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Originally Posted by Ustwo
To me this is a more sophisticated version of my old line 'God is a small invisible fish that lives in my anus which can't be detected by any means'. Saying we are too stupid to figure out Gods version of right and wrong is unprovable, and futile to discuss.
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Naturally. Religion is based on faith. That's sort of the point. The invisible birthday cake argument (or your more colourful metaphor, the invisible anus fish) is a way of encapsulating that axiomatic. Trying to apply a purely rational approach to something that is not based on reason returns bad results.
Note that when I say this it's not to say that anyone who ascribes to a religion of some sort is irrational, just that faith is. It isn't based on reason or logic, which is what makes it faith.
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Originally Posted by Ustwo
My response would be, if we can not understand right and wrong, then we can not do right or wrong. We are but infants to his divine majesty. Sin, punishment, etc all go out the window the same way they do for a 2 year old child.
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Well, yes, but this is why your two year old is given rules and discipline. God has set out a form of rules and discipline for his followers, so that they can't claim this sort of ignorance.
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Originally Posted by Ustwo
So the point of free will is to free up gods day planner? Pedophiles to pancreatic cancer explained away as free will needs meaning? This to me is sophistry to find a place for god that doesn't seem to need it. A god that in effect serves no function beyond builder, a theist of the old ilk, once reviled by religious men and now happily lumped with them by the same types in a growing agnostic western world.
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I don't think anyone has ever said that God has any interest in being your best friend or your babysitter. We all have choices to make and we all deal with the consequences of those choices. This is true regardless of what if any religion you follow. The simplest answer given by Christianity here (insofar as there is one) is that God wants us to love Him for Himself and not for what He can do for us. There's actually a bit more to the story than that, but for the purposes of our discussion I think this suffices; if we get too much more involved in the dogma I'm going to have to refer you to a theological scholar anyway. It's not my religion and I don't know all of the fine details.
The bottom line is that we're all responsible for finding our own answers. Further to that it's been my experience that you can find assholes in any faith. I don't care what you or anyone else believes. The only thing that gets on my nerves is when people try to force their own beliefs on others and atheists are often the worst offenders for this. Religion isn't any better or worse than the people involved and really there isn't a whole lot more evidence behind atheism than there is behind anything else. If you want to be an atheist I say more power to you, but why is it so important that you try to prove everyone else wrong?
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Originally Posted by asaris
I don't think God's 'version' of right and wrong is substantially different from ours. The difference between God's ethics and my ethics is like the difference between the mathematics of a PhD and my mathematics, not like the difference between mathematics and english.
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Assuming that we're going to leave moral relativism out of the argument for the time being, I should think this would go without saying. If we accept that good and evil are absolute concepts then we can accept that two beings would interpret them more or less the same way. Within the context of Christianity, good and evil are clearly defined, so we must assume that God would have a more advanced understanding of what are the same concepts we know. And really, if we accept God as being omniscient then it's pretty clear cut; one follows the other.