evasion.
is religion real or a way to feel comfortable?what do you think?
- Thread starter Tleit004
- Start date
evasion.
Just asking you to clarify your oft repeated argument of logical inconsistencies with the notion of god being causeless.
Thanks in advance
Just asking you to clarify your oft repeated argument of logical inconsistencies with the notion of god being causeless.
Thanks in advance
Add a layer of bait on that evasion.
Its not a bait.
Its a request for you to clarify your arguments.
You say that "everything must have a beginning" is a dishonest argument (and go on further that you don't have a working definition for ""beginning") yet you also (apparently) say that "god is causeless" is a logical fallacy.
Do you have a working definition for "cause" in that argument, or is that another thing that has you stumped?
:shrug:
Maybe you have just shot yourself in the foot but its certainly not bait.
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Several of us, who are not religious, noted that the idea that religiousness is just to feel comfortable, is too simplistic.
And again:
How many people who call upon "everything has a beginning" have you asked whether they call upon "everything has a beginning" in order to "feel comfortable"?
You asked the OP, but received no reply so far.
Mutawintji
Registered Member
Quote:
As I said before, I do not think that the real reason why people accept religion has anything to do with argumentation. They accept religion on emotional grounds.
One is often told that it is a very wrong thing to attack religion, because religion makes men virtuous.
So I am told; I have not noticed it.
You know, of course, the parody of that argument in Samuel Butler's book, Erewhon Revisited. You will remember that in Erewhon there is a certain Higgs who arrives in a remote country, and after spending some time there he escapes from that country in a balloon. Twenty years later he comes back to that country and finds a new religion in which he is worshiped under the name of the "Sun Child," and it is said that he ascended into heaven. He finds that the Feast of the Ascension is about to be celebrated, and he hears Professors Hanky and Panky say to each other that they never set eyes on the man Higgs, and they hope they never will; but they are the high priests of the religion of the Sun Child.
He is very indignant, and he comes up to them, and he says, "I am going to expose all this humbug and tell the people of Erewhon that it was only I, the man Higgs, and I went up in a balloon." He was told, "You must not do that, because all the morals of this country are bound round this myth, and if they once know that you did not ascend into Heaven they will all become wicked"; and so he is persuaded of that and he goes quietly away. That is the idea -- that we should all be wicked if we did not hold to the Christian religion.
It seems to me that the people who have held to it have been for the most part extremely wicked. You find this curious fact, that the more intense has been the religion of any period and the more profound has been the dogmatic belief, the greater has been the cruelty and the worse has been the state of affairs. In the so-called ages of faith, when men really did believe the Christian religion in all its completeness, there was the Inquisition, with all its tortures; there were millions of unfortunate women burned as witches; and there was every kind of cruelty practiced upon all sorts of people in the name of religion.
You find as you look around the world that every single bit of progress in humane feeling, every improvement in the criminal law, every step toward the diminution of war, every step toward better treatment of the colored races, or every mitigation of slavery, every moral progress that there has been in the world, has been consistently opposed by the organized churches of the world. I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.
Bertrand Russell
As I said before, I do not think that the real reason why people accept religion has anything to do with argumentation. They accept religion on emotional grounds.
One is often told that it is a very wrong thing to attack religion, because religion makes men virtuous.
So I am told; I have not noticed it.
You know, of course, the parody of that argument in Samuel Butler's book, Erewhon Revisited. You will remember that in Erewhon there is a certain Higgs who arrives in a remote country, and after spending some time there he escapes from that country in a balloon. Twenty years later he comes back to that country and finds a new religion in which he is worshiped under the name of the "Sun Child," and it is said that he ascended into heaven. He finds that the Feast of the Ascension is about to be celebrated, and he hears Professors Hanky and Panky say to each other that they never set eyes on the man Higgs, and they hope they never will; but they are the high priests of the religion of the Sun Child.
He is very indignant, and he comes up to them, and he says, "I am going to expose all this humbug and tell the people of Erewhon that it was only I, the man Higgs, and I went up in a balloon." He was told, "You must not do that, because all the morals of this country are bound round this myth, and if they once know that you did not ascend into Heaven they will all become wicked"; and so he is persuaded of that and he goes quietly away. That is the idea -- that we should all be wicked if we did not hold to the Christian religion.
It seems to me that the people who have held to it have been for the most part extremely wicked. You find this curious fact, that the more intense has been the religion of any period and the more profound has been the dogmatic belief, the greater has been the cruelty and the worse has been the state of affairs. In the so-called ages of faith, when men really did believe the Christian religion in all its completeness, there was the Inquisition, with all its tortures; there were millions of unfortunate women burned as witches; and there was every kind of cruelty practiced upon all sorts of people in the name of religion.
You find as you look around the world that every single bit of progress in humane feeling, every improvement in the criminal law, every step toward the diminution of war, every step toward better treatment of the colored races, or every mitigation of slavery, every moral progress that there has been in the world, has been consistently opposed by the organized churches of the world. I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.
Bertrand Russell
Mutawintji
Registered Member
Fear, the Foundation of Religion
Religion is based, I think, primarily and mainly upon fear. It is partly the terror of the unknown and partly, as I have said, the wish to feel that you have a kind of elder brother who will stand by you in all your troubles and disputes.
Fear is the basis of the whole thing -- fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death. Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it is no wonder if cruelty and religion have gone hand in hand.
It is because fear is at the basis of those two things. In this world we can now begin a little to understand things, and a little to master them by help of science, which has forced its way step by step against the Christian religion, against the churches, and against the opposition of all the old precepts.
Science can help us to get over this craven fear in which mankind has lived for so many generations. Science can teach us, and I think our own hearts can teach us, no longer to look around for imaginary supports, no longer to invent allies in the sky, but rather to look to our own efforts here below to make this world a better place to live in, instead of the sort of place that the churches in all these centuries have made it.
Bertrand Russell
Mutawintji
Registered Member
What We Must Do
We want to stand upon our own feet and look fair and square at the world -- its good facts, its bad facts, its beauties, and its ugliness; see the world as it is and be not afraid of it.
Conquer the world by intelligence and not merely by being slavishly subdued by the terror that comes from it.
The whole conception of God is a conception derived from the ancient Oriental despotisms. It is a conception quite unworthy of free men. When you hear people in church debasing themselves and saying that they are miserable sinners, and all the rest of it, it seems contemptible and not worthy of self-respecting human beings.
We ought to stand up and look the world frankly in the face. We ought to make the best we can of the world, and if it is not so good as we wish, after all it will still be better than what these others have made of it in all these ages.
A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage; it does not need a regretful hankering after the past or a fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men. It needs a fearless outlook and a free intelligence. It needs hope for the future, not looking back all the time toward a past that is dead, which we trust will be far surpassed by the future that our intelligence can create.
Bertrand Russell
Mutawintji
We want to stand upon our own feet and look fair and square at the world -- its good facts, its bad facts, its beauties, and its ugliness; see the world as it is and be not afraid of it.
Conquer the world by intelligence and not merely by being slavishly subdued by the terror that comes from it.
The whole conception of God is a conception derived from the ancient Oriental despotisms. It is a conception quite unworthy of free men. When you hear people in church debasing themselves and saying that they are miserable sinners, and all the rest of it, it seems contemptible and not worthy of self-respecting human beings.
We ought to stand up and look the world frankly in the face. We ought to make the best we can of the world, and if it is not so good as we wish, after all it will still be better than what these others have made of it in all these ages.
A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage; it does not need a regretful hankering after the past or a fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men. It needs a fearless outlook and a free intelligence. It needs hope for the future, not looking back all the time toward a past that is dead, which we trust will be far surpassed by the future that our intelligence can create.
Bertrand Russell
Mutawintji
And dogs don't lick their balls.
That is incorrect. I said it would be dishonest *for me* to use that argument.
That is incorrect. If it were not, you would be able to point out where I stated that.
I don't recall stating that.
The only thing I am stumped on is why you wont provide a definition of a word that you are using in one of your assertions. Actually, I suspect I know why but it is moot.
Roe anyone?
So you don't have a problem with navigating the argument "what caused god" but struggle with the statement "everything has a beginning."?
Or do you mean to say that something that has a beginning doesn't have a cause?
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So you don't see "everything having a beginning" being an integral component of the OP author's proposal?
Or are you talking about something other than the opinions of the OP author?
You said:
And I am asking you
How many people who call upon "everything has a beginning" have you asked whether they call upon "everything has a beginning" in order to "feel comfortable"?
In your statement I quoted above, you attributed to the atheists the intention that they "commonly call upon /the notion of everything having a beginning/ in order to feel "comfortable".
And I am asking you: How do you know that those who call upon "everything has a beginning" do so in order to "feel comfortable"?
Have you asked them?
Can you read minds?
Is it part of your theology/philosophy to attribute intentions to other people without asking them?
You're throwing around questions and assertions while evading making a definition of the only word that poses any significance at this point. I suspect you realize that a commitment to a definition may render your questions and assertions invalid; hence, I can understand your reason for avoiding it.
The only assertion I have made is the notion of "everything having a beginning" is a tool commonly called upon to justify the (commonly) atheistic demand that god cannot be causeless.
Actually I didn't even make that assertion - that is the assertion of the OP
:shrug:
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go back to OP for hints why I put "comfortable" in quotation marks.
In fact go back to my initial response if you think that the main thrust of my critique was about "comfort"
So far, I suspect that the main thrust of your critique is to make assumptions about other people's intentions, and then expecting that everyone take those assumptions of yours as being true about those people.
Let's look at the OP:
Do you really think that a statement formulated in that way can and should be treated as an example of a philosophically concise statement, suitable for scrutiny?
LG, you referring to the OP poster looks more like this -
- you being the one on the left.
Take on someone your size.
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Let's look at the OP:
Do you really think that a statement formulated in that way can and should be treated as an example of a philosophically concise statement, suitable for scrutiny?
LG, you referring to the OP poster looks more like this -
- you being the one on the left.
Take on someone your size.
Not sure if there is a way to make philosophical statements while being beyond philosophical scrutiny
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