Reflectorites
On Mon, 11 Dec 2000 10:13:31 -0600, Susan Cogan wrote:
>SJ>But if Chris is wrong, and Christianity is true, then both Chris and I will die
>>and wake up. But then for Chris, there will be everlasting self-inflicted
>>torment as he contemplates *eternity* with what might have been. OTOH
>>for me there will be everlasting happiness.
SC>I could definitely see you enjoying an eternity of smug superiority
This is an interesting Freudian slip, that Susan thinks of me as having a
"smug superiority". I am supposed to be the one who is hopelessly
*wrong*, believing in the equivalent of the Tooth Fairy!
If Susan can "definitely see" me "enjoying an eternity" whether "smug"
or otherwise, then she needs to urgently reconsider her wager.
>SJ>In this classic version of Pascal's wager between an atheist and a Christian,
>>I can't lose anything, but I can gain everything. Chris OTOH cannot gain
>>anything, but he can lose everything.
SC>and if he is right and you are wrong and he believes (as you do) that
>he'd better pretend to be a Christian in order to hedge his bets,
>then he will have lived his life as a lie. We are back to that.
No. Pretending to be a Christian just as bad as being an atheist. In fact it is
probably worse.
SC>In
>fact, if *you* are correct, he would *still* have lived his life as a
>lie.
No. He could be *honestly* wrong, as I believe he is.
In fact that is what I admire about straightforward atheists like Susan
and Chris. At least they have the courage of their convictions, unlike
some Christians who try to have it both ways.
SC>I don't think even your god would be pleased with that. In a
>sense, Pascal is correct. You pays your money and takes your choice.
Agreed.
SC>In the end you must live a life of integrity as you see it. If your
>god is displeased with that, then screw him. He isn't worth worship.
God is not displeased with atheists like Susan trying to "live a life of
integrity". Far from it. What God is displeased with is: 1) their attempt to
"live a life of integrity" always falls far short of what they intended; and 2)
Their insisting that it should be "as" *they* "see it", rather than as *God*
sees it. This is in effect setting *themselves* up as God.
>SJ>Chris must satisfy himself, in his *heart*. The test would be that Chris
>>would be then relaxed about Christianity, and not getting angry at Christians
>>or their God anymore. We do not get angry at some South Sea
>>Islanders' god, or its followers, because we believes in our hearts that
>>there is no real possibility of that god being true.
SC>I believe in my heart that your god has no possibility of being true
>and for exactly the same reasons you disbelieve the Islander's god.
If that is the case, why bother arguing against my God?
SC>Meanwhile, the South Sea Islander's god isn't pushed in our faces
>every day.
Maybe that is because He is different from "the South Sea Islander's god"?
If the Christian God was real, then one would expect His followers to try
to persuade others that He is real?
BTW if Christians are literally pushing their God in people's faces then I do
not condone it.
SC>They aren't trying to use political influence to force
>publicly funded schools to teach their particular brand of religion.
At the moment Susan's side is using "political influence to force publicly
funded schools to teach" *their* "particular brand of religion", i.e. scientific
materialism and its offshoot, secular humanism. Christians have every right
in a democracy to "use political influence to" counter that.
SC>The South Sea Islanders are not anti-science because they think it
>contradicts a detail of their religion. The South Sea Islanders don't
>have a long history of burning heretics at the stake.
I have pointed out before that AFAIK only *two* non-Christian heretics
were ever burned at the stake: Bruno and Servetus. There may have been
more, but I am not aware of them. I hasten to add that two is too many.
The rest of the burnings at the stake at the hands of Christians (so-called)
were of other (real) Christians (e.g. Catholic Queen Mary burning
Protestant Christians like Anglican Archbishop Cranmer).
As I have pointed out before, the total number of people executed in the
Spanish Inquisition was in the tens of thousands (again one execution
would be bad enough). But atheist governments in Russia, China and
Cambodia have executed tens of *millions* of people in this century alone.
>SJ>I was reading the Koran the other day and it threatens me with eternal
>>punishment unless I become a Moslem. But I don't bother attacking
>>Moslems because I believe in my heart that there is *no* chance that
>>Islam is true and so Mohammed's God is no more a threat to me than
>>the Tooth Fairy.
SC>true. And you would be pretty darned pissed if they took over the
>public schools and insisted on teaching their religion to your
>children.
But that is *exactly* what *did* happen! My children were forced with my
tax money to be taught a secular religion, namely scientific materialism.
SC>You would be angry if they took over the government and
>used their influence to disenfranchise your wife and daughters.
The Moslems might want to do this but Christianity doesn't.
SC>If
>everywhere you turned they repeated their warning that you were going
>to hell unless you embraced the truth of Islam.
If Susan remembers, *she* brought up the topic of Hell first.
I have been debating on this List since 1995 and although I believe that
Hell is real, I have rarely (if ever) mentioned it.
SC>Oh, you would fight
>them if they were constantly telling you to bet on their religion
>because even if you sincerely believe Christianity to be correct you
>will still burn in hell forever if they are right.
No. I would just ignore them (as I do).
I have said before that if I reverted back to being an atheist, I would not
see my new role as robbing Christians of what I saw was their comforting
but irrational illusion. I would then rather *expect* that since if we all
arose by a mindless `blind watchmaker' mechanism, there would be nothing
strange or reprehensible about the majority of my fellow humans being
irrational and believing in God, for example.
Indeed, as an atheist, I would regard it as *really* strange the behaviour of
those of my fellow atheists who berated Christians for their irrationality. I
would suspect that those of my fellow atheists who wasted their brief time
on Earth attacking Christians for their irrationality, did not *really* believe
in their hearts that atheism was true and Christianity was false, and were
really trying to convince themselves.
SC>Oh, and while you are engaged in this fantasy, keep in mind that
>world-wide there are 1.03 billion Muslims and only 391 million
>non-Catholic Christians.
First, I don't know why I need to keep this in mind?. How many Moslems
there are compared to "non-Catholic Christians" is *irrelevant* to the truth
or otherwise of Christianity. Except that if Christianity is false, then so is
Islam, because the Koran teaches that Jesus was born of a virgin. But the
reverse is not the case-if Christianity is true then Islam is false. So Islam is
false either way.
Second, why does Susan exclude "Catholic Christians"? If the claim is that
most "Catholic Christians" are only nominal Christians (and I do not make
that claim) then one would have to exclude nominal Muslims.
Third, I would like to know where Susan got her figure of "1.03 billion
Muslims" from. According to the EB there are between 600-700 million
Muslims worldwide:
------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.britannica.com/bcom/eb/article/8/0,5716,108138+2+105852,00.html
ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA
Islam
[...]
The vast variety of races and cultures embraced by Islam (estimated to
total from 600,000,000 to 700,000,000 persons worldwide)...'
[...]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Whereas the EB says there are 2 *billion* Christians worldwide:
------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.britannica.com/bcom/eb/article/4/0,5716,108294+1+105945,00.html
ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA
Christianity
major religion, stemming from the life, teachings, and death of Jesus of
Nazareth (the Christ, or the Anointed One of God) in the 1st century AD.
It has become the largest of the world's religions. Geographically the most
widely diffused of all faiths, it has a constituency of some 2 billion
believers.
[...]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Reflectorites
On Mon, 11 Dec 2000 10:15:55 -0600, Susan Cogan wrote:
[...]
>SJ>I was reading the Koran the other day and it threatens me with eternal
>>punishment unless I become a Moslem. But I don't bother attacking
>>Moslems because I believe in my heart that there is *no* chance that
>>Islam is true and so Mohammed's God is no more a threat to me than
>>the Tooth Fairy.
>>
>>That Chris gets angry at the Christian God and Christians tells me that
>>despite all his philosophising, Chris still believes in his heart that the
>>Christian God is real enough to be a threat. If He is real enough to
>>Chris to be a threat to him, then to Chris His probability cannot be 0.
>><<<<<
>BW>(not a mind reader but) Chris probably gets annoyed at Christians in the
>>same way that Christians get annoyed at Mormons and JWs who come
>>to the door.
I don't get annoyed at them. I have had long discussions with them. I
respect them for having the courage of their convictions, which is more
than I can say for some Christians.
BW>No one gets annoyed at Unitarians because they mind their own
>>business.
Maybe they don't really believe what they claim to believe, and/or
have nothing *worth* believing?
SC>It's not so much that we mind our own business, but that we consider
>proselytizing to be in bad taste. :-)
So it is good taste for Susan (and Chris) to attack Christianity on this List
but it is "bad taste" for Christians like me to defend Christianity on same?
Steve
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"Nabokov's science gave him a sense of the endless elusiveness of reality
that should not be confused with modern (or "postmodern")
epistemological nihilism. Dissecting and deciphering the genitalic structure
of lycaenids, or counting scale rows on their wings, he realized that the
further we inquire, the more we can discover, yet the more we find that we
do not know, not because truth is an illusion or a matter of mere
convention but because the world is infinitely detailed, complex, and
deceptive, "an infinite succession of steps, levels of perception, false
bottoms" (SO II). He found this not frustrating but challenging, not
niggardly of nature, in hoarding its secrets, but fantastically generous, in
burying such an endless series of treasures for the human mind to unearth.
This sense of design deeply embedded in nature's detail, of a playful
deceptiveness behind things, of some kind of conscious cosmic hide-and-
seek, is fundamental to Nabokov, though hardly unique to him. Almost
three thousand years ago the Bible declared, "it is the glory of God to hide
a thing, but the glory of kings to search things out" (Proverbs 5:2)." (Boyd
B. & Pyle R.M., ed., "Nabokov's Butterflies," Nabokov D., Transl., Allen
Lane / Penguin Press: London, 2000, p.19)
Stephen E. Jones | Ph. +61 8 9448 7439 | http://www.iinet.net.au/~sejones
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