Based on the evidence I’ve seen, while acknowledging the pending nature the long awaited Parousia, I’m pretty sure Jesus died 2,000 years ago and stayed dead without committing one word of his good news to writing.
That said, if your god is capable of all the fine tuning you’ve attributed to this entity, and can even incarnate itself as a human being, couldn’t and shouldn’t he, she or it have written down the required dogma himself rather than leaving the job of transmitting basic human morality to long-dead middlemen and 2,000 year old hearsay?
Or would that more direct method be considered “too reasonable” by a being whose intellect purportedly confounds suboptimal human intelligence?
Alternatively, are you saying (as the Bible does) that our maker’s laws really are somehow innate-i.e., “written on our hearts”-which would imply that we can rely on our own god-given (according to the theist’s parlance) faculties of reason and conscience and therefore do not need to constantly sift through the work of countless and often contradictory Christian apologists, innumerable churches and internecine “Christian” infighting, or any other of the world’s assorted dogmas, in order to live moral and meaningful lives?
Just a heads up, the poster @JESUS_IS_WITH_YOU is long gone. So there’s no point directing questions directly to him.
FYI, If you highlight text from a post, a quote icon appears, and clicking on this opens a new post with that quoted text, and a link to the original post.
Pretty much agree with the rest, 2000 year old anonymous hearsay is about as weak as “evidence” gets, and for the most extraordinary of claims at that.
I sense the sarcasm, his arguments were relentlessly irrational, and he was pretty dishonest in the way he conducted himself.
The idea that morality must be underpinned by the dogma of mythology was never remotely evidenced beyond the claim of course, he just piled unevidenced assertions on top of each other. His championing elsewhere of ideas like panpsychism, were equally devoid of any supporting objective evidence, and his arguments were again relentlessly irrational.
In the 3rd post in this thread, I asked him to define what he thought morality meant, I repeatedly asked him, and he never answered, that says it all really.
I read your comments on panpsychism that were moved to a different discussion and am not here to champion it anymore than I want to become one of Jesus’ Christian Soldiers.
But I’m interested in the possibility that all matter may somehow be a crystalline form of condensed, nonlocal consciousness.
No objective evidence?
The panpsychist argument is “Of course not. Science cannot quantify consciousness so it must be excluded in order for one’s research to be considered scientific.”
This stance has soften somewhat since Chalmers coined the phrase “Hard Problem” but there is no denying the objections you mentioned and as have been discussed in many other places since time out of mind, given that the concept predates Christianity.
That said, I understand there’s another thread on panpsychism in Forum so I’ll check it out.
I didn’t realize it until I moved out of Tucson a few years ago but the University of Arizona has been running conferences on the topic for over 20 years.
Roger Penrose made a presentation in 2021 to celebrate his 90th birthday as well as having won the Nobel Prize in physics in 2020 but I missed that, as well.
Like I said, I’m not ready to devout myself to panpsychism just yet, as I’m pretty sure it will forever remain unfalsifiable and thus a religious belief rather than an objective fact or predictive theory.
I agree, this means it is also untestible of course, remains unevidenced, and of course seems to have no explanatory powers for the origins of consciousness.
Whilst this largely remains unexplained as an emergent property of an evolved brain, there is at least some objective evidence to support this.
I will withhold belief from all unfalsifiable ideas, and remain agnostic as well, as I must.
While I think we would agree that hearsay and eyewitness testimony are not the most reliable sources when trying to get at the truth they are, in fact, evidence of a sort.
So while I, like everyone one else on the planet, admit that I have no empirical evidence to demonstrate that I am a conscious being, this can also be said of many other “things” that we know are “real” even if we cannot touch them physically; love, hate, fear, our memories, logic, etc.
A fine point obviously but then again, if panpsychism’s most basic axiom is correct, subjectivity could be the most elementary component of the material world.
Again, I’m not committing to that assertion any more than I’m happy about the current political or environmental climate.
But if you’re saying I can’t prove that I’m a conscious entity because I have no physical evidence, I’d counter by saying that I nothing but hearsay evidence to show you are an atheist, and in which case it seems we really don’t have much to talk about.
I think this is a little like pain, whilst the exeprience is entirely subjective, we can point to objective evidence or markers that it exists. And of course we can point to the objective evidence that when the brain dies, the consciousness disappears every time, when the brain is damaged consciousness is impaired, and we can monitor areas of the brain that register different things, and how those physiological processes are impaired when those areas of the brain are damaged. So this does seem like empirical evidence that subjective consciousness exists in humans, and is likely an emergent property of our evolved brains.
But how would we test this most basic axiom, if it unfalsifiable? We can watch a brain die, and watch the consciousness disappear at that point, that to me seems like compelling objective evidence that human consciousness requires a functioning human brain. if panpsychism were correct, subjective consciouness would not need a brain at all.
Except perhaps that the claim to lack one particular belief is a rather trivial one, compared to the idea that all matter can have subjective experience, and we know that lacking a aprticular belief is possible of course. Our brains don’t form beliefs until after we are born, so it follows then that we are all born without theisitic belief, or as atheists. Though we may make a more informed decision later to stay atheists of course, anyone who knew nothing about the concept of any deity, would also have to lack beliefs about them.
