But davey, I thought the sophists turned out to be the good guys in the story
> Three or four times now I have hit the reply button with an urge to respond > but then I just hit cancel because I promised myself I'd cut you some slack. > But, dude, this is the kind of thing that gives sophistry and specious > reasoning a bad name. All you've done here is define theism in such a way > that it is not possible to be anything but a theist. All you've done is > render the term meaningless. > Ok, then. My work here is done. > But it does shine a little light into the issue. For a lot of people, when > they say they believe in God, what they're really trying to tell you is, > "I'm a moral person" or "I like the people at church" or "I'm not a boat > rocker" or "I'm not weird", none of which has anything to do with weather or > not you really think a supernatural, all powerful creator actually exists. Or perhaps they are saying something closer to "I need to feel like there's a big daddy in the sky for my own psychological security." You know, that existential angst thing. > Where is it written that you can't be moral or have any values unless you > believe that? And if you're morality springs from such a belief then it's > not really morality. It's just obedience. Exactly. I agree completely. The statically defined religious belief in God is no belief in God at all, but a belief in a system handed down by your priest, rabbi or guru. > It breeds irrational attitude of submission to authority and all kinds of > thing that actually retard moral intelligence. > Yep. > And the idea that people become atheists so they can be naughty is just the > stupidest kind of pop psychology I ever heard. > Sorry, I got it from an Aldous Huxley quote and it made sense to me. > This doesn't make me splutter my soup. It just makes me sad. > Well, again I'm sorry. I didn't mean to make you sad, but I did think it might. I like the point you make about the need for dialogue. I think these points need to be made and that's why I bring them out. Between the angry bull horn of the religiously certain, and the angry bull horn of the anti-religiously certain, we have the middle way of the MoQ - which says Good is real but cannot be defined. That's been my understanding of the MoQ ever since I closed the covers on Lila and I'm kinda confused how come the anti-religious bullhorn has gotten the podium on this forum for so long when the empirical truth confronting us all is that whatever we think we know, such things remain a mystery to us. The idea of a fat guy wearing a tee-shirt that says, "Too big to fail" makes > me laugh but you need about 80 more of those just to break even. > Or what? God is gonna punish me? I ain't gonna get an "A"? 'scuse me while I guffaw in my soup. > Let me ask you a straight question. Why do you believe in God? Seriously, > give me one good reason. > He makes me laugh. > And why are you trying to sell it here, of all places? There are literally > a million places on the internet and many thousands of real-world places > that would be more receptive and more appropriate. Why do you feel compelled > to jam it into the MOQ when you know perfectly well that it's not about > that? > Well I guess davey, I've always been something of a contrarian and when I see one side of an argument pushed off as "truth", I wanna present the other. And I don't think the MoQ should be pushing religion, I also don't think it should be pushing anti-religion. For one very important and pragmatic reason, if none other, atheism is about the smallest minority, population wise, in the world and if you want a philosophy to succeed, you don't want to start by pissing off 95% of the entire fucking world. duh. And it's not just you. Time and time again, religious people with an agenda > show up here and do what you're doing, only worse. > > God, it's sooooo boring! > Well Dave, you know what to do with boring posts, just toss 'em. I think you made that point to Bo recently. I mean, what else can you do? John Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
