On 1/11/2013 2:17 PM, Jason Resch wrote:
On Fri, Jan 11, 2013 at 11:25 AM, <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
In a message dated 1/11/2013 2:27:33 AM Eastern Standard Time,
[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]> writes:
1) Choose some religion, it doesn't matter which
2) Find an idea some adherents of that religion put forward but almost
no one
seriously believes in or is easily shown to be inconsistent
3) Assume that because you have disproved one idea of one religion that
all
ideas found in all religions are false and/or unscientific
4) Bask in the feeling of superiority over those who are not so
enlightened
Jason
Ok, so in Darwinian fashion you sort through hundreds of faiths, so what
happens
when you cannot dissprove a religion? You sort them down till you hit a
toughie,
does that make it automatically correct, or is it the intellectual
limitation of the
sorter? Your Basking, is angering many non-believers, even. Witness Higg's
criticism
of Dawkins. Believers, Jason, I suppose will merely, pray for your soul
(poor lad!).
Perhaps if you decided to create your own religion, that couldn't be
disproved,
based on physics, or math, you would be coming up with the best faith? Then
we could
all be converted to being Jasonites. Or Reschers-whichever you prefer?
I'm nor sure I understand your point. My point was only that John's adherence to
atheism, which he defines as belief in no Gods, is less rational than someone following
his 4-step program to become a liberal theologian.
In particular, it is the above step 3, rejecting all religious ideas as false without
giving the idea a fair scientific evaluation, which is especially problematic. John is
perhaps being prescient in turning a blind eye to these other ideas, as otherwise we
might have the specter of a self-proclaimed atheist who finds scientific justification
for after lives, reincarnation, karma, beings who exercise complete control over worlds
of their design and creation, as well as a self-existent changeless infinite object
responsible for the existence of all reality.
He would rather avoid those topics altogether and take solace in denying specific
instances of inconsistent or silly definitions of God.
But your parody fails as a serious argument because the ideas put forward by *almost all
theists* include a very powerful, beneficent, all knowing superbeing who will judge and
reward and punish souls in an after life and who answers prayers. Now some, far from
powerful, humans with far from complete information, eliminated smallpox from the world.
God therefore must have had that power and simply chose not to do it. So if any very
powerful, very knowledgeable superbeing exists, it is not beneficent and not an acceptable
judge of good and evil. These are not just a peripheral idea of theisms and it's
falsehood is not a minor point because all theism insist that these ideas are definitive
of their religion.
John didn't say that all religions are false or unscientific. His point was that you can
avoid those attributes by becoming a *liberal theologian* - and incidentally that nothing
follows from liberal theology.
Brent
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