How is euthyphro's dilemma "a threat to theism"?

Bloody hell, that oozes respect. As for me, my head implodes just by accidentally browsing religious subreddits.

Yeah, I am really looking forward to that!

1000’s of years, with theists making nothing but unsupported assertions, fallacious arguments, appeals to ancient texts, and appeals to personal experiences, and some random guy on the internet is going demonstrate the existence of a god!

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Actually, I think you are slightly wrong here, or rather, you could have been more precise. I suspect you mean 5000 years of recorded history of mythology fanboyism. There is no reason to believe that religious zealots suddenly popped into existence 5000 years ago. The oldest relious texts known so far are some 4400 years old, with the Epic of Gilgamesh in second place at around 4100 years old, but the availability of documentation of particular religous phenomena is limited by the invention of writing. Göbekli Tepe in Turkey possibly pushes the age of ritual buildings back to at least the pre-pottery paleolithic, some 10-12k years ago. And if the Göbekli Tepe turn out to have been buildings of a religous importance, there is reason to believe religion stretches even further back. Native Australian mythology stretches at least 10k years back, so it is not a far stretch to assume that the spirituality, religion and creation myths can be dated even further back. Also, there seems to be indications of possible ritual behaviour as far back as 600k years ago.

So in conclusion, the oldest recorded fanboyism is some 4400 years old, but there are strong indications that these or similar beliefs are significantly older.

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While your remarks are, of course, largely correct, there’s rather less we can know about prehistoric ideas about imaginary magic men, when these aren’t accompanied by diligent writing. Though I gather that said prehistoric ideas were more likely to involve nature spirits and the like, than the sort of entities one finds in much later written mythologies. Indeed, a quick search for “prehistoric religious artefacts” yields an assortment of “Venus” type figures with exaggerated breasts, and at this point I’m reminded of a facetious, but possibly surprisingly astute, comment to the effect that humans screwed things up the most when they mixed religion with tits. :smiley:

I’m also reminded of that amusing German find of recent vintage, involving an artefact that has been considered to be a prehistoric sex toy, which might also have had devotional significance of some sort, which dates back to 28,000 years before present. It would appear that religion and sex have been hand in hand for a very long time.

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Kudos to you sir, how I chortled at that… :rofl:

As far as religions go worshiping big boobies seems fairly benign. For things to really go sideways you need to combine religion with human sacrifice. Although it wouldn’t surprise me if some religion managed to combine the two.

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Whenever I read/hear those words, I think of this.

Fuck! If it’s sacrificing the small tittee ladies in favor of keeping the well endowed alive (to be worshipped) - I’m burnt toast!!!

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Me too, but I like to think that the god of big mammaries would be insulted with a sacrifice of inferior sized bazooms and it would be the extremely top heavy offered up for sacrifice. Only the best for the gods :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes: .

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On one my occasional random walks into the uncharted territories of YouTube, I came across the video linked to below, which argues, through comparative linguistics and mythology, that proto Indo-European religion(s) involved (literally) a “sky daddy” that evolved into such diverse pantheons as the old Greek, the old Norse, and the Hindu. Which again would mean that the myths surrounding this proto-sky-daddy precedes written records of religion, by far.

Of course, given the source (YouTube), one should be somewhat skeptical of the claims being made, but on the surface, it seems to be somewhat well researched. At the very least it works pretty well as a piece of light sciency entertainment :slight_smile:

Heh, the idea that an invisible magic man in the sky had a prehistoric origin is not new, and I suspect if you have access to the relevant anthropology journals, this concept may well be discussed in depth. Indeed, it’s an idea I’ve suggested makes eminent sense in several other discoursive arenas in the past, and I even recall one individual on the now defunct Richard Dawkins Forums contemplating writing his own take on this, in the form of gorillas inventing “the great Silverback in the sky”. :slight_smile:

Indeed, one thesis I’m aware of is that the whole business of fabricating fantastic mythological entities, was an exercise in trying to compensate for the deficit of actual hard knowledge, by projecting our capacity for intent upon our surroundings. When you have a species that has acquired the first prototype of an inquisitive brain capable of at least some level of abstract thought, but said brain is deprived of any hard facts to satisfy the requisite curiosity, fabrication of this sort is pretty much inevitable.

The worrying dark side of that last sentence being, of course, that any intelligent life form that arises on any planet, is likely to fall victim to this. Figuring out a way of avoiding intelligent life forms becoming infected with mythological nonsense promises to be one of the really hard problems …

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Yes, I am very well aware of that, and I didn’t mean to link to this as original research (there are some sources in the description under the video), but rather as a well done popularization of the recearch cited. Anthropology, linguistics, and mythology is somewhat outside my area of expertise, so I will have to make do with popularized summaries of the fields.

Thanks for bringing this paper up! I’ll be sure to use it in the future.

It is not an argument against the existence of God. It does not even address the existence of god. It specifically targets “MORALITY.” If you are not discussing morality, you are not discussing Euthyphro’s Dilemma.

If you use the Dilemma that way, you are building a Strawman.

All you have is a bunch of rambling bullshit. Are you going to address the Dilemma or not?

Straw Man Bullshit.

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