I don’t honestly think we have to go that far. When faced with deviant behaviors, regardless of how common they are in the human race, it does absolutely no good at all to hide your true feelings. When you are sitting across from people like these, they can read you like a book. It’s honestly best not to apologize and simply state your gut reaction. The gut reaction is not ‘blaming’ or ‘wronging’ the other person. Blaming, or evaluating something as good or bad, is a judgment, a conclusion. A gut reaction is something honest and completely different. It is also different in different people: shock, surprise, disgust, confusion, etc… A core reaction before you get to ‘That is bad, wrong, horrible, etc…’ Being honest with them and expecting honesty from them is how a connection is made. People spot insincerity with amazing ease.
Thank you. I was kind of being tounge in cheek when when I apologized for being offensive to a necrophile. I know I shouldn’t judge, but sometimes it’s hard not to be.
Still, I try.
Our human reactions are often very appropriate. Unfortunately, most people are not in touch with them. Socialization, social mores, should, need too, ought to, must, the right way, good, bad, all get in the way of our gut reactions. Castaneda called it,‘Stopping the World,’ "GI Gurdjieff,’ talked about the Fourth Way. “Zen talks about being in the present.” In psychology classes, we called it ‘Checking in with the self.’ It all seems to be the same thing. A switching of focus from what is occurring externally to what is happening internally. A switching of focus from the message of the communication to the underlying intent and contextual content of the communication. It is extremely hard and much more so outside the counseling room than inside.
Did I miss a response from you about a passport for “Uncle Angus”?
Or did you just reassert I made a fallacy?
Here’s what I laid out before and would like your response to…
Hitler was not a Christian just because he claimed to be. He would have had to provide a “passport” (evidence) that it was so. His actions clearly evidence that he did not follow the teachings of Jesus. Jesus longed for the Jewish people to be saved, not massacred.
Luke 13:34 (NIV) — “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were not willing.
Um… this is the definition of a ‘no true Scotsman fallacy.’
Hitler? Hitlet most certainly was a Christian. The entire Nazi movement was also called ‘POSTITIVE CHRISTIANITY.’ Now your probably one of those folks who assert Catholics are not Christian, JW, are not Christian, Mormons are not really Christian, and over two-thirds of the 33,089 Christian denominations are not really Christian. This is what we expect from you. Christianity and Islam are “In-group/Out-group” religions. You are either in my small group and agree with me or you are outside my tiny group and damned to hell. It’s always the church up the street that is following false teachings. Early Nazism was a religious movement. It became more political and less religious towards the end of the war.
***** Positive Christianity (German: positives Christentum ) was a religious movement within Nazi Germany which promoted the belief that the racial purity of the German people should be maintained by mixing racialistic Nazi ideology with either fundamental or significant elements of Nicene Christianity. Adolf Hitler used the term in point 24[a] of the 1920 Nazi Party Platform, stating: “the Party as such represents the viewpoint of Positive Christianity without binding itself to any particular denomination”.[3] The Nazi movement had been hostile to Germany’s established churches.[4][5] The new Nazi idea of Positive Christianity allayed the fears of Germany’s Christian majority by implying that the Nazi movement was not anti-Christian.****** That said, in 1937, Hans Kerrl, the Reich Minister for Church Affairs, explained that “Positive Christianity” was not “dependent upon the Apostle’s Creed”, nor was it dependent on “faith in Christ as the son of God”, upon which Christianity relied, rather, it was represented by the Nazi Party: “The Führer is the herald of a new revelation”, he said.[7] Hitler’s public presentation of Positive Christianity as a traditional Christian faith differed. Despite Hitler’s insistence on a unified peace with the Christian churches, to accord with Nazi antisemitism, Positive Christianity advocates also sought to distance themselves from the Jewish origins of Christ and the Christian Bible.[4][5] Based on such elements, most of Positive Christianity separated itself from traditional Nicene Christianity and as a result, it is in general considered apostate by all mainstream Trinitarian Christian churches*, regardless of whether they are Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, or Protestant.
While it is considered apostate from mainstream Christianity, that does not mean it is outside the boundaries of our Venn Diagram. ******After the denominations in the Oneness Pentecostal movement, the largest nontrinitarian Christian denominations are the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Jehovah’s Witnesses, La Luz del Mundo, and Iglesia ni Cristo . You also have movements like Unitarian Universalism. You ever heard of a 'Bell Shaped Curve?"
Just because these groups are ‘fringe’ does not disqualify them as Christian. The ‘Trinity’ is not a biblical teaching. It is a teaching of the Church of Rome. Is the doctrine of the Trinity biblical? Does the Bible anywhere contain anything like the Nicene Creed? No. Does the Bible anywhere present a systematic statement of the doctrine of the Trinity using technical theological terms such as homoousios or hypostasis ? No. The only way you extract a ‘Trinity’ from the bible is by creating Dogma like the NIcean Creed.
The Church invented the Nicean Creed to pull all the Christian sects in the 4th Century together. To unify them under a single religion controlled by Rome. The early sects were NOTHING like the Christianity of today. We don’t even have a bible until the middle of the fourth century. Our oldest complete bible is ) Codex Sinaiticus has been dated to the middle of the fourth century.
Finally, The Nicene Creed was formulated in the year 325 at the First Council of Nicaea. It was later amended at the First Council of Constantinople in 381, leading to the version known as the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed. This is the version that is most widely used in Christian liturgy today.
The phrase ‘and the son’ is not in the original creed and was not supported by the Catholic Church until 1014, Pope Benedict VIII.
Bottom line — Close to one-third of all Christian faiths are non-trinitarian Get over it. .
So by the same argument, Jesus was not the son of god, just because he claimed to be.
LOL - Jesus was not a Christian Either. He was a Jew. What does that say about the fanciful Christian faith that came about after his death? Hmmm.
Of course they have nothing new. If, in two thousand years, they haven’t been able to come up with objectively verifiable evidence for the existence of their magic men, why would anyone expect them to come up with something new now?
You are using an example of a no true Scotsman fallacy, that has no relevance to your previous use of that fallacy, and you introduced Hitler not me. So there is nothing to respond to, since it is irrelevant to your original assertion claiming “what we think we ought to do, is evidence for objective morality.” When as my example showed, it clearly is evidence that morality is subjective.
That’s still your subjective opinion, and a no true Scotsman fallacy, and you introduced Hitler not me, to evade answering my question about your earlier unevidenced claim about morality here:
All you have offered in repose to this is the aforementioned no true Scotsman fallacy, that as well as being irrational, has no relevance whatsoever to my example refuting your original claim about morality. You seem determined to spin this in any direction to avoid answering.
So one more time then. do you accept that what we subjectively think we “ought to do” is not evidence for objective morality, **as you asserted,**but instead demonstrates morality to be subjective and relative, as my example shows?
You answer that please, and I have answered your fallacious claims about Hitler, even though it was not me who introduced Hitler, but you. However here is my response again:
Again this is no true Scotsman fallacy, christianity has over 45k different sects and denominations globally, it condemns gay people as abominations, insists witches should be executed, endorses slavery, ethnic cleansing, misogyny, sex trafficking, infanticide, and genocide on a global scale, and again this has been pointed out, and again you have mendaciously ignored this to simply repeat your fallacious assertion.
Agreed! He proved it by his resurrection from the dead among other miraculous signs!
So what evidence would you give that Hitler was a Christian? I reject that he is one by only claiming it for himself.
Nope. There is no historical documentation for that. The Bible is the claim, not the proof.
As far as Hitler goes, I don’t need to show anything. You’re the one making the claims.
If you believe that; then you don’t know what proof is.
That’s a circular reasoning fallacy. So does this mean you think all the other resurrections were deities as well? What about the other people who performed magic in the bible, like Pharaoh’s wise men and sorcerers for example?
Other than him being baptised, and claiming to be throughout his life you mean, and having Christian parents, and being an alter boy, and living in a country that was overwhelmingly Christian, and being wildly anti-Semitic? Or are you still peddling your no true Scotsman fallacy that removes anyone you have decided are “bad” Christians, so only people who you have decided are “good” Christians remain?
Parenthetically, the Pope Pius XI signed a concordat with Nazism, and turned a blind eye to the persecution of Jews, does this mean you think the Pope wasn’t a Christian as well? How about the SS who ran the deaths camps, Himmler and Hitler were pretty clear you had to be a theists to get in, and I doubt they would let Jews in, for pretty obvious reasons, so in a country that was 96% Christians, and had been for centuries, one wonders what religious views you think they held and why?
How about Sun Myung Moon, or David Koresh, or Pat Robertson, what about the Westboro Baptist church, or the KKK, they’re Christian organisation no?
Then there was Rudolf Hoess of course, the commandant of Auschwitz, shortly before his execution, Hoess returned to the Catholic Church. On 10 April 1947 , he received the sacrament of penance from Fr. Władysław Lohn, S.J., provincial of the Polish Province of the Society of Jesus. On the next day, the same priest administered to him Holy Communion as Viaticum.
So he’s saved then right? Whereas Gandhi is in Hell, obviously? How does this work?
I reject that idea only by claiming it for yourself.
“Atheists of gaps fallacy”.
Kidding. But we have biological correlates for all of the conditions giving rise to orgasm. The lack of a prevailing physical theory for feeling does not exclude the existence of one that might come in the future.
I’d wager you don’t have a mechanism for this apart from calling it “subjective”.
These biological correlates are also only occurring in the brain and yet they are objective?
The biological reactions happen in the brain.
Owing only to the absence of a physical theory which would demonstrate otherwise.
Then the physical processes are also subjective? Can’t be measured? Etcetera?
'kay, but what’s the but for?
What biological correlates, you know what the word only means right?
Glad we agree…thus our brains interpreting pleasure is subjective, just like our brain interpreting stimuli as pain.
What physical theory? Pain is interpreted in the brain of the sufferer, thus it is subjective. No one can experience someone else’s pain.
No, just the pain the brain interprets, a hammer hitting a thumb can be objectively evidenced, we can evidence that a brain interprets different stimuli, we cannot objectively evidence the pain, as it occurs only in the brain of the person who is subjectively experiencing it.
2 Samuel 12
"15 …And the Lord caused the son of David and Bathsheba…to be very sick…
18 On the seventh day the baby died."
You have not addressed this contradiction you made?
Or that one?
Or that one?
EDIT < I see I posted the wrong quote:
[quote=“christianapologist, post:64, topic:4909”]
Why is it wrong to torture a young child? This question needs no argument to support it. All agree.
[/quote] That was the one I was looking for. It’s certainly not wrong to torture anyone, a young child, a woman, a witch, a homosexual, or anyone else, if one feels a God has instructed them to do it. LOL
And I was surprised you missed, "“About midnight I will go throughout Egypt. Every firstborn son in Egypt will die, from the firstborn son of Pharaoh, who sits on the throne, to the firstborn of the slave girl, who is at her hand mill, and all the firstborn of the cattle as well.”
Never mind the songs (psalms) about the happy Christians dashing little ones on the rocks.
Or,
Hosea 13:16
Verse Concepts
Samaria will be held guilty,
For she has rebelled against her God.
They will fall by the sword,
Their little ones will be dashed in pieces,
And their pregnant women will be ripped open.
I know, I know, there are so many bible verses about God killing kids and infants that it is hard to choose from. I enjoy the one where pregnant women fall on the swords and their infants are ripped from their bellies. And the 42 boys being mauled to death by 2 she bears is priceless. I mean 42 bears mauling 2 boys would have been more believable. Can you imagine being number 42 in that line as the bears worked their way towards you.
I’m sorry, I’m off track. What were we talking about again? God’s love of children? My head is too full of Bible verses to recall what the conversation is actually about.
The “but” is for, “kidding about the “atheist of gaps fallacy” BUT (being serious) there is a distinct gap in your assertion that feelings like pain or pleasure are “subjective” experiences only experienced in the brain.”
Ie. we have physical correlates found only in the brain which fully account for the pain. There is missing scientific theory on what pain is, however we know it’s a brain state, we know it’s a chemical sequence of events, and we know it therefore exists in an objective sense.
Sure. “Just”. The feeling is “just” occurring in the brain. “Limited to”. The feeling is limited to the brain. As are the unique chemical and physical markers for the feelings.
Can you produce a mechanism for this subjective interpretation?
No one can experience someone else’s chemicals either.
And tactile sense receptors can be evidence. Nerves starting at the thumb can be evidenced. Electrical signals leading from the nerve in the thumb to the brain can be evidenced. A location in the brain where those signals culminate can be evidenced. The neurochemicals which transmit electrical impulses can be evidenced. Everything can be evidenced. However, the feeling itself hasn’t been described in scientific terms as of yet. There is a gap in scientific understanding which needs to be filled with a theory of how all of these objective physical processes in the brain give rise to the “feeling” of pain. It’s not really a “feeling”. It’s a cause or an effect of the objective physical process. That process is limited to the brain at the point of experience. Thus “being limited to the brain” or “occurs only in the brain” doesn’t define “subjectivity”. Nor does “produced by precise causes and effects” define “subjectivity”.
Oh Ratty, of course we can. Most mammals can. Some , like equines have a specialised organ under their top lip to scent specific chemicals.
When a mammal is ready to mate (including apes) it starts emitting pheremones…oh yes, those pesky chemicals you cant detect?
Mammals and other animals also emit different chemicals when frighted, content, not interested etc etc.
Really Ratty, do you think before you type?