- Thomas Pane

        David W said:

Christianity as described in the Bible was about accountability to each other, all were considered brothers and sisters. Nobody was considered to be “more Christian” than anyone else. So, a theocracy (in my opinion) falls away from the original intent, and abuse ensues. And secular governance has absolutely no claim on being kindly towards humanity, witness Stalin, Mao, etc. In all cases it’s the unaccountable power that’s the problem.

Indeed I should have been more specific. I was referring to the secular democratic nations which have arisen in western Europe and it’s colonies over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, rather than the twentieth century dictatorships of central and eastern Europe and elsewhere, whose underlying characteristics share much in common with theocracies, right down to the demand for absolute faith in the system, unlimited power for the authorities, and some kind of utopian mythology concerning historical neccessity and a brilliant outcome at some unspecified futurity.

        Finrod said:

You are UNABLE to prove anything to anyone. The evidence for the other side of the argument is overwhelming, and Christians always resort to some kind of special pleading to give the illusion of staying in the fight.

Or in David’s case an outright ad hominem attack. Don’t kid yourself – there is no common ground to be had here. You haven’t got a leg to stand on do you, except to fall back on your own personal delusions, which quite frankly are of no interest? You haven’t mounted any sort of structured argument and continue to fall back on rhetorical theatrics to hide the fact you have made no points at all. I don’t mind an active exchange of ideas, but this has become tiresome.

Good day

        Finrod said:

Christianity is all about unaccountable authority, and there’s no need to speculate on the state of affairs it leads to. The historical record is before us, and a dismal sight it is! Secular governance has been much more kindly towards humanity than any theocracy, or theocratically inclined authoritarian state.

Christianity as described in the Bible was about accountability to each other, all were considered brothers and sisters. Nobody was considered to be “more Christian” than anyone else. So, a theocracy (in my opinion) falls away from the original intent, and abuse ensues. And secular governance has absolutely no claim on being kindly towards humanity, witness Stalin, Mao, etc. In all cases it’s the unaccountable power that’s the problem.

Let me be very clear on this point: I cannot prove the existence of God, either physically or rationally.

I never tried to prove anything to anyone, except for flaws in thinking that you can disprove the existence of God. I don’t expect you to believe that God exists, I didn’t ask you to believe that God exists, so what fight are you looking for?

You may think religion is the problem, but it’s really people who believe they are morally superior that push intolerance and become a threat to a free society.

Think about it.

        David W said:

Blah, blah, blah. Me thinks the lady doth protest too much.

I’m not obliged to prove anything to you, and don’t think I’ve asked anyone to cater to me. In fact I think I’ve been pretty forthright in trying to find common ground. So stop getting your panties in a wad.

You are UNABLE to prove anything to anyone. The evidence for the other side of the argument is overwhelming, and Christians always resort to some kind of special pleading to give the illusion of staying in the fight.

        DV82XL said:

That’s just so much rubbish masquerading as wisdom, and avoiding the issues I brought up in comment 78.

If you or anyone else wishes to delude yourselves with these beliefs, that is entirely your problem, but don’t expect the rest of us to cater to you in this regard or in any other way defer to these ideas. Also given that there is overwhelming evidence that adherence to these fantasies can and does lead to behavior that is violent and, as in the original post, outright criminal, expect opposition to grow. It is high time that this vestige of pre-enlightenment ignorance be put behind us for good.

Blah, blah, blah. Me thinks the lady doth protest too much.

I’m not obliged to prove anything to you, and don’t think I’ve asked anyone to cater to me. In fact I think I’ve been pretty forthright in trying to find common ground. So stop getting your panties in a wad.

        Finrod said:

It seems that belief in the existence of absolute evil lends itself to this sort of thing.

My experience is that unaccountable authority lends itself to this kind of thing, much more than any particular belief. Which is why I question over reliance on “systems of knowledge”. There are few people who will understand any philosophical or theological system with the depth that’s really necessary to be an equal among peers. So they rely on the expert authorities, whether that’s a pastor or a therapist or a rock star or a blogger. And even if the system of knowledge is perfect, those who implement it are not, and abuse follows.

Better to keep it simple.

        David W said:

I also think objective thinking and logical reasoning are great tools as well. I just don’t think they’re the only tools.

That’s just so much rubbish masquerading as wisdom, and avoiding the issues I brought up in comment 78. What other tools are there? Some myth that isn’t even the product of your own imagination, but that of con-men that were out to bamboozle others into believing that they had a privileged hot-line to the will of the creator of everything?

Actually you have been ducking most of what I wrote since you returned to the thread, because your replies in comment 71 also managed to dodge the points of what I had wrote as well.

The fact remains that all of this (religion) is nothing more than an edifice built on a foundation of absolutely nothing but the arbitrary belief in an imaginary being. It really doesn’t matter how convoluted the attempt to rationalize away the fact that there is not one shred of evidence to support this entity’s existence, or make excuses for it not directly reveling itself; any honest evaluation of the facts at hand cannot help but come to the conclusion that the whole idea is patently false.

If you or anyone else wishes to delude yourselves with these beliefs, that is entirely your problem, but don’t expect the rest of us to cater to you in this regard or in any other way defer to these ideas. Also given that there is overwhelming evidence that adherence to these fantasies can and does lead to behavior that is violent and, as in the original post, outright criminal, expect opposition to grow. It is high time that this vestige of pre-enlightenment ignorance be put behind us for good.

        David W said:

I understand the irritation in the ambiguity, but why should we have a doctrine that’s completely unambiguous when life itself is ambiguous.

Because when you’re dealing with a matter as momentous as salvation or damnation, we really ought to expect God to issue firm guidance regarding it. For Him not to do so leaves Him in a reprehensible moral position.

The following is one example of “Christian love”, as it is called.

If you will cast your mind back to the Eighties and early Nineties, you may recall something now known as the Satanic Panic, where a number of therapists, some with connections to the Christian community, promolgated the idea that there existed a network of murderous Satanist paedophiles preying on young children and using advanced brainwashing techniques to cover their traces, the evidence for which could be uncovered by using hypnosis to recover supressed memories. After a thorough FBI investigation, no trace of such a network has ever been found, and it’s pretty obvious in retrospect that the entire thing was a scam. A particularly viscious scam it was too, ending up with a lot of innocent people going to gaol (that’s jail to you Yanks) under a cloud of the worst kinds of accusations against their characters.

At the time, and occasionally since then, the general results of this witch-hunt have been pretty much the same. When presented with a seemingly plausible case for an immense evil, and pushed by authority figures into believing they’d been victims of it, the Christian targets of this movement ended up accusing the only people in their lives they really knew well: Other Christians (usually their parents). In this, the whole phenomenon recapitulated the evolution of the witch craze of the Early Modern period in Europe. If you invent an imaginary enemy for a relatively insular group and tell people the enemy is infiltrating society, said group will naturally turn on itself.

It seems that belief in the existence of absolute evil lends itself to this sort of thing.

All of this makes no sense from the viewpoint of individual morality, but becomes much more explicable if you consider it as a mechanism of cultural control.