Hi Roger Clough,
On 13 Jan 2013, at 11:37, Roger Clough wrote:
Hi Bruno Marchal
No, the Devil would never disparage reason. For reason, as
we can see on this list, is the father of doubt.
We are on the domain where we might disagree a lot. I hope you don't
mind.
I think that:
doubt = sanity, and
absence of doubt = madness.
Reason, for example through Aquinas' 5 proofs of God, can get you
no closer to God than plausibility. You have to take the blind
leap of faith to actually reach God.
I think you need only to look inward, and stop using words. You need
only to open the mind of your brain to the mind of your heart, or
perhaps just to have a good connection between your left and right
brain.
I think that if you ask a blind faith, you can only favor atheism.
See how clever Satan is, using perfectly reasonable questions and
common sense to deceive Eve into eating the apple:
"The Fall
3 Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the
Lord God had made.
He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from
any tree in the garden’?”
2 The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat fruit from the trees in
the garden,
3 but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in
the middle of the garden, and you
must not touch it, or you will die.’”
And we know she will not, unless dying means "eyes opening and seeing
that we are naked, that is living on the terrestrial plane".
So either Eve lied, or God lied to Eve.
The serpent just told the truth.
How weird!
4 “You will not certainly die,” the serpent said to the woman. 5
“For God knows that
when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like
God, knowing good and evil.”
The first prohibition law.
That God looks like the incarnation of the authoritative argument.
Looks like the killer of the doubting reason, and the hesitating
democracy (when sane).
6 When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food
and pleasing to the eye,
and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She
also gave some to
her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. 7
Then the eyes of both of them were opened,
So the serpent was right. Unless again "dying" means (in paradise)
"living (on earth).
Are we dead?
and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together
and made coverings for
themselves."
The end of innocence.
That text might be an echo of the "climate-change" passage where we
lived first in trees, and were eating and drinking in a generous
jungle, and probably naked, in an hot climate, to a more cold period,
with much less food and much difficulties to get it and keep it.
It might be an echo of a humanity nostalgia for its "childhood", and
an echo of the passage of childhood (with the father and the mother
providing food and warm) to adulthood where usually you have to find
those things by yourself.
It might be an echo for the penible truth that knowledge is not always
fun, it can hurt.
The one believing in the one (truth) fears mainly the hurting due to
the lies deposit on the truth, as when the truth win, the shock is
proportional to the thickness of the lies.
Truth is a queen which win all the wars, and this without any army.
But she is patient, as the Löbian number can make *quite* long detours.
Roger, that text is terribly hard to interpret. From comp it can still
describe a "genuine" meeting with God, but then it should have been
never written. Some truth are just non doubtable, but when asserted,
generates the infinitely many doubts. In that sense, the "fall" is
closer to the Plotinian and neoplatonic fall, with the birth of matter
as its main consequence.
I favor the second interpretation, but it inverts completely life and
death.
You are living when you are ignorant in the paradise, and you are dead
when you get the knowledge that you are naked on earth. Or God is a
liar.
But I insist. Such text are not easy to interpret.
Bruno
[Roger Clough], [rclo...@verizon.net]
1/13/2013
"Forever is a long time, especially near the end." - Woody Allen
----- Receiving the following content -----
From: Bruno Marchal
Receiver: everything-list
Time: 2013-01-12, 17:41:09
Subject: Re: WHY YOU SHOULDN'T BECOME A LIBERAL THEOLOGIAN
On 12 Jan 2013, at 12:03, Roger Clough wrote:
Hi meekerdb
As you observe, beliefs can be slippery, because reason is the
devil's whore.
That's a rumor propelled by the Devil :)
Reason is bad only for those of bad faith. Religion does not oppose
with reason.
It extends it.
Reason is the best ally to honest religion.
Reason is the enemy of those who want to manipulate you in religion's
name.
From your post, I am sure you agree on this at some level. The more
you trust God, the less you fear the use of reason, even if not
especially in theology.
To oppose science and faith perverts ... science and faith. I think.
Bruno
That's why we Lutherans rely first on faith (trust in God).
Second on the Bible.
[Roger Clough], [rclo...@verizon.net]
1/12/2013
"Forever is a long time, especially near the end." - Woody Allen
----- Receiving the following content -----
From: meekerdb
Receiver: everything-list
Time: 2013-01-11, 17:42:15
Subject: Re: HOW YOU CAN BECOME A LIBERAL THEOLOGIAN IN JUST 4 STEPS.
On 1/11/2013 2:17 PM, Jason Resch wrote:
On Fri, Jan 11, 2013 at 11:25 AM, wrote:
In a message dated 1/11/2013 2:27:33 AM Eastern Standard Time,
jasonre...@gmail.com
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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