posted
Bummer. I have heard plenty about going to hell, etc. If you're not Christian but I've never heard someone say you can't be a good person unless you are a Christian. I guess that's a good thing.
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posted
I'm a little confused as you appear to be saying the opposite thing here than you said before-- but there are plenty of people who say both things...
"You cannot be a good person unless you are Christian."
AND
"You cannot be good if you are a Christian."
(which is usually stated as something like...)
"Christians who actually follow what they are supposed to, and don't subscribed to a watered-down, selective-reading version of the religion, cannot be good people. For example, they should oppose homosexual acts."
That's my paraphrase, not what I believe, necessarily.
Christians should, if they are followers of the Bible, probably believe that all those without faith are not good people. Jesus likes outcasts, but only those who show faith or have someone to show faith for them (Zacchaeus, the paralysed man and his friends). Which is fair; the most important commandment is to believe in God and God alone. If you're not doing that, you're committing the only unforgiveable sin.
Think of the thieves. Jesus forgives the thief that shows faith. Faith/belief in God is, according to the Bible, the one thing that fixes everything.
The virtuous unfaithful are almost completely absent from the Bible. An exception would be the Samaritan story in which the Samaritan is not faithful (or rather, not explicitly faithful).
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posted
Teshi, are you saying that you believe this?
quote:Christians should, if they are followers of the Bible, probably believe that all those without faith are not good people. Jesus likes outcasts, but only those who show faith or have someone to show faith for them (Zacchaeus, the paralysed man and his friends). Which is fair; the most important commandment is to believe in God and God alone. If you're not doing that, you're committing the only unforgiveable sin.
Because even most legitimate Christian leaders would disagree.
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posted
How can someone be as good as a Christian if they break the only unforgiveable sin?
Surely committing a sin, especially one as fundamentally and irretrievably serious as not following the first commandment, should unavoidably create a situation where the person is more sinful than people who do not break this first commandment.
Ignoring that commandment, they may be equally sinful or good, of course. They may fall into a broad "good" category, but they cannot get full marks, as it were.
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posted
Being good and "as good as" are different. I'm sure there are some Christians who fit the classic holier-than-thou and subscribe to the "as good as" nonsense.
My point was that every Christian I've ever spoken with about this would agree that you can be good, loving AND not a Christian.
My earlier question was asking (perhaps in a muddled way) if you've heard anything contrary from a Christian.
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posted
Oh. I thought you meant the opposite as you asked whether goodness and Christianity were mutually exclusive (which means they are separate).
There are plenty of Christians who are horrified that their children/parents/sister/friend are atheists. They believe, as the Bible says, that being faithful to a Christian God is above all the most important thing that contributes to their acquaintence's quality.
Jesus says "love your neighbour", as the Samaritan story shows. However, he also says, "He who loves father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me; and he who loves son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me. And he who does not take his cross and follow after Me is not worthy of Me." (Matthew 10)
When Christians say this, however wrong I may think they are, they are totally within their scriptual rights.
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posted
It's too late for me to track down the quote. I'm writing this so you don't think I've just abandoned the conversation. It's past midnight!
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Matthew 10 is one of the reasons I am not nor ever will be again a Christian.
No loving god could demand that I put them before my own children. If loving my children with all that I am makes me unworthy of Christ then so be it.
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posted
Blasphemy of the Holy Spirit is often misunderstood. Basically, what it means is that if you know- not just believe or have faith or suspect but know - know God - and not some wrong idea of God but really God - and you utterly, permanently, finally reject a relationship with God, God will let you.
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quote:Originally posted by Stone_Wolf_: Matthew 10 is one of the reasons I am not nor ever will be again a Christian.
No loving god could demand that I put them before my own children. If loving my children with all that I am makes me unworthy of Christ then so be it.
Is it possible that you have a different perception of God? God is the source of all, even your children. If you truly believed that, then shouldn't He be able to expect you to love Him more than you love your children?
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posted
I've been thinking about this argument about "choices." And something's occurred to me. I was assuming that we (all of us) were either communicating badly, or one group was wrong. (i.e. either Matt and I just haven't tried hard enough to choose different beliefs, or rationalized it afterwards as something we always believed. Or kmmboots and Stone are making generalizations about free will that are based on misguided principles.)
quote:My old professor, David Berman, liked to talk about what he called the "typical mind fallacy", which he illustrated through the following example:
There was a debate, in the late 1800s, about whether "imagination" was simply a turn of phrase or a real phenomenon. That is, can people actually create images in their minds which they see vividly, or do they simply say "I saw it in my mind" as a metaphor for considering what it looked like?
Upon hearing this, my response was "How the stars was this actually a real debate? Of course we have mental imagery. Anyone who doesn't think we have mental imagery is either such a fanatical Behaviorist that she doubts the evidence of her own senses, or simply insane." Unfortunately, the professor was able to parade a long list of famous people who denied mental imagery, including some leading scientists of the era. And this was all before Behaviorism even existed.
The debate was resolved by Francis Galton, a fascinating man who among other achievements invented eugenics, the "wisdom of crowds", and standard deviation. Galton gave people some very detailed surveys, and found that some people did have mental imagery and others didn't. The ones who did had simply assumed everyone did, and the ones who didn't had simply assumed everyone didn't, to the point of coming up with absurd justifications for why they were lying or misunderstanding the question. There was a wide spectrum of imaging ability, from about five percent of people with perfect eidetic imagery1 to three percent of people completely unable to form mental images2.
Dr. Berman dubbed this the Typical Mind Fallacy: the human tendency to believe that one's own mental structure can be generalized to apply to everyone else's.
This was a lesson I've learned over the course of my life, in particular in discussions with my mom, who's mental architecture is very different from mine (whether that's nature or nurture, I have no idea).
I don't actually think this is the issue here - I think there's a combination of boots and Stone believing in free will (I don't, at least not in a meaningful sense), and also a bit of a semantic breakdown in terms of what "choice" means.
I believe the sky is blue. If I tried REALLY REALLY HARD, I could try a variety of techniques that would increase my chance of changing my belief (I liked Matt's cancer analogy). I might be able to find a technique so potent that it practically guaranteed that I permanently started seeing the sky as red. I don't know how likely that is, but I know people have been able to convince themselves of some pretty crazy things. If I really, really chose super hard to believe the sky was red because my life depended on it, I could probably find a way.
It is still patently absurd to tell me that I believe that the sky is blue "because I choose to" rather than because, seriously, the sky is blue.
By now, I confess that I have plenty of biases built up that reinforce the fact that God probably isn't real. But there was a time when I didn't have those biases. I had a catholic parent and an atheist one - I feel like I was in a reasonable position to choose either option. There was a period of time when I believed in God just because. Then I started asking questions, and looking at evidence. There was a preliminary period when I was around 7, and then at 15 or so I tried hard to shed my earlier preconceptions and go at it again.
In both cases, I don't know that any piece of evidence cemented it completely, but at every piece of evidence I looked at (talking to my mom and priests at age 7, reading the bible and looking up biblical archaeology, every single piece of evidence I saw made me instinctively, definitively, without any time to think, lower my estimate that God existed. Until the choice was so small as to be meaningless. If you consider that a choice, then I consider choice to be a meaningless word.
Now, if I had a parent arguing kmmboots position instead of my mothers, things may have been a little different. My mental architecture is radically different from my mother's. I suspect it is not so different from kmmboots, and I suspect that if God had been defined in a pantheistic sense when I was 7 years old and learning about black holes, it wouldn't have sounded instinctively wrong to me.
By now, I've grown up, I've cemented my worldview, and it's too late. Not to change my beliefs about god, but to change the way I adopt beliefs. If I have no evidence for something, I ignore it. No one has ever presented evidence for God that made me raise my estimate of him (pantheistic or otherwise). If I'd grown up believing in a pantheistic deity it might be a reasonable enough sounding (and conveniently undisprovable) default belief that I'd stick with it. I wouldn't consider that a choice either though.
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quote:Is it possible that you have a different perception of God? God is the source of all, even your children. If you truly believed that, then shouldn't He be able to expect you to love Him more than you love your children?
As I noted before in another thread, this statement doesn't automatically follow for all people. For any definition of love that I actually care about, it's not true for me. If love is defined in such a way that this is possible, then I don't care about love. I can (at least come pretty close to) wrapping my brain around why it makes sense to you. But you need to (at least come close to) wrapping your brain around why it doesn't make any sense to some other people. (I can imagine myself eventually coming to believe it if forced to, but only to the same extent that I can imagine myself forcing myself to believe the sky was red).
I am curious if there are any statistically differences between people for whom it makes obvious sense and people for whom it doesn't.
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The idea that we owe God more than our children because we owe Him our existence suggests to me that, should our parents suggest a course of action that would be beneficial to them but detrimental to our children, we should take it. Is that a fair analogy?
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posted
I haven't actually attempted to define it before - I have an easier time saying what it's not than what it is. Don't hold me to this, but my initial stab at a definition is:
A profound admiration and affection for someone.
Admiration and affection is not something you intrinsically get, for anything. No matter what good you've done. You can't make people love you. You can try to do all kinds of right things, but in the end they either love you or they don't.
What sort of things make people profoundly admire and feel affection for other people depends wildly on the person. There are ways and reasons to love that are both healthy and unhealthy. A woman might love an abusive husband and a child might love an abusive parent. I won't tell them that their feeling isn't love, but I don't think it's particularly valuable love either.
Love that I care about is based on mutual respect, and efforts from both individuals to form an intimate relationship that improves each other's lives. Most importantly, it's a relationship that has to be willingly entered into and embraced. You can't willingly enter into a relationship before you even exist.
I do not love my parents because they gave birth to me, I love them because of the things they've taught me, the shelter they gave me, and the respect they've shown me.
If I were, say, a poor starving child in a destitute family that received life-sustaining help from a distant philanthropist, I would respect and thank them, but I wouldn't necessarily love them. It requires not only effort to help, but effort to be intimate.
And even if a person does their best to treat someone with respect, to help them in their struggles, and to better their existence... sometimes love just doesn't happen. It's not particularly fair, but that's how it is. And when it works out that way, how the person reacts to that rejection tells you what kind of person they are. They certainly have a right to be sad. They may even have a right to be bitter. They do not have a right to take any of that bitterness out on the person who rejected them. If your respect and effort was contingent on them reciprocating, then you weren't attempting to create a relationship, you were attempting to execute a business transaction.
If God created me, that was nice of him. I'm grateful. But he has made no effort to be intimate with me (and I have made what I consider a more than reasonable effort to extend him an invitation). Some day, if God reveals himself to me, and attempts in good faith to begin a relationship, then a relationship can begin, and perhaps love will follow. But it doesn't come before then.
[ March 30, 2011, 11:22 PM: Message edited by: Raymond Arnold ]
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posted
You know it's a bad thing if I love were this topic is going....
You know what I would think is awesome, a land where everyone is nice and kind, not because some shadowy overlord would refuse them access to a told 'wonderful afterlife', but because they think it's the right thing.
Those who do good without seeking a reward are greater than those who do.
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posted
O_o I can get away with saying something like that, only because it's believed I am heartless, and I never really love anyone anyways.
But to say "I don't love you any more." gives the feeling that you're meaning something negative and not something neutral.
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quote:Is it possible that you have a different perception of God? God is the source of all, even your children. If you truly believed that, then shouldn't He be able to expect you to love Him more than you love your children?
I do have a different perception of God. I think "God" is everything, including my children, myself, under cooked broccoli, atom bombs and light years of mostly empty space, etc.
So, the source of my children, no. I do not think that God is separate, the thingy-ma-bob who made us and then stepped away. We are God, and God is us, and not us, and everything else.
I think if you were everything and self aware, and wanted to learn, to grow, to not be bored to death and lonely you would split off pieces of yourself to experience "stuff".
I also think think that God wants us to be happy and harmonious, if we can be, as God wants to be happy and harmonious Itself.
But no matter what I think of God, I can guarantee that no God I choose to believe in and worship would ever ask me to love him more then my children, would be jealous of me cherishing my babies the most of anything in my whole life. And if I am wrong, and God wants that, then I am His enemy, for He is a petty and small thing not worthy of praise.
The "God" I believe in has room for different views, for finding the beauty which sings to you, to cherishing the harmony that speaks to the quiet places in your soul and comforts you that you are not alone and there is magic in the world, because in the end, it is all God.
No one answer is good enough for the largeness of my God. I don't think God should be separated out from our lives, from our hearts, given a day of the week and a building to live in, so that if it isn't Sunday and we aren't at church then we are separate from God.
I think that God learns from us humans, and loves us humans, but doesn't step in to change things because then it isn't separate, it isn't let the chips fall where they may and learn what you can.
I think God loves all of us humans, and feels that we all deserve to be loved, deserve endless chances on the wheel of life until we can love everything enough to be a part of loving everything, returning to being one with God. Returning to the state of knowing and not questing.
I mean seriously, if you had all the answers to all the questions, had all your needs filled, felt connected with every atom of existence, you would cease to be you and become something...complete, say, a part of God.
As to the definition of love...the ancient Greeks had at least four words, separating out respect, passion, friendship and family.
In all of these the common thread for me is wanting goodness for the thing loved. To wish someone growth, prosperity, health.
Mutual respect is great, but I loved my childhood dog, I didn't respect him. I love my 3 month old daughter, but I don't expect her to respect me, well, until maybe she -can-.
I love freedom, and the ocean, and a peaceful cool night. Love isn't always about being loved in return. It is about recognizing value. Love is moral judgment. I love you because I see that you are good and want you to continue as good or improve and to no way diminish.
Where as hate is wanting something to be less, to waste away into nothingness.
As an interesting offshoot I would like to discuss...something most people don't consider. That love and hate are not good and bad respectively. As RA pointed out, love can be good or bad, as can hate.
I hate injustice, corruption, bullies, cruelty and grape soda. Some people love to hurt people, taking advantage of others, making themselves feel good by making others feel bad.
Love can be evil and hate can be good.
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quote:If you truly believed that, then shouldn't He be able to expect you to love Him more than you love your children?
One commonality amongst those that I love is that none of them explicitly demand it of me.
Really? Try telling your wife, "Honey, I don't love you any more," and see where that gets you.
??? The point was that love, for me, is something that is earned, fostered, nurtured. You can no more demand love than you can demand that a flower bloom. Whether wilting of that flower might make you sad is really beside the point.
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posted
I also wanted to note (possibly relevant to Matt) that there may be deeper levels of love that are a bit more of a negotiated commitment. Not negotiated in the sense of "all right, I'll love you X harder if you love me X harder" but based on a mutual understanding that you both already love each other, and you will both be working to deepen that love. If you then found out your spouse is cheating, or never really cared, that would certainly be even more wounding.
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posted
Raymond, just a slight correction. My religion is not pantheism. It is closer to panentheism but not entirely. Sort of a Catholic panentheism.
As to the whole typical mind issue. You are correct; I do assume that most people are as intelligent, aware, and as capable of free will as I (or the multitude of others) who choose their religion. There may be some that are incapable of choosing, but I think far more just don't realize that it is a choice. I remind you again of the guy who beat someone to death with rocks. Did he have no choice? Should he not be held responsible for his crime (assuming of course that his story is true and not a scam about the will)?
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quote:My religion is not pantheism. It is closer to panentheism but not entirely. Sort of a Catholic panentheism.
I know. But the part of it that could have potentially altered my life would have been pantheism. (I already had exposure to the catholic part at an early age, and every new thing I learned turned me off to it)
quote:Did he have no choice? Should he not be held responsible for his crime (assuming of course that his story is true and not a scam about the will)?
These two statements have nothing to do with each other. Punishments don't get to be worse nor people held "more accountable" because they made choices. We should inflict the amount of punishment necessary to deter perpetrators from doing it again, and to prevent others from doing it in the first place. No more. The fact that they "chose" is irrelevant.
In fact, the only reason punishment is a good thing at all is precisely BECAUSE people's choices can be manipulated by outside events.
[ March 31, 2011, 10:40 AM: Message edited by: Raymond Arnold ]
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posted
But this guy, presumably, would do the same thing regardless of punishment because he had no choice. We aren't affecting his future choice because there is no choice.
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quote:But this guy, presumably, would do the same thing regardless of punishment because he had no choice. We aren't affecting his future choice because there is no choice.
Let me be clear about my nomenclature (I'm going to be using this from no on rather than trying my best to guess at yours). I had assumed I'd talked about this in detail in a thread you were following.
Actually, before I take the time to write that all out, if I say that my beliefs here are nearly identical to TomD, does that clear every(any)thing up?
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posted
Not really. I vaguely recall the idea of their being no free will but it fails to make any practical sense so far. Though I suppose if I can be a panentheistic Catholic, you can be a Calvinish atheist. Posts: 11187 | Registered: Sep 2005
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posted
Right now I'm busy and can't in good conscience take time to explain the whole thing satisfactorily.
There's a good Less Wrong article that sums it up (it actually provided me with a reason to believe Free Will "exists", although not a way to believe that it ultimately matters). I can't just sum it up here because part of why it works well is diagrams:
(The most important part is the first few paragraphs and diagrams, the rest is interesting to me but might not be to you)
"Decision" and "Belief" are both words that mean "the result of complex processes in your brain, which is the result of physics." There's a difference between them IMO, but it's a complex, subtle. The simplest comparison is that a belief is like an emotion: is arises spontaneously from outside stimuli.
When I'm pretending to believe in free will for the sake of discussions, I still don't think it's meaningful to say you "chose" a belief. The man chose to act on his belief. He did not choose what the belief was.
(In "free will" terms, you can choose the control emotions, but it's a choice to modify the naturally occurring phenomenon. You can choose not to get angry when you find out your child was killed. But it's a choice AWAY from the default. You can't choose "not to be happy" because there was no happiness already there to choose away from. I can choose to believe the sky is red, but that is a choice to change the naturally occurring belief that the sky is blue)
I might try and explain more later when I have time.
[ March 31, 2011, 11:44 AM: Message edited by: Raymond Arnold ]
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First time I have ever heard that word, so prolly not. Glancing over wiki page I see some similarities, but I wouldn't classify myself as "pantheistic", if you held a gun to my head I would have to say I'm "fascinated".
My personal theories are bits and pieces of this and that, with a healthy respect for believers. I think it is an act of courage to believe in something you can't prove, and in most cases, the act of believing strengthens the believer, regardless of the belief.
Slightly disappointed no one had anything to say to my last post.
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posted
Your last post seemed to be directly responding to Armoth, and I thought you had already explained most of it in an earlier post so there wasn't much to comment on.
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What I wonder, and perhaps you've already answered this, is that if God is everything, including yourself, what part of God is just part of everyday life, and what part of God is separate enough to worship? I know that question probably doesn't capture how you really see it very well, but hopefully it's understandable.
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posted
That's the point afr, the way I see it, if you love your children, you love God, if you love Private Selection Caramel Sea Salt Truffle Ice Cream, you love God, if your heart is filled with joy when you see the sun set over the pacific ocean, then you are worshiping God.
My point is, don't separate anything. Love everything, be a part of everything, as everything is God.
RA, don't worry about it, I just put a lot of myself into that one and hoped it might touch a nerve somewhere.
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quote:Is it possible that you have a different perception of God? God is the source of all, even your children. If you truly believed that, then shouldn't He be able to expect you to love Him more than you love your children?
Well first of all for many people there is the idea that you're supposed to love your children more than anything, period, in the ideal situation. So if God gives you something you're supposed to love more than anything else...well, obviously-even if it's God, you love that more than anything else. (Italics for emphasis, not for irritation or anything.)
And then there's the problem of people's obligations changing as time goes on, as their lives change. As responsibilities grow. It is perhaps reasonable for God to expect your primary love when nothing looks to you with primary love (or would, unless you trained them quite deliberately to look to God). But this is a discussion that's been had before, about expectations and obligations, etc.
To me, if God is going to give me a child, then God will simply have to be prepared for the whole love pie having fewer slices remaining in it, y'know?
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quote:1 John 4 Little children, you are from God and have overcome them, for he who is in you is greater than he who is in the world.
I do not get it. Care to elaborate?
But I do agree that the love pie is limitless.
The love cake on the other hand only has 12 slices, and hurry to the conference room, 10 of them are already gone!
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quote: 1 John 7 7 Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. 8 Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. 9 In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. 10 In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. 11 Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. 12 No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.
Nice, too bad it is very conflicting with so much other stuff in that there book.
Please just post the verse next time, I like discussions, but I really dislike homework.
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quote:Originally posted by Stone_Wolf_: That's the point afr, the way I see it, if you love your children, you love God, if you love Private Selection Caramel Sea Salt Truffle Ice Cream, you love God, if your heart is filled with joy when you see the sun set over the pacific ocean, then you are worshiping God.
Fine, fine, but then what is the purpose of referring to this as 'God', with all the associated historical context? I feel you are really misusing the word; you should invent a different one, to clarify that you mean something that's not the usual English sense of 'God'.
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posted
Part of that belief is a strong disbelief in the standard "God", so while it might cause some confusion, it also alleviates some confusion as well.
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