Do you have anything other than this drivel to offer?
More preachy bollocks and discardable blind asssertions. Do you have anything other than this drivel to offer?
More preachy bollocks and discardable blind asssertions. Do you have anything other than this drivel to offer?
More preachy bollocks and discardable blind asssertions. Do you have anything other than this drivel to offer?
Er no there isn’t. There’s lots of ASSERTIONS to this effect from mythology fanboys, but no substance.
What part of “several here have done more genuine research than you’ll ever be capable of” have you failed to learn during your sordid tenure here?
And the preachy bollocks and blind assertions continue …
According to your goat herder mythology, genetics is controlled by coloured sticks. A 19th century monk taught us that this assertion is horseshit.
According to your goat herder mythology, the entire planet was once drowned under an extra 9,000 metres of water. Multiple lines of evidence from biology, archaeology and geology tell us that this assertion is horseshit.
According to your goat herder mythology, 1½ million people spent 40 years wandering aimlessly in the Sinai Desert, despite the fact that it only takes about 8 days to cross it on foot. Evidence from archaeology tells us that this assertion is horseshit.
Seeing a pattern here are you?
And we KNOW that this assertion is horseshit. How do we know this? Oh wait, we know that “sin” is made up shit, because according to your goat herder mythology, as you’ve just regurgitated, death and associated phenomena purportedly only came into existence after the episode with the imaginary magic fruit. Except that oops, death has been a feature of the biosphere since its inception about 3.5 billion years ago, long before humans ever existed. We have fossils of dead organisms dating back almost that far. The oldest known multicellular eukaryote, Bangiomorpha pubescens, dates to 1.2 billion years before present, and left fossils behind. More recently, various Triassic reptile fossils have been found exhibiting the clinical signs of a bone cancer known as osteosarcoma, the oldest of which, if memory serves, dates back to 240 million years before present.
Stop living in the Bronze Age.
According to the goat herder mythology you’re so fond of regurgitating assertions from, your cartoon magic man purportedly “created” two stool pigeon humans who were completely bereft of any ethical knowledge, and the only way that said ethical knowledge could be obtained according to your mythology, was to eat the hilarious magic fruit. The whole story is a crock full of plot holes from start to finish.
Crap.
Oh wait, childhood diseases have been found affecting various Australopithecus fossils dating back over 3 million years before present.
Once again, stop living in the Bronze Age.
Crap. See above.
Don’t play dishonest apologetics with science, it’ll end badly for you.
For the same reasons people have been willing to die for kings and political doctrines. Once again, stop living in the Bronze Age.
Only ASSERTED to have occurred, and in a mythology littered with nonsense at that.
When are you going to learn that “my mythology says so” doesn’t equal fact? Oh wait, I’ve just pointed out several instances above where your mythology contains blatant made up shit.
Define good and evil. What does good mean, what does evil mean, and why? Note that this isn’t playing with words. What is one man’s good can be the other man’s evil. Thus, you need a good definition of both terms.
Why pose such a question if good and evil don’t exist? Why respond if good and evil don’t exist? Who cares about this question if good and evil don’t exist?
It is important, because whether an act is considered good and evil can depend on context and on the viewpoint of the observer.
For example, anti-abortionists/forced birthers might consider abortion evil, while a 10-year old girl that became pregnant after being brutally raped by her drug-addict father might consider abortion a good thing.
Another example: Most people will consider killing someone an evil act. But if one can save 10 hostages by killing one kidnapper/terrorist, it can be excused, even a good act.
Therefore, good and evil depends heavily on context and who observes it. That’s why I would like your definition.
The classification of single acts into good or evil can be considered ethical dilemmas, ref. the trolley problem. For some interesting, yet absurd, versions of the trolley problem, have a look at the absurd trolley problems. Some of them are guaranteed to challenge your ethics thinking.
To specifically answer your question, they exist as subjective concepts like the concept of the number 1. By subjective I mean that they only exists in minds capable of understanding those concepts. If there is an apple on the ground, a mind may think that there is one apple. This happens because the mind in question compared the definition of the number 1 to the apple. The apple doesn’t somehow embody the concept of the number one.
The concept of the number 1, like good and evil, doesn’t objectively exist somewhere. You can test if something is objective or not by theoretically removing all minds. If you remove all minds who understand what a $20 bill then all is left is a piece of paper with some ink on it. The piece of paper being worth $20 and the meaning of the text and numbers on it are all subjective. These are sometimes called shared fallacies, like American soil, this computer is mine, there are 5 cats, etc. Subjective ideas are only useful when they can be properly mapped to objective reality (using definitions) and other minds also know what they are.
God existing or not existing does not affect these concepts being subjective. I can explain this further if needed, but a god could only claim some form of moral authority over good an evil. That is why others are asking about definitions here because they matter a lot when talking about subjective concepts. For example, the Bible will say things are evil, but never say why, or more importantly, what the full definition of evil is.
This is a good question. Discussion on subjective topics are both interesting and can be helpful. Good and evil are extremes and there is a lot of middle ground here that ethics also covers. Personally, I would consider a poor single mom stealing something to feed her kids, maybe not good, but definitely not evil. A rich person stealing to get themselves richer I would consider to be evil. Once again, those are my definitions and having discussions to see what others use for definitions and why they use them is worthwhile. The goal isn’t to try to create some list of good and evil for some draconian purpose, but to improve ethics to help advance us as a species.
There are two mistakes that theists make here. First is that somehow good and evil existing means that their god exists. This is just another post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy (assuming the source). It is also quite circular: “We know good and evil exits because of god, we know god exists because good and evil exist.” The second is that we should assume the moral authority of god exists when we can’t prove that god exists in the first place. If people made up god and religion, then they made up the underlying ethics too, there is no way around that. Therefore, it makes no sense to believe in some religion’s morality if there is no evidence of it being true. In ancient Mesopotamia religions, which Judaism is a branch, they would claim their moral rules, aka good and evil, were true because the god they believed in said so. That’s nice and all, but without evidence of this, I’m going to assume it is just another person’s rules with really weak justification.
I didn’t, though I’d imagine @Get_off_my_lawn was seeking clarity of your position, I have seen enough of your posts to know you’re evasive, and here to preach, but not debate.
What a stupid question, obviously to point out you already have an answer you’re ignoring, and now having repeated your question you’re ignoring it again, quelle surprise.
Lets try yes or no see if that helps, do you accept that people’s notions of what is evil or good are subjective and relative?
Why wouldn’t people care? People care about all manner of subjective beliefs they hold, you care about a deity you imagine to be real, yet it is an entirely subjective belief, and you can demonstrate no objective evidence it exists outside of your imagination.
Now ask yourself if the Natzis thought it was evil?
See, relative and subjective.
You’d be amazed how many people struggle to understand that money is not objectively real.
Again this is exactly correct, and even if it claimed to be perfectly moral, we could only know it was so based on our subjective notions of morality, that’s why the imaginary deities people create tend to reflect the knowledge culture and morality of the societies and epochs from which they emerge, then change over time as these change. Most western Christians don’t burn witches anymore, yet the bible says quite clearly they should, hmm…
Ding ding ding, we have a winner…the argument from morality is a circular reasoning fallacy if ever there was one.
“Arguments from moral order are based on the asserted need for moral order to exist in the universe. They claim that, for this moral order to exist, God must exist to support it.”
All animals that have evolved to live in societal groups would necessarily have required the ability to learn what actions and behaviour the group would and would not accept, if they were to live long enough to reproduce, natural selection at work.
As an example of the subjectivity involved in the terms “good” and “evil”, past mythology fanboys thought it was “good” to burn people alive for failing to conform to a mythology based doctrine. A disturbing number of present day mythology fanboys want to return to this hideousness.
This on its own destroys every piece of bluster and cant about “objective morality” by mythology fanboys, even before we recognise how ridiculous it is to present “Magic Man says so” as “objective morality”.
Indeed, the ones like @WhoAreYou who proclaim a literal biblical truth of creationism, must never suffer a witch to live, and must view people as an abomination just because they happen to have been born gay, and must look on new born baby and when admiring it’s perfection admit it is cursed with “sin”. View a genocidal barbarically cruel deity that commits and encourages indiscriminate murder, promotes wars of ethnic cleansing, and sex trafficking prisoners as perfectly moral, and accept (as described specifically in Exodus 21) slavery as moral, and a great deal more besides.
I mentioned 2 mistakes that theists make and there are really at least 3. The third is that they tend to conflate relativism (absolute vs relative truth) with objective vs subjective reality. They want to think that some how us saying that morality is subjective is the same as saying that we are a relativist. The problem at the core of this is that a definition cannot be true or better on its own. How we define green isn’t truer or better than the way we define blue. Just like if I define murder one way, and you define it another way, neither of those are more true or better on its own. Something is only true when those definitions are compared against something they are meant to describe and they match. Better can be argued to the end of time. Usefulness is a more important quality as described above since us all having similar or the same definitions allow us to communicate.
Even if you have some god say that this is their preferred definition for something, it doesn’t make it better or more true. All they can do is try to enforce it through some kind of extortion. They would still be bound by the fact that it is inherently subjective.
From my personal experience, people who make this argument don’t understand basic philosophy, because even if their misunderstanding was correct, it would still take a logical fallacy to jump to their invisible friend being real.
…in particular. It’s astonishing how many people, especially theists make this error. Dictionaries are compiled for clarity, as in communication clarity is more useful than ambiguity or confusion.
Since the first his posts have been evasive and dishonest. He is not here to analyse the snake oil, or test it’s efficacy, just to peddle it.
It seems like a lot of folks we get in here are only interested in selling their invisible friend and just ignore it when their points are countered in a reasonable way.