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WBraun
climber
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There's a bunch of guys just in Fresno alone named Jesus who are Landscape and maintenance guys who use water for their jobs.
You have to use the word "Jesus Christ" to make your argument worthy.
Ho man ....
Now the word "Christ" is not like the material word, water.
It's actually transcendental and non different from it's source .....
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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...if Jesus is there in the desert with water, I'll call him anything he likes for a sip if I'm in need...
and I don't care if he were a gardener in Fresno (or anywhere else for that matter).
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FinnMaCoul
Trad climber
Green Mountains, Vermont
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This torturous thread reminds me of an experience I had when I was attending university in Australia some twenty plus years ago. I had stumbled into a circle of friends who largely hailed from various parts of the South Pacific.
Many of them were older than me and had been sent to the university on behalf of their various governments to receive further training for their jobs. It was a tranformative experience for me as a young man. Their outlook on living was very different from my experience and while diverse, depending upon where they were from, they were, for the most part, a pretty laid back group of people. And a ton of fun to hang with. They introduced me to kava kava and many a weekend night a big group of us would get together and have a kava celebration. These guys knew how to laugh and enjoy life.
I had been taking a philosphy class one semester and the professor had strongly encouraged his students to take advantage of a guest lecturer who was some big wig professor from the states, Princeton I think. I planned to attend one of his lectures, titled; "If God exists then how can evil exist".
One of my friends was an older gentleman from Fiji. Aca was the son of his tribe's chief and in line to inherit the post. He was also the tribe's storyteller and the government had sent him to study literature.
Aca heard me talking about this lecture and thought it might be interesting and tagged along. Turns out it was this horrifyingly torturous and dry dissection of the argument that only a philosophy professor could manage. Truly a dispassionate and methodical lecture that bored me to tears.
I'm trying like hell just to keep my eyes open. I look at Aca and his mouth is hanging open and he's got this dumbfounded look on his face. We snuck out early. Aca's reaction was one of complete and utter disbelief. That anybody could THINK like that. His approach to life was just SO relaxed and so matter of fact. Life is about friends and family and living well and being happy.
To be honest I don't remember what his religious beliefs were. A lot of the guys from the South Pacific were some kind of christian due to the early missionary work there. But it wasn't the notion of good or evil or God or no God that threw Aca for a loop... it was the question of why anybody would take that kind of time and truly elaborate effort to try to put logic to something that is clearly beyond any logic, whether you believe it or not.
I completely agreed.
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neebee
Social climber
calif/texas
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hey there say, finn... what a very nice and interesting post... thanks for the share... say, i hope you still get to say to those friends, off and on... some friends are so special that they stay with us through life...
yet, in this case, due to local etc, it can be hard... but thankfulness in just haveing the memory of such, is a treasure...
god bless... thanks for the calm share of simple
love and friendship...
:)
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Tony Bird
climber
Northridge, CA
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the heart is a blood pump, rrradam. feelings are in the head, not the heart, although it's often the perception of the head that powerful feelings are in the heart.
intuition is a proven entity. it has been behind many a breakthrough in science. "using your head" often involves intuition. sometimes we know things before we can prove them.
the big thing in the evolution debate these days is convergence. your statement about rewinding it comes close, but it's not a done deal. the convergent emergence of intelligence--an indication that there may be a god, though certainly not a proof.
ah, braun, those indic names. all you have to do is spell one right and who can argue?
i agree, weschrist, two consecutive, tops. if i have violated that, feel free to ignore me after two.
btw, we're up to 700-some posts on this baby. no fair referring to what you might have said 300 posts ago. reiterate and encapsulate if it's important.
i like your points, wes. we need a future here on planet earth. the christian myth tends to put our lives here on hold with all its to-do about the next one. the importance of what we do, say and think become secondary to its message. it easily becomes escapist.
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Lynne Leichtfuss
Trad climber
Will know soon
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All I can say is jesus is, really, my best friend. He's never let me down. I've written my story before so I won't re write, but when I was @23 I would have pro been dead in a gutter, but for his intervention in my life.
Through a series of what I call "holy coincidences" he saved lynnie and I have never been the same.
One miracle I still can hardly comprehend. I was a 3 1/2 pack a day cigarette smoker. My husband hated it but I could not stop. I was addicted from the first cig I smoked. Then I met jesus, and told all my friends how fantastic he is. One of my friends said he could not believe anything I said cause if jesus was real he would help me quit smoking.
Well, I loved this friend whose life was also totally screwed up. So I went to my little church and they prayed for me after the service. I woke up the next morning and never smoked again. It's been @ 35 years......
Dr. F, when he comes again you'll recognize him....I won't even have to introduce you. :D
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WBraun
climber
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Dr F
I asked Jesus the gardener in Fresno how to water the lawn and he said hook the garden hose up and start watering the lawn.
That's just my sarcastic ass at bat line drive into your face sitting in the out field. You couldn't catch the fuking ball to begin with anyways as I round the plate to home.
And to top it off you put your words into other peoples mouths by your stupid statement quoted below.
"if you ask those questions to your Jesus, he will not be able to answer them, right"
You better learn how catch a ball before you even start to try to play.
You're a terrible atheist. Horrible.
Try and become a smarter atheist a least .....
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climbera5
Trad climber
Sacramento
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Well peeps, this has been interesting but as with all previous posts I've participated in that debate the existence of God, what we end up with is an elaborate pissing contest. I doubt if anyone will leave here with life changing revelations, but perhaps there will be some seeds planted that will cause us to reconsider our position and explore alternative positions. That is growth, from which we develop understanding and tolerance.
A couple of observations: There are an overwhelming number of misconceptions posted here surrounding Christianity and I can see why Madbolter feels compelled to answer or defend them all. It is frustrating to read the many factual errors or myths surrounding Christians and not be able to respond. It’s also insulting to paint all Christians with the same brush and expect us moderates to defend fringe thinking. I’m against stupid also and I would encourage some of you to actually READ the bible before you argue against it. You might actually learn something. You won’t be brain washed, trust me, but some of your friends will look at you weird so be prepared.
Unfortunately some here lack the spiritual or emotional maturity to carry on civil discourse about a subject central to many people’s lives. I suggest keeping your vile to yourself, don’t make it personal because once you do, you’ve lost your argument and all credibility. Be respectful because at the end of any debate, you may be the one that was wrong.
(Paul, you asked questions yesterday about the paradox between free will and omniscience. This brings up a debate as old as religion itself surrounding determinism and predetermination. I think you knew that already and the web is chock full of opinions, both for and against. It’s worth the read but I still believe in Free Will, but I won’t pretend to know the mind of God, his methods, his ways, his timing or agenda. That would be very presumptuous. It may seem like a cop-out answer but I’m at peace with it, just as you are at peace with grabbing the tiger’s tail.)
I wish you all well, I just bought a new harness for my four year old and we need to go out and develop his footwork.
Cheers!
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Tony Bird
climber
Northridge, CA
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finn--i have an antidote for that anecdote.
i heard elaine pagels speak a couple years ago--another princeton scholar, but full of liveliness and ideas and so engaging to her audience.
pagels is a student of early christian literature--please don't call it new testament, 'cause she wrote the book on the gnostic gospels. she has had her share of personal tragedy, and she's very open about her feelings. i suppose you'd say she came back to belief from agnosticism--but she still manages to keep rigorous scholarship in its place and bases her observations on that. she's in demand on both sides of the theist/atheist aisle, and, from a fella's point of view, she's living proof that a blonde can have the best brains in the thinktank and still keep one heck of a figure into her 60s. the professor who went to the lecture with me remarked simply, "i could listen to her all day."
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Lynne Leichtfuss
Trad climber
Will know soon
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Hey Dr. F, old friend......I mean that cause you are. One of Dan's bitd friends. (and mine too) You don't have to say "poor lynnie" or worry about hurting my feelings. I'm good :D
Now if you got on ST and said, " Did you see the awful outfit lynne wore to the Sacherer Memorial and what's with her hair.....or the tacos she made were horrible." Well that could hurt my feelings. Cause you see like Carly Simon said, "You're so vain." Workin' on it, but it's a tough one especially as you get a bit older.....
Oh, I've said this before too. I've studied and tried different religions and for a while I didn't even believe there was a God and a personal one at that. Then I met my best friend, and that was that. Peace all and Cheers.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Unfortunately some here lack the spiritual or emotional maturity to carry on civil discourse about a subject central to many people’s lives. I suggest keeping your vile to yourself, don’t make it personal because once you do, you’ve lost your argument and all credibility. Be respectful because at the end of any debate, you may be the one that was wrong.
and similarly for the Christians out there who feel that it is their responsibility to remind us non-Christians that they believe there is a price to pay for our choices... we know that, best to keep your concern to yourselves.
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WBraun
climber
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Dr F -- "Am I the only one that takes a scientific viewpoint on this one"
No you don't. You lie to your own self.
The word "scientific" originally comes from Latin which means "producing knowledge"
It doesn't distinguish between spiritual or material.
You've taken the word and interpreted it to fit your own agenda and bias including limiting the actual word "scientific".
Catch the ball dude .....
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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well Dr F, I think you should try to take a scientific view of what the concept of faith, religion, etc, are and not dismiss the ideas out of hand.
From my viewpoint as a scientist, these beliefs are compelling because they connect in some deep way to how our consciousness works, which after all is a behavior program that evolved over a very long time, parts of which were appropriated to do other things as the behavioral package changed.
Scientists know that human perception is a very unreliable and limited in reporting precisely and accurately on natural phenomena. A lot of that has to do with the patchwork of sensory input, and sensory processing that has to be done...
...part of that processing deals with the consciousness, the sentience which seems to be rare among other animals, or if it exists, has no outlet, like language, to express itself (that statement may be extremely limited).
The point I'm getting at is that thoughts can animate action, so the belief in religious ideas have a material affect independent of the realization of those thoughts. There doesn't have to be an actual God for us to become "Christian soldiers," there only has to be a shared belief.
In the end, the religious ideas are products of the mind, they are powerful ideas that reconcile a number of difficult to understand concepts related to the human experience, actually the "life" experience. And though these thoughts may not be "real" by scientific standards (e.g. science fiction is not real, but they are certainly thoughts based on some logical speculation) the thoughts are actionable.
These thoughts explore the way we think, the way we are conscious and aware. The computer may be completely understandable from a material standpoint, the program running on the machine need not produce ideas that are reality.
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Tony Bird
climber
Northridge, CA
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lynne--my mom believed in jesus all her life and smoked for most of it as well. she quit smoking at age 60 when she had to have the veins stripped in her legs. i guess it hit too close to home at that point. she died of emphysema and CHF at age 86, having been on oxygen for several years, a great mom in many ways, but it's not a recommended way to die. when you smoke that long, no matter if you quit, the damage is done. if your lungs and veins are returned to pristine pre-smoking condition, now that would be a miracle worth an eyebrow raise. somehow, it's easier to put a tongue back together shortly after it got sliced. "god" isn't that omnipotent. if you study miracles, you'll find that we only get certain kinds.
if jesus is your best friend, that's great, and i wish you both well. he isn't mine, nor about to become one soon, and i kinda gave him his chance. look at the experience of others. it seems to be rather selective. i suspect he may play favorites.
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Lynne Leichtfuss
Trad climber
Will know soon
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Now I hear ya Tony Bird. Ya, I'd like to hear your story about giving him a chance. Maybe our paths will cross one day.
When my husband Dan died two years ago......well, I never dreamed he would. God had never really said no to me before. Life was full of good stuff and hard challenges, but never an ultimate. If you get my drift. So when I prayed for Dan to get well I never dreamed he would die. He did die. I slept nearly every night in ICU for over a month on two card table chairs with a trash can inbetween to fill the empty space so I wouldn't slip off the chair.....waiting for the miracle that never came. Finally one day my best friend said, "lynne, it's time to tell them to pull the plug." Even now it makes me cry.
I've had some major issues with God during my life time. That was the most difficult. I wish there was a way for a human to go into the life and brain of another. I know that sounds weird, but it would be the only way you could see how my life is good and ok now, even better than good. I miss Dan like heck, but God has eased the pain, even given me joy and peace and a whole new life path. God is God and I can't understand what or why things happen, but I know one thing.....in my lifetime he has never left me or forsaken me. He is always there. I can trust him even when I cannot trust myself.
I may never climb a big wall, but I have climbed lifes big walls.......and in the really tough pitches jesus has taken the sharp end for me.
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Tony Bird
climber
Northridge, CA
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gotta be careful here. most of the kids reading these posts don't want to hear nursing home stories. once you start talking about the diseases, they go, "ewwwwwwwwww" and i can't say i blame them.
um, lynne, really. we all die. you've got this "up front" relationship with your god, and you expect people around you not to die? "never dreamed he would"? what were you thinking? in any given couple, it's one or the other that goes first.
so you pray like hell about it, it happens anyway, and you don't like it, but you're eventually reconciled to god's "will", which means your prayers weren't "answered", better luck next time. seems like a lot of emotional gymnastics to me. we're all saddened by death, and there's nothing wrong with such gymnastics when it happens, but we're talking about religious philosophy here.
step back a minute. it's a child's relationship with a parent. most human-god relationship is couched in those terms. jesus's rhetoric is couched in those rather patronizing terms. the good shepherd is another one. we need a jesus who's a good cowboy and knows how to ride herd, not a good shepherd who lets things go to hell and then finally puts his own life on the line. if he's doing the tough leads for you, maybe you're not really a climber. i don't consider it a climb unless i've led it. and it doesn't seem like jesus is the sort of guy who deals with us as an equal.
i'm a grown-up. i've gotten there through the school of hard knocks. i don't need a patronizing relationship, thank you. it's a lot bigger existence than what i was first clued about, and the best thing for those with a good mind is to get into it as much as they can. that's what life is about. i'm not even saying you're wrong about these things--they work for you, and i'm sure you've paid dues of your own. but lynne, they don't work for everybody. and i see a real restlessness among those who can't accept that. and i suspect it's because they have to keep proving it all to themselves, time and again.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Dr. F, where did I say science didn't know?
science doesn't know the details of thought and consciousness, I'm not saying science won't know... someday, but probably not to the point that a thought could be determined, the exact thought... but who knows.
My point may be the same as yours, and may even have been posted in many threads before... are you listening and thinking or are you just responding reflexively. It might be your style, but it is not a good way to communicate the ideas of science. Think about being a teacher rather than a firebrand. Science doesn't need martyrs, don't set yourself up to be one.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Ed said: "In the end, the religious ideas are products of the mind, they are powerful ideas that reconcile a number of difficult to understand concepts related to the human experience, actually the "life" experience."
Many religious ideas are products of the mind, as you say, but probably just as many are interpretations or evaluations of spiritual experiences people have had or heard about which in and of themselves (the experiences) are not thoughts.
My sense is here you are trying to cast religious ideas as the fruit or product of the evolved brain, another way of positing material reductionism insofar that the evolved brain is viewed as somehow producing, or giving biological/material birth to said religious thoughts.
But spiritual experiences are quite another affair. To get anywhere with this at all you have to develop some sense of nothingness, void or emptiness. Recall the old Zen insight that the "mind" is not the content but is in it's most basic nature, entirely empty. That's not to say that "mind" does not contain thoughts, sensations and feelings, memories, imaginings, and so forth. It's just that through various observer based practices to recognize the difference between content and void, that while entirely interconnected and interdependent, they are in one sense, different.
In physics, the vacuum or void (mind) is filled with countless virtual particles rapidly bursting into and out of existence (thoughts, feelings, etc.) like an invisible fireworks display. We don't say that void and the particles are the same. Some might say that the void "sources" the particles, or material, which arises spontaneously from the potential in nothingness, just as thoughts arise from the infinite potential of Mind. There might even be those out there who say that the particles source the void, meaning that space and nothingness are the consequence of the spontaneous arising of particles from the vacuum. Here we have big bang theory in a mind of reverse mode, where something (virtual particles) create nothing (the void) in which they arise. The problem is the these are one-sided ways of looking at causation
But for my money, the goofiest way to look at causation is by way of material reductionism. In the mania for the evaluating mind to latch onto "something," we abandon the nothingness and vacuum of the Quantum model as something totally irrelevant, and say, not that void (mind) is filled with countless virtual particles rapidly bursting into and out of existence (thoughts, feelings, etc.), but that material and things (thoughts, feelings, horseshoes, beliefs in God, faith, religious doctrine, et al) somehow give rise to themselves.
Our attempts to deal with the void "neat" is fraught with the same challenges man has always struggled with per the idea of nothing or zero - without which no-thing works or arises. Take the following quote:
"Records show that the ancient Greeks seemed unsure about the status of zero as a number. They asked themselves, "How can nothing be something?" leading to philosophical and, by the Medieval period, religious arguments about the nature and existence of zero and the vacuum.
And here we are, still talking about it.
JL
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madbolter1
Big Wall climber
Walla Walla, WA
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Physics has long ago moved beyond the need to invoke God. Philosophy would be better off it did the same.
Ed, I agree with most of what you said about the discussion on this thread, and you are right that "convincing" is not likely to be going on. However, it's amazing how people's positions change over the years, and I've seen people I argued vociferously with "come around" years later and tell me that their arguments with me gave them food for thought that ultimately changed their mind.
And my mind is also open to change, as I have expressed. So, I don't think that things are a futile as you indicate.
Regarding what you said, quoted above, about that I, of course, heartily disagree.
First, philosophy largely abandoned appeal to "God" in its investigations many, many decades ago. However, "God" is being rediscovered by more and more philosophers, as it is increasingly found that something like "God" just makes for a better case in subjects as wide-ranging as philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and ethics.
Second, physicists in general have a very narrow view of what matters. Their technical wizardry tends to wow the uninitiated and lead the "physical perspective" to seem more comprehensive than it really is. But the account a physicist can give of everything from legitimate government, to justice, to mind, to ethics, and so on is wholly inadequate; and this fact is being more and more widely recognized by the intellectual community (contrary to HFCS's fervent hopes and assertions. hehe).
Anyway, most here are amazingly dogmatic; and they are unlikely to get anything at all from these discussions. Oh well.... I'll probably have less and less interest in spending the time on this thread going forward.
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madbolter1
Big Wall climber
Walla Walla, WA
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Just like they are deluded by 1000 other false beliefs.
Your beliefs in your own statements among them.
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