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What's your opinion on free will?

I am religious and believe in free will
- 71 (27.7%)
I am religious and do not believe in free will
- 10 (3.9%)
I am not religious and believe in free will
- 114 (44.5%)
I am not religious and do not believe in free will
- 61 (23.8%)

Total Members Voted: 251


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Author Topic: Railgun and Spirituality Discussion  (Read 681143 times)

MetalSlimeHunt

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There are plenty of criminals who say they love Jesus in the light and then turn around and take care of business the rest of the time. It's the same factor that allows surgeons and doctors to be Christians, compartmentalization. People follow the code when they're in the role, and nowhere else.
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Quote from: Thomas Paine
To argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason, and whose philosophy consists in holding humanity in contempt, is like administering medicine to the dead, or endeavoring to convert an atheist by scripture.
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No Gods, No Masters.

Arx

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It's the same factor that allows surgeons and doctors to be Christians, compartmentalization.

Huh?
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Rose

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It's the same factor that allows surgeons and doctors to be Christians, compartmentalization.

Huh?

A true Christian would let God heal the sick.
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MetalSlimeHunt

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It's the same factor that allows surgeons and doctors to be Christians, compartmentalization.

Huh?
Compartmentalization determines how we perceive various roles, or compartments, in our lives. It is rare in the extreme that any person actually lives all or even any whole aspect of their life truly dedicated to a particular set of beliefs. Violating your own accepted standards depending on your circumstances triggers cognitive dissonance, compartmentalization defends against cognitive dissonance by mentally separating your "self" into the different roles you play.

In this instance, a Christian doctor is an absolute oxymoron given the magnitude, demands, and promises of Christianity. There are a number of reasons why, the following is probably not comprehensive. Firstly, Christians are told not to rely on their own understanding but to trust in God with all their heart (Proverbs 3:5). Medical science is nothing but human understanding, not the best fulfillment.

Beyond that, Christians logically should have no competing interest in the universal preservation of human life, that which medical professionals do. The eschatological claims of the Bible show that the first death is, in fact, desirable for those who are in a state of grace as it both brings them to a state of either temporary unconsciousness followed by eternal paradise or immediate paradise depending upon your interpretation, and eliminates the possibility of future rejection of grace followed by inevitable torment, if you're of a sect that believes in resistible grace. It definitely follows from this that the deliberate extension of the mortal lives of Christians can only be a bad thing. Now, the Bible also says that only god can decide who dies and that suicide is bad, so Christian doctors couldn't go around killing people or having them kill themselves to attain paradise, but it certainly allows for leaving the survival of a saved patient to the will of god rather than imposing human will on them. Further, all medical efforts under that should rightfully only be directed towards non-Christians alongside constant incessant appeals to both the patient and the Holy Spirit to intercede and convert them.

Further still, Jesus Christ himself says that if you have as much faith as a mustard seed you can command a mountain to move and it will do so (Matthew 17:20), as well as that if you ask anything of him in the name of God the Father he will do it to glorify His Name (John 14:13). So even if you don't believe in the previous paragraph, it's all good, because medical science is useless! What good are gauze and hydrogen peroxide before the intercession of Almighty God? And certainly it qualifies, Christian doctors healing the sick and raising the dead would glorify God's name pretty well compared to the other efforts made over the years, it's even got a guarantee! And yet we do not see this kind of behavior (not even getting into how this further demonstrates Christianity is unreliable in a real v. fake sense, just the behavior of doctors).

This, among other things, makes the actions of Christian doctors writ large make no sense. You'd think at least a strong minority would understand this, and that the either literal or inspired word of God is way more important to follow than some bullshit human textbooks, but it just doesn't work out that way. "Christian doctors" don't really function like that, they're Christians when they're in that role and doctors in its own role. Neither changes the other the way it should if they absolutely believed either in all circumstances.

And that is why converting rapists and murders to Christianity so that they'll stop raping and murdering people is an invalid argument.
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Quote from: Thomas Paine
To argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason, and whose philosophy consists in holding humanity in contempt, is like administering medicine to the dead, or endeavoring to convert an atheist by scripture.
Quote
No Gods, No Masters.

Orange Wizard

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There's so much wrong with that I don't know where to start
« Last Edit: November 22, 2015, 01:32:46 am by Orange Wizard »
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Please don't shitpost, it lowers the quality of discourse
Hard science is like a sword, and soft science is like fear. You can use both to equally powerful results, but even if your opponent disbelieve your stabs, they will still die.

Orange Wizard

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I decided to start at the beginning.
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Please don't shitpost, it lowers the quality of discourse
Hard science is like a sword, and soft science is like fear. You can use both to equally powerful results, but even if your opponent disbelieve your stabs, they will still die.

Rolepgeek

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I was reading an article, specifically this, which seems to address the issue to some extent, MetalSlimeHunt.

And to me, at least, it makes quite a bit of sense. Whether or not the literal beliefs espoused by the Bible and the rational end product thereof is logically consistent is irrelevant, in this case, for most people, as can be seen by the actions of a vast plurality of people.

Actually, wait. Let me make a bit of a caveat here. I am quite good at doublethink. I take some amount of pride in my ability to hold multiple viewpoints simultaneously, or, to put it another way, to twist the methods of logic I usually take into something vastly different than their default. So when I say that it's irrelevant, I'm not arguing from the direct position of logic. I'm trying to argue from the standpoint (and I will make it very clear right now that I have never once read the bible in it's entirety, so I am in all likelihood shit at arguing any point concerning it, as I have only secondhand sources, regardless of the cultural saturation) of someone who would be religious and a doctor.

There is, of course, first off, the idea of taking the Bible figuratively. If you ask Jesus in your heart to do it in the name of God the Father, who is to say that His method is not via your hand? Or a Christian doctor's hand? The mountain will move, but many faithful might desire it to move.

Now here's where I could either make a quantum technobabble argument, a physics technobabble argument, a definitionbabble argument, or an actual at least decently legitimate argument, which I'll do because the first two fail to address any sort of point and don't actually help me fill my role here as God's Advocate (:P).

Jesus is not trying to trick us. Trying to say that he's purposefully using poor language is stupid. For one thing, it's an english translation of a latin collection of works nearly 2,000 years old, the earliest surviving copy we actually legitimately know of being from several hundred years after the events it describes, written by humans, who are innately fallible and sinful. So it's not His fault if we misinterpreted, unless you wanna go for a "God is Lazy, therefore Evil" argument, but that gets into free will and I already skirted that subject and my viewpoint on the matter is that it's essentially a null question anyway. (Good is described as Godliness. Thus, if God is Omnipotent and Omniscient, and everything is part of His plan, everything, eventually, will resolve in some good.) For another thing, it is entirely possible he was being metaphoric, and if text in the modern day with emotes and all doesn't translate irony or sarcasm well, then, well...I suspect ancient Latin will encounter similar problems. I also doubt Jesus, being the Son of God, was less capable of using figurative language than your average high schooler, and if I'm trying desperately to get people to listen to me of their own free will because I have a limited time on this Earth and those who don't must be bound into fiery condemnation for the rest of time...figurative language evokes emotion, and emotion is what allows us to connect with God. He is beyond our ken; attempts to apply puny human logic simply cannot apply. You might say, 'well isn't that convenient for your argument when all argument is useless', and I would respond 'yes, this is why faith is important; the application of logic, at it's purest form, leads to obviously poor rationals, even when done with the best intentions'. There is an eminent nature in humans, that while likely explainable by biology, is no less the important for it. If God led us to notice patterns, and thus use logic, he also led us to have emotions which can confound this logic, to what purpose it is hard to tell, at times. Perhaps it is to prevent either from keeping us from reaching God, whenever we may.

To put it, perhaps, more simply:
Yes, it seems illogical to accept any part of the set of rationalizations and beliefs that, when properly articulated, 'click' together coherently, when the world also clicks with none of them present. That is why it is called faith. The choice is to believe, or not to believe, and both, when initiated independently, seem perfectly rational. One simply happens to hold positive beliefs in something being, that, when some portion is called into question for one reason or another, causes the entire system to appear to fall apart, and so seems the less rational.

On the same note: Logic can be deceiving. The senses lie through their teeth, swearing up and down they're reporting the world accurately. Statistics can be biased, misread, or simply erroneous by no fault of the statistician. The argument that science has been wrong therefore it could be wrong therefore it likely is wrong is a logical fallacy. The argument that science has been wrong before, therefore it is likely to be wrong on some things now, and the possibility that these considerations are some of those, and that when you don't discount emotions and their purpose, this appears (I may be misrepresenting the logic process on this bit by not having considered some possibility, but if anyone could account for everything, they would be God) to present a different default from the typical assumption, that is also apparently sensible.

This has been me, attempting to present a credible presentation of a logical argument for Christianity, without knowing very much about the intimate details of the subject matter. I probably did a terrible job, as I know that I am confused by my wording, if nothing else, mostly because it was difficult to find accurate diction that doesn't skirt about the issue horribly.

Spoiler: EDIT (click to show/hide)
« Last Edit: November 22, 2015, 02:44:49 am by Rolepgeek »
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MetalSlimeHunt

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I decided to start at the beginning.
You have completely and utterly missed my actual argument (hint: it's in the part you dismissed as euphoria). I'm happy as anyone else who plays at theology on the internet to go round and round the mutually contradictory doctrines of the Christian faith, but that's not even what's really important here. Indeed, the Bible could say literally almost anything about anything and still be a usable example.

The real takeaway is that the media-fueled stereotype of the 6'7" soft-spoken murder-turned-faithful-servant isn't the way the real world works or the way that humans contextualize their lives. If you want me to play at some bullshit golden mean I'll say that most atheists including myself who ascribe arbitrarily high probability of there being no afterlife also do not generally live their lives with that wholly internalized, otherwise both I and the rest would literally spend all our time either trying to acquire as much fun as possible or banking on immortality projects.

And since you brought it up, I do in fact think that the idea that we should rely on spreading religion to felons is both counterproductive and a bad thing, in the former because it is a popular public masking of our shitty hypocritical prison system and the latter for all the other reasons I find religious people morally questionable.
« Last Edit: November 22, 2015, 02:51:02 am by MetalSlimeHunt »
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Quote from: Thomas Paine
To argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason, and whose philosophy consists in holding humanity in contempt, is like administering medicine to the dead, or endeavoring to convert an atheist by scripture.
Quote
No Gods, No Masters.

Rolepgeek

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Not necessarily, MetalSlimeHunt. I should really be using quotes more, but I figure if your religion espouses charity and kindness and forgiveness as it's selling points and has had many, many, many charity organizations and otherwise communal activities done, either because of it directly, indirectly, or simply in it's name, it has at least some force for good. There is no reason to empirically believe that religion, a set of beliefs that has been able to permeate and perpetuate in culture, would be unable to change the behavior of criminals. What, because someone killed a guy on purpose once they've inexplicably become unable to hold reasonable positions in society without doing so again, even when there are demonstrable changes in their behavior and values as demonstrated by religion or faith? Or is it just that you find the prospect too risky? (I may be misinterpreting you heavily; I apologize, I feel mentally exhausted after the doublethink)

Also, many people might come to different conclusions about the 'I will die some day, and there will be nothing left save memory' bit. All about different ways of viewing the world (though ironically I'm going for the immortality project option myself).
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Orange Wizard

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I decided to start at the beginning.
You have completely and utterly missed my actual argument (hint: it's in the part you dismissed as euphoria). I'm happy as anyone else who plays at theology on the internet to go round and round the mutually contradictory doctrines of the Christian faith, but that's not even what's really important here. Indeed, the Bible could say literally almost anything about anything and still be a usable example.
How many times? They are not contradictory.

...

And since you brought it up, I do in fact think that the idea that we should rely on spreading religion to felons is both counterproductive and a bad thing, in the former because it is a popular public masking of our shitty hypocritical prison system and the latter for all the other reasons I find religious people morally questionable.
Rely? No, never. It's not reliable. I agree that prisons are shitty, but there's not much we can do about that. We can offer help to felons, why shouldn't we? Because the state should be doing more? That's counterproductive, then everyone ends up doing nothing.
The latter point is up for debate. Everyone is morally questionable in at least some capacity, whether or not they use religion to justify it is immaterial.
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That Wolf

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God doesnt talk to people now and never has!
The bible is all lies! eat some fruit you fucking psycho
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Graknorke

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> implying there are no contradictions in the Torah/Bible
lol k

I am posting from a phone so can't really be quoting things, but they shouldn't be very hard to find some.
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Arx

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Basically what it comes down to, as far as I can tell, is this: militant atheists, in my experience, don't hate religion. They hate a specific interpretation of religion and will swear blind that that is the only valid interpretation of the religion, in a manner quite possibly more blind than that of many theists.

For instance, in this case MSH seems to be wilfully ignoring the sanctity of life (amongst other things). Which is great, feel free to do that, but don't expect me to take you seriously. Don't expect anyone to take you seriously. OW is quite literally doing God's work, but I don't think I have it in me to try to argue with someone that's willing to ignore parts of the doctrine and blind themselves to more than first-degree consequences of actions.
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Dwarf4Explosives

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Hoo boy D4E, you have just committed one of the biggest possible errors regarding thinking about infinity and probability. There's infinite real numbers between 1 and 10 but none of them are 11.
What? My logic was pretty much infinity * random small number = infinity, albeit a smaller one than the first one.
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And yet another bit of proof that RNG is toying with us. We do 1984, it does animal farm
...why do your hydras have two more heads than mine? 
Does that mean male hydras... oh god dammit.

SirQuiamus

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Sanctity of life is a very important aspect of Christian theology. A Christian failing to make the best effort to survive in a given circumstance is to disrespect the life God has given them. A doctor failing to do everything in their power to heal the sick is to disrespect the life of another - Jesus himself insisted that the greatest commandment is to love God and love your neighbour.
The Scriptures are clear that we cannot know who is to be saved and who is not, so even if it were somehow acceptable to kill someone to send them to Heaven (which it isn't, see love, respect of life), you have a chance of doing them a grave disservice anyway.
If that really is a universal tenet of Christianity, why do some Christian fundamentalists approve of indiscriminate drone strikes and capital punishment? How do they cope with all that cognitive dissonance? Lobotomy?

Spoiler: Also relevant (click to show/hide)
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