In the vast majority. He will deliver on their goal of denying women access to safe and affordable abortions. They do not care how gang rapey he is.

No comment about the actual topic, but a diversion to another topic.

You chose to talk about religious people and their role in the Kavanaugh nomination. Voltaire2's comment was completely on topic.

If you're going to promote what you consider to be good news about your religion, people have the right to disagree.

Or bad news?

Some people are religiously motivated to oppose Kavanaugh. More people are religiously motivated to confirm him, though.

are you using religious teachings to support following a "false prophet"? Bishops are captives of a political machine that leans right authoritarianism. I do not agree with your premise. imo

Precisely for the reason you stated, your post addresses the very heart of the issue. They have been brainwashed to believe that reversing Roe v. Wade will stop abortions, which is total bullshit. Celebrating the opposition of "some groups of religious women" as though it is a heroic thing to do is also bullshit. There is no reason for any Christian of any denomination, not one, to ever have supported this evil huckster.

make any difference at all. They will be universally ignored, both politically and religiously. If they persist, the RCC and its patriarchal hierarchy will squash them like insects.

This is religion in action.

Note: And yes, I'm back. The week ended yesterday in the Senate chambers.

The civil rights movement was not won overnight.

Slavery was not abolished overnight.

It should not have to have been abolished. Christianity, like many other religions fostered and approved of it.

Yes, I am cynical, in part due to statements like the ones you dropped above. And you do not even see the idiocy of statements like that. Feh!

What a combination.

This is not one of the former times. Slavery is not a natural human state, Guy. It never was. It is the worst social evil of humanity.

I do not tolerate it, nor excuses for its persistence.

My point, which you clearly missed, is that struggle is always necessary.

Slavery is irrational. It violates the very simplest ethical rule: reciprocity.

Prison labor is also slavery. Who benefits and benefitted from the slavery?

And struggle is the story of humanity.

Really.

Argues people make decisions based on personal benefit.

they soon can do no work.

Prison labor is specifically not slavery. The prisoner is not owned by anyone. Instead, it is a form of punishment for crimes committed, either real or manufactured. That is also not free labor, for the same reasons I described above.

slavery existed across the ages, across religions (or no religions) and seems to be constant for almost the entirety of human civilization.

It's only in the last what 300 years or so that we've (mostly) gotten rid of it?

Humans are really smart animals. Our nature is power. We thankfully have used our brains to think our way past our nature (mostly).

but just like racism and sexism, it's always there, lurking, will never be defeated and must constantly be fought against. So yeah, unfortunately, it is a natural human state. Fortunately, we are learning slowly to evolve past it.

societies that had slavery. There haven't been many atheistic societies, really, at least that we have information about. If you know of one that had the institution of chattel slavery, please let me know. I'm not aware of any.

unless you are expanding religion to include any supernatural belief at all, no matter how unorganized.

I'm simply postulating that slavery is older than organized religion.

supportable, really. Religion of one sort or another appears to have developed at the same time as homo sapiens. We also have almost no records of pre-historic cultural practices, so we don't really know if slavery even existed in earlier cultures. However, we do have evidence of some sort of religious or spiritual practices among those cultures that left enough evidence to judge that.

Since religion serves as a system for answering unanswerable questions and for establishing some sort of ethical norms, it seems to follow along the development of human cultures and civilization.

My neighbor just down the street is a Hmong shaman. That culture's religion is a naturalistic one, which believes that spirits inhabit virtually everything. Friendly spirits and mischievous spirits and even harmful spirits. I hear him conducting rituals in his home, which involve playing a gong, dancing and chanting.

He's an interesting man, but his English is halting, at best, so I can't really talk to him about that. His son has explained the traditional Hmong religious beliefs to me to some degree, and I've done some reading about it as well. Once I learned to be polite in the Hmong language, with greetings and the like, the shaman is quite friendly with me, and we've helped each other with snow removal.

His son's generation, however, is a mix of Christianity and the old religion, which makes for an interesting combination.

But, religion is part of human culture. Even more a part when knowledge about the physical world was limited. I do know that slavery was never a part of Hmong society.

If you are defining religion uber-broadly then sure, slavery and religion are roughly the same age.

But there's no real tie between them to say one begets the other, and again I don't think if religion got stalled in our developmental timeline, that slavery would have waited for religion to bounce into the heads of folks.

Power of the strong over the weak is a natural thing. We see it in nature. We see animals that enslave other animals (ants for example). We see hierarchy as a fundamental component of highly organized social animals.

Religion has played every role in the slavery business. It encouraged it and justified it in some cases (many cases) and it fought against it and decried it in other cases (too few and fairly recent). I'm sure it participated in it as well.

But the reality is that mankind and civilization is a slow process. It took us and is still taking us a long time to figure out how to ethically act towards each other. We still haven't figured it out. And the default setting is basically strong v the weak.

In any case, I haven't seen any information about slavery in prehistory. We don't know, I suspect. Certainly, it existed in the Middle East in Biblical times and perhaps before. But those places all had religions. I can't find much information about non-religious cultures at all with regard to even the existence of such cultures, and nothing about slavery in them.

that slavery was born of organized religion??

I see no evidence or reason why that would be. Certainly the concept of social hierarchy in humans has been there the whole time. The concept of slavery flows pretty clearly from that concept. You can't have slaves without masters, and you don't have either without the concept of a hierarchy.

Certainly religions helped justify, continue, support slavery, but religions helped support murder, rape and other crimes, and no one believes those things didn't exist pre-organized religion.

We know virtually nothing about the development of religion in prehistorical times. The written word is part of the developing of cities, trade and what we call civilization. So, by the time we have stories, civilization was already in place.

Religion predates civilization. That's virtually certain. Slavery, however, requires supervision, so it probably didn't develop until people lived in areas in more concentrated populations. A small tribal unit probably wouldn't be able to support slave labor, and agriculture and construction of buildings was probably the first use of slaves. Both of those developed to support higher population densities.

It's not all that simple, really. And we have no records before writing developed. Even cuneiform and hieroglyphics came out of more densely populated civiilizations. Religion, on the other hand, developed even in nomadic and small village cultures. That we know from isolated village cultures within historic times.

Some sort of belief in the supernatural was probably present the moment mankind had the capacity to contemplate death. What happens when we die is a pretty complicated thought process that only humans appear to have. But organized religion I think requires civilization to exist. You need that structure. I would argue civilization predates organized religion. Maybe not by much.

A civilization used an organized religion to provide order and justification. A common set of beliefs.

I get that the idea of what is a religion, and what is an organized religion are squishy ideas at best.

Religion, itself, has no such requirement and is a fundamental aspect of most cultures,even small primitive ones. I think that if you mean organized religion, you must indicate that each time. Otherwise, you risk confusion.

Truly. And religion is a very broad thing. Our Native American tribes had religion. It wasn't universal, nor was it very organized, but it was religion. It had rituals and the whole gamut of religious nonsense. And yet, we don't actually know all that much about it. Instead, when we encounter aboriginal cultures we foist our religion off onto them.

Religion is, I believe, a thing of every culture. It might not look like our modern religions, but a volcano god is a god nevertheless. If the local religion requires heaving a virgin down into the caldera, then there you go.

He gave four just about himself, but he couldn't add one saying people shouldn't own other people.

How can a diety who say free will is the most important thing for humans also say it it alright to take all freedom away from someone?

Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbour's.

can't dispute that.

just the same as houses, livestock, and wives.

who wrote the Bible were fine with it.

at the least inspired by God, if not wrote as conduits for God, we can only conclude if God exists, he is not against slavery.

we can only conclude that someone invoked the authority of "God" to sell a book.

If God exists we have no idea what such an entity would be like, how such an entity would think...except to make the baseline assumption that such an entity would use logic, be at least as smart as us and at least as ethical as us.

If God exists, it may be a sadistic evil monster that derives pleasure from watching human beings and other animals suffer and die.

Brings certain qualities like omniscience or near omniscience and that to me makes it unlikely such an entity is evil and sadistic (and if it were, life can be much much worse).

I don't think there is a Good mind you

that would make a god that had that quality unlikely to be evil or sadistic?

Life is and has been much, much worse for most of the people who have lived on earth, both past and present.

a life of misery and pain that far outweighs what goes on now. Centuries of torture and misery. I am pretty sure an evil twisted God can imagine even more.

Intelligence and evil don't tend to last long together. Intelligence and knowledge is literally the key to defeating evil.

The children dying right now of cancer and AIDS and starvation and burns and whatever other slow, painful, lingering ways, with no medical attention or pain relief may not be able to imagine it, but you can. Isn't that nice.

Mark Twain had it right. If there is a God, he is a malign thug.

So can you. There's death and sadness and there's life and happiness. It's a mixed bag.

Given the various permutations of what folks think of a God, particularly Deists, it fits some versions well, and other versions not well at all.

We have to drop one of those three, but believers are typically unwilling to do that, so they twist themselves into knots to explain how a perfect God could create such a mixed bag of a world.

The polytheists have a better explanation - the gods are themselves a mixed bag.

good is a human term and it's a pretty darn relative one.

Good to you is bad to someone else.

It only has meaning in relation to other things. This is good, that is bad.

My point is that you can have a God big G and not require such an entity to be perfectly good.

And if we are talking perfectly good, does free will fit into that?

If God is constantly stopping all evil in the world does that not erase free will? Is free will evil or good?

Being an agnostic, you can conceive of a lot of things that have nothing to with anyone's actual religion. "Perfect goodness" is an absolute religious concept, it's not something relative in the religious imagination.

If all evil stopped, there would still be free will. Consider a game of chess. You can make any move you want, so you have free will, but there is no evil because there is no pain or death in the game. There might be mild suffering for the loser, that's about it.

God created the world and then decided to not intervene.

Boom, got it in one. I'm pretty sure they aren't the only ones who don't think God is "perfectly good" which is a rather undefinable term.

You keep saying religious, but I just think you mean fanatical Christian/Islamic/Abrahamic sects.

You can't make any move you want in chess. There are rules. You can play by the rules, or you could cheat. Cheating would be "evil."
Evil isn't simply pain and death, and I'm not sure all pain and death is per se evil.

Pain keeps you from serious injury. Death helps recycle limited resources.

The ones who sound that way are liberal religionists like Guilliameb, who say they are Christians or Unitarians or something else. 18th Century Deists seemed to keep the idea of God as perfect but not interfering. Hindus may qualify as not believing in an all-good God, but more typically they say God is beyond all opposites and so on, and so paradoxical that's more of a mystical experience than anything called a god in the West.

As far as evil goes, I am just going by what most people call evil. I suppose we could define evil away by calling even mildly bad (like cheating in a game) things evil or calling the most horrible things in the world not evil.

I am fine with that, but we started with the question as to why an omniscient, omnipotent being would allow any pain and suffering at all, and seemed to think it wouldn't, then you sounded like maybe it would, then you sounded like we don't really know what evil is anyway, so I am not really sure what you are trying to say.

and I guarantee you I could find 100 people to say you've done so too broadly and another to say you've done so too narrowly.

You make it sound like it's a clear, well-defined concept that only quibblers like me could take issue with definitionally.

I mean what is evil, what isn't evil has been something we've struggled to define and figure out for our entire existence.

Suffering builds character. SOME level of suffering is probably required for growth, for any sort of meaning.
Certainly too much suffering isn't great, and there are all sorts of people for whom fairness skip town and left them hanging high and dry.

But you need some level of suffering to grow IMO. Otherwise you are just joyful automatons not really living, just existing with a big smile on your face the whole time.

I also think free will implies the ability to be selfish, to harm others, to do "wrong." Otherwise, it's not really free will if you are bound from doing anything that harms anyone else in any way.

So, I ask again, is free will evil? Or do you reject the concept of free will being necessary? Assuming a God for this hypo, should that God only have created perfectly happy creatures, incapable of doing harm to anyone or anything else, but thus lacking free will?

See Nietzsche's "Beyond Good and Evil" for more on that. I also don't think free will is necessary. Nietzsche also questioned free will.

Ideas like "we need suffering to grow" are based on our experience in a world where suffering is unavoidable. But an omnipotent, omniscient being would have had the power and knowledge to create a world where we have free will but suffering is avoidable, or at least significantly more limited than it is now in various ways Given enough technology, we might one day be able to create such a world ourselves, so I don't see why God couldn't do it.

Why does free will require that you be able to cause suffering? Back to the chess game. Yes you can violate the rules and make people upset, but the suffering is mild, if it even can be really called that. But it also usn't a world where everyone is perfectly happy all the time.

I don't agree with Mr. N on there being no such thing as evil. It's not a supernatural thing obviously. But it's a relative term we use to describe those activities which produce some degree of harm, to oneself or others.

It's certainly not a rigid word with plenty of definitional wiggle room, but it's also not non-existent either.

I think free will is necessary to make a life remotely meaningful or purposeful.

If you are a controlled automaton then the point is what? I think you implicitly see that by saying "significantly more limited."

Free will requires you the ability to make any choice, choose any action. If you are limited in the choices and actions you can do, then you don't have free will.

Heck, those folks who argue that we DON'T have free will make that very point by arguing that our nature/nurture combo by necessity limits our range of choices (an introvert won't do this, an extrovert won't do that, someone who's been traumatized by an event won't do this). Thus, they argue, because we cannot control our nature or our environment, that we are stuck in the pathways those two things generate. I think there's some validity to that argument but ultimately I reject it.

At any rate, I don't think given enough technology we can create such a world. Someone will always come around and use that technology in ways not intended. Or the definition of suffering and evil will change. What does it mean to be "poor" in 2018 vice what does it mean to be "poor" in 1818? It's relative. If I tell you I live in a small shack in 2018 with no electricity or utilities, you will probably conclude I'm poor...if I say the same in 1818 you will ask what the heck is electricity and utilities and that's a decent shack you have there.

He just thought we should call it "bad" because "evil" has moral connotations or a sense that it "shouldn't" be.

For the rest, I am not sure what the point is. We find ourselves in a world with suffering and it feels like free will. You seem to conclude from this that we must suffer and we must have free will. You also seem to conclude that there must be a connection between the two.

My comment "at least greatly reduce suffering" was meant to include natural disasters and other random events that have no conceivable connection to free will. That is, if there were no earthquakes, would that in anyway reduce our free will?

That free will is what makes us individuals instead of automatons. And with free will comes the freedom to help or harm. Or else it's not free will.

No natural events don't necessarily tie to free will but it's through our responses to that hardship that we exercise that choice to do good or bad.

If everything is happy and there's no struggle and no choice then the purpose of existing is meaningless.

No matter how happy or sad, no matter how free or unfree.

Here's a novel idea:

All of those permutations? They're wrong.

Deism? That's wrong, too.

An omnipotent creator of the universe is morally responsible for the happiness and well-being of said universe's end users. Gather your permutations and your -isms and dance around that all you want; at the end of the day you're just making excuses for not holding God to same bare minimum standards anyone in their right mind would hold a McDonald's.

I'm not religious or a theist so taking that attack with me is a waste of both our times.

I'm simply discussing IF there were a God, THEN there are various permutations such an entity could take that do not require it to actively intervene when bad things happen in the world.

It's merely tautological. "If God exists, then he is defined so this isn't a problem. Somehow."

That fantastic, but who cares? I think our time would be better spent addressing the ethics of deities people actually profess belief in.

there aren't hundreds of different concepts of a God that have zero to do with my personal imagination that form the basis for some group of human's religious beliefs??

There are approximately 150 religions in the US alone that have at least 1 million followers according to the 2001 version of the Encyclopedia of American Religions. Can't vouch that's perfectly accurate, but strikes me that bottom line there are a lot of different religions out there, and most of them in the US are Christian.

There's very little I've imagined that someone else hasn't already thought of and incorporated into their religious beliefs.

Maybe some Americans believe in a weak, dumb, or evil god. Let us know when you find them.

Wasting my time with a couple of folks in here who just want an echo chamber to tell them how smart they are.

You're not furiously picking at the lint in your intellectual navel. We're just a bunch of assholes who enjoy the company of other assholes to deep, thoughtful, nuanced internet randos with a rock-solid case for the ethical deployment of pediatric cancer.

you are clearly the most logical, ethical, and smartest people here.

If only the rest of us could be like you.

At the very least, the ascerbic rejoinders wouldn't read like they came out of a bag of fortune cookies.

They'd just read like they came out of the mind of an arrogant know-it-all.

...maybe try knowing more things?

If that doesn't work, you could always get gud at faking it. I know a great divorce lawyer in Pennsylvania who could coach you. He's got plenty of time on his hands, I hear.

That's it embrace your inner ass.

wasn't a joke.

Sure sounded like one.

Religions have many gods with all sorts of properties, very few gods are described in the abrahamic creator god model of omniscience omnipotence and omnipresence.

However omniscience and omnipotence bring with them the paradox of evil, and do not as you claim, result in some convincing argument that such gods must be good. A better argument would be that such gods must be entirely indifferent to what is going on in the universe.

between God big G and god(s) little g.

I didn't say a God must be "good." I said a God is unlikely to be "evil." That can include being "indifferent."

I don't think that's necessarily true at all.

We would say that was a bad thing, regardless of your justification.

It would also depend on the existence of an afterlife or not or reincarnation. A baby dying is less of a problem if that baby gets a long life later or goes straight to eternal heavenly bliss or whatnot.

And if I simply made the universe but had no further contact with it then I am simply allowing things to progress without interference. I didn't cause the suffering, thus I don't necessarily have an obligation to wipe it away.

And if you created a world of suffering then walked away from it, it would not absolve you of moral responsibility. Maybe this supposed god would think so, but much of its creation disagrees. Not that it really cares, of course.

In black and white and I operate in gray then.

But sometimes you have to make choices. If you do one thing, it means you didn't do another. You can choose to save a drowning person or not. There is no shade of gray in that choice. You can dream up all sorts of what ifs, but in the end, a person is either alive or dead.

Doing what you thought was good ends up doing evil and vice versa and sometimes good and evil are difficult to figure out. It's not simply suffering and death bad.

Even more so if you are an omniscient and omnipotent being who made free will beings. Those free will beings may spit in your face. They may even be right to do so.

but once they become adults, all responsibility falls on their progeny.

You always like to think of exceptions and special cases to whatever anyone says, I am sure you can think of your own for this one.

I don't generally talk about exceptions or special cases, I make the argument that things aren't remotely as binary or pat or black and white and set in stone as folks want to believe.

Most people are very binary in their think...this is this and that is that and you're an idiot if you think otherwise.

And that spans across anything you want to talk about from religion to politics to football.

So if you want to add the word almost in front of always feel free... doesn't really change the point much.

Almost basically you are saying that almost everything you say should not be taken seriously much because we may sometimes have to add in qualifiers and assumptions that can almost change the meaning, significance or other parameters of the discussion. That way you can defend almost any divine or near divine being from almost any moral responsibility because you would almost always assume that the being is probably usually moral to begin with and wouldn't necessarily feel obligated to anything in particular most of the time. Which gives you an almost infinite number of beings to be uncertain about.

If you like, feel free your own qualifiers and complications to almost anything I say so it can be suitably gray enough for your tastes. The you can almost always agree, disagree or be neutral about it.

I added almost about ten seconds after I wrote the original statement. Because that was effectively your quibble, and I was saying, sure, it's not universal, it's just by far the example in this case. And it doesn't change the point.

You then use that as a jumping off point for some silly psychobabble analysis of what you think is in my head.

That's why this group is a waste of time. Folks hard set one way or the other, who want to make everyone else hard set one way or the other, who have zero interest in discussion or exchange, just the opportunity to be right.

I didn't defend "any" hypothetical doesn't actually exist supreme being, I talked about a certain subclass, the ones that started the universe and then let it run without interference from the beginning.

But that gets in the way of your righteous rant where you get to wipe away any of my comments or discussions as meaningless.

Which you didn't seem to get.

Everyone he meets is an asshole.

Link to tweet

you'd be surprised at how fewer assholes you have to deal with.

But hey, you do you.

mounted on its garage. The sign reads: "ASSHOLE'S NEIGHBOR." Having had a couple of encounters with the woman who owns the house with the sign, I can say with confidence that the apostrophe and the final S should not be on the sign. Projection, I think they call it.

And addressed that point in my response.

It just doesn't remotely have the heft you want it to.

Then you have missed the point.

On hypothetical gods. You said something to the effect of, if there were a deist-type God, there are various versions that wouldn't have to interfere with the universe. Don 't let me put words in your mouth. If that it isn't what you meant, what did you mean? Because the way it reads, that's just the definition of a deist god. They all don't interfere with the universe. If so, what was the point of providing this definition as an if-then statement?

remains unsupported by any evidence. Deities, if they existed, would not own human slaves. People, on the other hand, have historically had slaves. A slave-owning culture would be very unlikely to issue a rule that demanded no ownership of people, I'd think. So, that's my explanation. No "god;" people.

I agree with everything else you wrote.

from a human slave. What service would such a slave provide?

An omniscient and omnipotent entity would be able to amuse itself, I would think.

Especially if it has talking monkeys.

Why do not all Christian churches play nice?
I wait for biblical consistency.
There was only one Jesus and only one teaching.

I am perplexed as to why there are so many misunderstandings
Why at least two types of Christians?
God's support is affirmed in both progressive and regressive churches (places of teaching).

I acknowledge that inconsistencies and hypocrisies exist in all major churches, and morality is too often unethical.
However, the recent head spinning, two-faced hypocrisy of the evangelical Christians in the USA is off the charts.

I am so tired of this good Kav, bad Kav deplorable autocracy of ignorance in the USA.

Too many church-going neighbors are naught but nattering nabobs of negatively charged ignorance.

and disregard the rest. We see that in evidence often, here as elsewhere.

If someone can show that a small religious group has behaved well, then the lesson that is taught is that religion is good. If you point to the bad behavior of other religious folk, you will be told you are part of a choir and are epitomizing a non-existent 11th Commandment.

along with countless "independent" and "nondenominational" churches. plus lots of differences among churches within denominations, and who knows how many individual practitioners who just do Christianity in their own unique way.

Obviously, determining what, exactly, the one Jesus actually meant to say with his one teaching isn't all that easy.

Who gave those women permission to speak anyway? A woman is supposed to remain silent until her husband allows her to speak.


That is actually the religious way of things.