<p>I have a hard time understanding how people could not believe in a God–two words: beauty and love. But that’s just my own very humble opinion and I personally don’t care if anyone believes in God, let alone any specific creed. I also think those that do may live happier lives, but that, too, is just my jmho.</p>
<p>Great sentiments, hereshoping! Praise the Lord for creating a world with love and beauty. I suppose the God who created all might also be accountable for the suffering, misery, and evil. Never mind, I forgot that is to test mankind - the ultimate meritocracy. Too bad It didn’t use the SAT and avoid the trial by fire.</p>
<p>I do not know alot about Christianity, but If I can I will offer an answer to that from a Jewish viewpoint:</p>
<p>God has a plan for the Jews, and even for the world. Everything that occurs is part of that great master-plan. God’s reasons for allowing evil into the world will never be known to us. After the holocaust many Jews questions why would God let this happen? What for? How could he? We will never know why it did, but it is part of a plan.</p>
<p>This is not to say that people then should go with the flow and let things be. Everybody has a soul and their soul has a mission to fulfill. We should connect our souls with God and fulfill our mission. A basic Jewish tenet is “Tikkun Olam”, which literally translates to “fix the world”. God forms the world in whatever way he wants to. but it is the responsibility of people to form their lives according to the principles that have been laid out in the Torah. To recound a something from the Talmud, a book of Jewish law, a man once approached the great Rabbi Hillel and asked him to teach him the Torah in 2 minutes while the man stands on one foot. Rabbi Hillel answered, “Do unto others, as you want other to do to you, the rest is just commentary”.</p>
<p>Disclaimer: Numerous times in the post I used the words “us” and “we”, in certain cases those “us” and “we” are referring not to people in general, but the Jewish nation. In other cases they were referring to everyone. One of the big differences between Judaism and its counterparts is that Judaism makes no room for prostelsyzing. Non-Jews are not bound to follow Jewish law, for the very simple reason that they are not Jewish. Conversions to Judaism are discouraged for many reasons that I will not get into here. But basically what I wanted you to take from this disclaimer paragraph is that I am not tryinging to persuade anyone to become a Jew. That is not my goal. I am merely offering a defense and view point from the teachings of my own religion.</p>
<p>"To recound a something from the Talmud, a book of Jewish law, a man once approached the great Rabbi Hillel and asked him to teach him the Torah in 2 minutes while the man stands on one foot. Rabbi Hillel answered, “Do unto others, as you want other to do to you, the rest is just commentary”.</p>
<p>I’ve always loved this statement, but it should be noted that both the expression and its form comes from the Roman stoics. The Romans taught that one should never teach a child anything more than he can learn while standing up (or on one foot), and the “do unto others” was a favorite expression of the Roman stoics, “neo-Atheists”, as it were, with a last flowering in the work of Marcus Aurelius.</p>
<p>Most people are charitable and give a certain percentage of their money to charitable organizations. For many church-going Christians, that means a significant amount of cash goes to the church. But what “good” is this money doing?</p>
<p>When I was on our church’s mission committee, it shocked me that only 6% of the contributions collected went to charitable causes. 94% went to keeping the church operating: staff salaries, mortgage, utilities, etc. This would definitely get a Zero Stars review on Charity Navigator. But even of the 6%, much of it went to other church-related activities (i.e., retired pastors’ home, supporting missionaries).</p>
<p>If you give to the church thinking that at least some portion of it serves the poor and needy, you are wrong.</p>
<p>I cannot tell you how liberating it was to divert our charitable giving away from the church and to organizations directly. And my wife and I had fun forming our own “committee” to figure out how to give that money for charities we wanted to support. The amounts are something that can make a real difference to some of these organizations.</p>
<p>If you are Christian, you can give to Christian organizations which truly use the money to actually help the downtrodden (two excellent examples: Compassion International and Hope International) vs. those who use the money to grow their own organization and proselytize for more money (e.g., Focus on the Family).</p>
<p>So, one way in which the church is harmful is that it diverts billions of dollars in charitable donations AWAY from those organizations which could put that money to good use.</p>
<p>I apologize Mini, I misrepresented what it said in the Talmud. My memory is not what it used to be. So instead I will just psot a direct translation of that passage from the Talmud: </p>
<p>“A certain heathen came to Shammai and said to him, “Make me a proselyte, on condition that you teach me the whole Torah in the time I can stand on one foot.” Thereupon he repulsed him with the rod which was in his hand. When he went to Hillel, Hillel said to him, 'What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor: that is the whole Torah; all the rest of it is commentary; go and learn.” (Talmud, Shabbat 31a) "</p>
<p>Marcus Aurellias was born after Hillel died and after it is believed that part of the Talmud was recorded.</p>
<p>No. You misread me. The expression was NOT from Marcus Aurelius but pre-dates Seneca (and Hlilel by at least 50 years. (Cato the younger, and Cicero, among others - though Stoicism itself goes back 200 years further). Marchus Aurelius was the summation of the philosophy (which, nonetheless, predates the gathering of the Talmud at the end of the 2nd century. Dates here, of course, are suspect, as there may have been proto-Talmuds before the final was gathered.)</p>
<p>Of course, the prima facie case for it being essentially a foreign borrowing is rather obvious. You can go through the entire Five Books of Moses without finding any expression, or even the hint of an expression, similar to that of Hillel’s summation.</p>
<p>Do you have any suggested reading on this?</p>
<p>Thirty years ago, I used to teach this stuff. But it’s a long time. Marcus Aurelius is a wonderful book for one’s old age!</p>
<p>I’ve heard good things about:</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.nd.edu/~lumen/2005_04/RomanStoics.shtml[/url]”>http://www.nd.edu/~lumen/2005_04/RomanStoics.shtml</a></p>
<p>The work of my professor Arnaldo Momigliano (a Jew from Turin who fled for his life under Mussolini) on the interplay of Roman, Jewish, and Christian philosophy is fantastic! - hard book to find, though:</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.amazon.com/Pagans-Jews-Christians-Arnaldo-Momigliano/dp/0819562181/sr=8-1/qid=1168710169/ref=sr_1_1/103-0274999-4342276?ie=UTF8&s=books[/url]”>http://www.amazon.com/Pagans-Jews-Christians-Arnaldo-Momigliano/dp/0819562181/sr=8-1/qid=1168710169/ref=sr_1_1/103-0274999-4342276?ie=UTF8&s=books</a></p>
<p>You’ll think you actually recognize the below, from the Talmud:</p>
<p>“Be silent as to services you have rendered, but speak of favours you have received.”</p>
<p>Actually, it is from Seneca.</p>
<p>A quick search on wikipedia was not able to turn up anything on the “golden rule” and stoicism, but then again wikipedia is no standard for scholarly articles</p>
<p>“Be silent as to services you have rendered, but speak of favours you have received”</p>
<p>This seems to deal with modesty whereas the golden rule deals with ethical reciprication.</p>
<p>Are there any articles I could read because I do not always have time to sit down and read a book.</p>
<p>No, I was just illustrating another example of where what is often seen as a famous saying from Talmudic wisdom actually came from the Romans.</p>
<p>Was not hillel and his “quote” put at about 100CE whereas Aurellias birth at about 120CE?</p>
<p>Would not attributing the idea of modesty be silly, just like it woudl be attibuting the idea of acting good toward other people. Seneca said one thing about modesty, another said something else about modesty and so on. The only distinction being made around about pithyness. I believe there are many quotes on modesty from the Torah which predates Seneca.</p>
<p>"I don’t think I’ll ever be able to buy into the concept that the inscrutable complexity, the incomprehensible symmetry of our vast universe just “happened”.</p>
<p>Although you are attempting to argue Irreducible Complexity your assertion itself reeks of it. An entity capable of designing the universe, would have to immeasurably and unfathomably more intricate and complex than its creation. God would be even more irreducibly complex than the cosmos. Your argument also collapses under the weight of infinite regression.</p>
<p>“I’ve been reading this thread with great interest, and it is extremely thought-provoking. While the conundrum of “The Prime Mover” has always been problematic to me, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to buy into the concept that the inscrutable complexity, the incomprehensible symmetry of our vast universe ** just “happened **”</p>
<p>Why is it that religious followers propose “all” or “nothing”? “A one off event” as described by Dawkins. The universe did not just appear as it is (in fact it is still presumably growing). Its existence has been a gradual and cumulative process, much like that of Evolution’s natural selection. If you assume that the universe, as it is today occurred by chance or that it was a mere happenstance, than creation may seem like a logical argument. It simply did not though. You are merely adhering to a God of Gaps. You can’t explain an event, so God must have caused it. As I have previously explained that is a non-explanation. I wouldn’t be surprised if three hundred years ago you claimed that a god positioned the globe on top of an elephant, which was situated on a tortoise that in turn rotated.</p>
<p>Excerpt from the God Delusion (I see very few have read it and yet they critiqued it earlier):
“Theoretically, a bank robber could get lucky and ht upon the right combination of numbers by chance. In practice, the bank’s combination lock is designed with enough improbability to make this tantamount too impossible almost as unlikely as Fred Hoyle’s Boeing 747. But imagine a badly designed combination lock that gave out little hints progressively the equivalent of “getting warmer” or children playing Hunt the Slipper. Suppose that when each one of the dials approaches its correct setting, the vault opens another chink, and a dribble of money trickles out. The burglar would home in on the jackpot in no time.
Creationists who attempt to deploy the argument from improbability in their favor always assume that biological adoption is the question of the jackpot or nothing. Another name for the “jackpot or nothing” fallacy is “irreducible complexity” (IC). Either the eye sees or it doesn’t. Either the wing flies or it doesn’t. There are assumed to be no useful intermediates. But this is simply wrong such intermediates abound in practice- which is exactly what we should expect in theory. The combination lock of life is a “getting warmer, getting cooler, getting warmer” Hunt the Slipper device. Real life seeks gentle slopes at the back of Mount Improbable, while creationists are blind to all but the daunting precipice at the front.
Darwin devoted an entire chapter of the Origin of Species to “Difficulties on the theory of descent with modification”, and it is fair to say this brief chapter anticipated and disposed of every single one of the alleged difficulties that have since been proposed, right up to the present day. The most formidable difficulties are Darwin’s ‘organs of extreme perfection and complication”, sometimes erroneously describe as ‘irreducibly complex’. Darwin singled out the eye as posing a particularly challenging problem: ‘To suppose that the eye with al its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus of different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree’. Creationists gleefully quote this sentence again and again. Needless to say, they never quote what follows. Darwin’s fulsomely free confession turned out to be a rhetorical device. He was drawing his opponents towards him so that his punch, when it came, struck the harder. The punch, of course, was Darwin’s effortless explanation of exactly how the eye evolved over gradual degrees. Darwin may not have used the phrase “irreducible complexity” or the “the smooth gradient of Mount Improbable”, but he clearly understood the principle of both.
‘What is the use of half an eye?’ and ‘What is the use of half a wing?’ are both instances of the argument from ‘irreducible complexity’. A functioning unit is said to be irreducibly complex if the removal of one of its parts causes the whole to cease functioning. This has been assumed to be self-evident for both eyes and wings. But as soon as we give these assumptions a moment of thought, we immediately see the fallacy. A cataract patient with the lens of her eye surgically removed can’t see clear images without glasses, but can see enough not to bump into a tree or fall over a cliff. Half a wing is indeed not as good as a whole wing, but it is certainly better than no wing at all. Half a wing could save your life by easing your fall from a tree of a certain height. And 51 per cent of a wing could save you if you fall from a slightly higher tree. Whatever the fraction of a wing you have, there is a fall from which it will save your life where a slightly smaller winglet would not. The thought experiment of trees of different height, from which one might fall, is just one way to see, in theory, that there must be a smooth gradient of advantage all the way from 1 per cent of wing to 100 per cent. The forests are replete with gliding or parachuting animals illustrating, in practice, every step of the way up the particular slope of Mount Improbable.”</p>
<p>Continues to talk about certain creatures such as the Flatworm and its eye.</p>
<p>…“So, we have seen that eyes and wings are certainly not irreducibly complex; but what is more interesting than these particular examples is the general lesson we should draw. The fact that so many people have been dead wrong over these obvious cases should serve to warn us of other examples that are less obvious, such as the cellular and biochemical cases now being touted by those creationists who shelter under the politically expedient euphemism of “intelligent design theorists”.
We have a cautionary tale here, and it is telling us this: do not just declare things to be irreducibly complex; the chances are that you haven’t looked carefully enough at the details, or thought carefully enough about them. On the other hand, we on the science side must not be too dogmatically confident. Maybe there is something out there in nature that really does preclude, by its genuinely irreducible complexity, the smooth gradient of Mount Improbable. The creationists are right that , if genuinely irreducible complexity could be demonstrated, it would wreck Darwin’s theory. Darwin himself said as much: “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. But I can find no such case”. Darwin could find no such case, and nor has anybody since Darwin’s time, despite strenuous, indeed desperate, efforts.</p>
<p>…“In any case, even though genuinely irreducible complexity would wreck Darwin’s theory if it were ever found, who is to say that it wouldn’t wreck the intelligent design theory as well? Indeed, it already has wrecked the intelligent design theory, for, as I keep saying and will say again, however little we know about God, the one thing we can be sure of is that he would have to be very very complex and presumably irreducibly so!"</p>
<p>“Thank the Prime Mover(s) that I live in a country where I have the right to believe whatsoever I choose (or not!), and can even worship who/whatsoever I choose (or not!) in whatever context I choose, and that I can share my beliefs with my offspring and anyone else who consents to hear my POV (though I am more often than not likely to remain silent on the subject).”</p>
<p>That is what atheists want, as well. Yet beliefs are imposed upon them, their government concedes to religion and its officials ignominiously attempt to retract their rights, their edification is subverted, and they are threatened by the righteous. Who seems to be the victim? </p>
<p>“While most devotely religious people live in the most light bulb-fragile of glass houses, I think I understand some of why they may feel so threatened by Atheists, especially, the most vocal ones. They understand that the most proactive Atheists are, ironically enough, everybit as committed to their “religion” (and Atheism has all the ear-markings of a religion) as any adherent of a conventional fundamentalist sect.”</p>
<p>Any true atheist will admit the possibility of god, even the slightest possibility, because otherwise they are just as dogmatic as religious followers-as you astutely noticed. I myself have admitted the possibility of God, along with that of me winning the lottery a thousand consecutive times.</p>
<p>“They understand that many active Atheists have an ulterior political and social agenda: Quite simply that of eventually irradicating religion from human society (for the sake of the “peace and stability of humanity”), thereby making it illegal to profess a belief in any god or gods, and making the religious indoctrination of children punishable by law.”</p>
<p>We have absolutely no contention with people believing in what they want to believe in. We do, however, take issue with those who assert that there is no possibility they maybe mistaken and than impose those beliefs upon others (often violently). That is righteous arrogance at its utmost. We also take issue with those who impose their beliefs upon children. A child should be shown the entire spectrum and then allowed to reach his/her own conclusion. If a child still subscribes to a religion, so be it. A child, however, should not be subject to indoctrination and its irreparable affects.</p>
<p>qwilde wrote:
“Yet the Pope insists that all those children who die unbaptized will perish in hell.”</p>
<p>Not true…Pope Benedict has stated that unbaptized babies will go to heaven.</p>
<p>Where do you get your info, qwilde? You seem so informed in some instances, and then you come out with total faslehoods out of nowhere! It completely distracts from your arguments.</p>
<p>Qwilde, in response to your Q:
“Oh, so god’s words and intent can change depending upon which pope has been elected?..even though god is omnipotent and omniscient.”</p>
<p>No, our “understanding” of God’s word and intent changes, not God’s word and intent. We (including you qwilde) are in a journey towards a better and more deep understanding of our beliefs. Dialogue and exchange of ideas like this is great, in my opinion. </p>
<p>So, thanks for asking, qwilde.</p>
<p>Yes, he has openly declared “Limbo has never been a definitive truth of the faith” and “I woud let it drop, since it has always been only a theological hypothesis”, but Ratzinger still indavertently insists upon the existence of limbo. He would have to. If he did not he would undermine original sin and Jesus himself: “Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God (John 3; 5)". He would also undermine the centuries of teaching that have instructed upon the importance of baptism and the missionaries who have traveled the globe’s extent to undertake the task.</p>
<p>“No, our “understanding” of God’s word and intent changes, not God’s word and intent.”</p>
<p>Could every modern theologian and church official be misinterpreting the bible, along with all religious followers then? Also, could every “holy act” that has ever been committed have been done so due to an erroneous understanding of the scripture?</p>
<p>“So, thanks for asking, qwilde.”</p>
<p>Patronization. How creative of a believer.</p>
<p>Personally, even knowing that infallible pronouncements are rare, I’ve been troubled by the concept of papal infallibility ever since I found out it hasn’t existed since the dawn of the papacy. I’ve seen some claim that John Paul I was troubled by it too, and was contemplating abolishing it, which would have created quite the paradox.</p>