₦airaland Forum

thehomer:
By what standard do you judge God to be right?

Answer mine adequately then I'll answer yours.

thehomer:
I think they're right by the standards of reasonable human beings. Or do you think that rape, plunder and murder are right? By what standard do you think that is right?

What do you mean by 'the standard of reasonable human beings'?

Do you mean reasonable human beings will judge rape and the murder and plunder of women and children to be wrong?

If so, then by what standard do you judge people reasonable or unreasonable?

thehomer:
By what standards do you judge God to be right?

by what standard do you judge God to be wrong?

plaetton:
Laughing out loud again.

I predicted it that cognitive dissonance was in the air.
It has claimed it's first victim on this thread.

So rape is greater form of evil than plunder and murder of women and children?

How about keeping the virgins for themselves?
You don't figure that rape would be a big part of that package ?


Lol.

This is the problem when humans like Josh hastily design a God without forethought and due diligence.

by what standard do you judge rape and the plunder and murder of women and children to be wrong?

plaetton:
Laughing out loud.

Ehhm, Ehhmm,

But sir, God did encourage and command the invasions, lootings, killing of women, children and oxen many many times in your sacred scriptures.

Did he not ?
By what moral standards was God operating on and even promoting ?

Oh Wait, I sense cognitive dissonance in the air, about to attack someone nearby.

It seems you are bent on derailing this thread.

Here's a question:

By what standards do you judge God to be wrong?

PastorAIO:
Personally? I think rape is heinous. But this opinion is not universal. For example these guys and their God think it is just fine:



They attacked Midian just as the LORD had commanded Moses, and they killed all the men. All five of the Midianite kings – Evi, Rekem, Zur, Hur, and Reba – died in the battle. They also killed Balaam son of Beor with the sword. Then the Israelite army captured the Midianite women and children and seized their cattle and flocks and all their wealth as plunder. They burned all the towns and villages where the Midianites had lived. After they had gathered the plunder and captives, both people and animals, they brought them all to Moses and Eleazar the priest, and to the whole community of Israel, which was camped on the plains of Moab beside the Jordan River, across from Jericho.

Moses, Eleazar the priest, and all the leaders of the people went to meet them outside the camp. But Moses was furious with all the military commanders who had returned from the battle. “Why have you let all the women live?” he demanded. “These are the very ones who followed Balaam’s advice and caused the people of Israel to rebel against the LORD at Mount Peor. They are the ones who caused the plague to strike the LORD’s people. Now kill all the boys and all the women who have slept with a man. Only the young girls who are virgins may live; you may keep them for yourselves.

Numbers 31:7-18 NLT

You may have a reading problem, as rape isn't even mentioned in that passage.

plaetton:
Daahhhh!!

Am I not the one who supposed to be asking you this question ?

I believe you woke up or fell down on the wrong side of the bed this morning.

KingEbukasBlog:
You are accusing me of your own actions . You are the one who claimed luck is responsible for all we've got . Have you forgotten your lottery analogy .

Its impossible - mathematically and otherwise - yet you are obdurate that life indeed came through luck .

Isn't that irrational

Your unbelief has caused you to accept an impossibility !

Irrationality is cognition, thinking, talking or acting without inclusion of rationality. It is more specifically described as an action or opinion given through inadequate use of reason , emotional distress, or cognitive deficiency.

serious cognitive deficiency.


A goat is proof that nature can make a goat.

Life is proof, that despite impossible odds, life emerged randomly.

plaetton:
We can compare and know the difference between the scribblings of a toddler on paper and the orderly written alphabet.
Same goes with scribblings on canvas and a portrait.

Common sense, Josh, common sense.

Answer this question then: Without the real alphabet, how would you understand that scribbling lacks design?

Common sense would tell you that comparing design and chaos is not and has never been a factor in the certification of design itself.

Design; aesthetic and specified, is self evident to reasonable beings such as ourselves. No comparison needed.

sonOfLucifer:
Going to the wrong church can lead to evil, Rev King comes to mind.

What are your thoughts on El-Rufai's bill? I haven't gone through it yet, hopefully should do so this week.

his bill has potential to paint religious activity in kaduna in a particular image.

Potential shaa.

Plaetton is saying that we must compare chaos with design to appreciate design.

When you see an alphabet or a portrait, we must know the counterfeit form of those things to be able to appreciate their design.

I applaud your thinking plaetton.

Kay17:
Are these beings capable of deciphering good and evil without God especially when they already know what's order and convenient to them?

The deciphering of good and evil takes us to many places, but without an objective standard, we all become hypocrite lawless animals.

What us wrong in my wiping out half of earth's population for the greater good of our planet?

Kay17:
Isn't there a relatively greater good in raping the last and unwilling woman on earth so she can reproduce future generations?

Similarly self defence involves murder albeit justified because of a relatively greater good.

smh.

plaetton:
Meaningless babble.

lol. Sorry for trying to reason with you

plaetton:
Your irrational anger and rage that someone refuses to accept and continually debunks your stone age beliefs is the main reason I say that religious beliefs are irrational.
It seems that to you, your beliefs are meaningless unless another person accepts it. That is irrational.

Funny that you and your type spend a lot time bashing Islam, and how crazy, intolerant and violent it is, even though you exhibit quite the same tendencies, albeit, in subtler ways.

This is the weakness of religious beliefs that highlights it as being based on no concrete truths, just pure primordial impulses and primitiv emotions.

Nonsense. Don't talk about tolerance to me old man. Lol. I am simply an apologetic, replying to your militancy. You publicly mock and ridicule other beliefs and blame others for barbaric acts of humanity and you call me intolerant? What the heck?

Tell your godfather Dawkins about tolerance. Talk to Harris.


When Islam is in power, it forces others, when atheism is in power, it forces and persecutes others.
It is only when Christianity is in power that it gives men a choice to believe.



And please address my post and don't go off on a desired tangent. What hope do you have in an accidental existence?

cloudgoddess:
Wow. You truly do not know what you are talking about. Every single point of yours is a strange perversion of what's actually true in science, and I can't tell if you're doing it intentionally or if you were truly this miseducated. Your ideas are simply incorrect, I don't know what else to tell you on that. You don't understand what microevolution entails, you don't truly understand genetics because if you did, none of what you just posted would make any sense to you. I genuinely pity you, because from the looks of it, you have been incredibly misled and miseducated.

Not only that, but you are projecting the strangest religious qualities onto evolution where there are none. You know that evolution and the means by which it was discovered & is still being researched, are the direct opposite of faith and dogma, yet you try to project it as that because you know that faith and dogma are weak means of knowing things. Yet ironically, those are the PRECISE MEANS by which religion thrives! Religion would not exist without faith OR forcefully imposed dogma. You are literally discrediting the basis for your own beliefs.

And let's be clear, EVEN IF evolution was wrong, THERE WOULD STILL BE NO PROOF FOR YAHWEH, let alone ANY humanoid magician creating planets & life forms by "speaking them into existence". Your standpoint would still be void of any support whatsoever other than the bronze-age myths from which it originated.

I'll just leave this here from an earlier post in this thread.



You are simply wrong. Whether you choose to accept it or not is no longer my issue since you seem intent on sticking to your own religiously-motivated perversions of "science".

Please scan through my post and look for any reference to religion on my part.

Lol.
Here it is folks. I bring up scientific rebuttals of her airborne subscription to macroevolution and she makes irrelevant snide comments then runs away and pastes an appeal to authority from wiki. Very nice.

You are displaying all the symptoms of dogmatic indoctrination without basis for knowledge. When pushed to defend your position you deflate

Pity me all you want, but please keep away from shouting your views if you cannot defend them next time.

plaetton:
No sire,
There always needs to be a benchmark from which we make comparisons.

The word " design ", itself evokes varying degrees of complexity. A purposeful aggregation of different elements, different properties, different linkages, different forms and functions.

When we see a Channel suit , for example, we automatically see the difference between it and the patch patch improvised work done by the unskilled hands of grandma or auntie.

If I wake up in another universe and see a signboard saying Joshua, did you bring your dissertation with you, I would certainly not doubt that intelligence is behind such a conundrum.

Specificity, and not just aesthetics in design, are present in our universe.

"raw materials", that have resulted in this universe as we have it have been brought together simultaneously in the most amazing combinations-combinations too amazing to have just happened by accident. That is the argument for design.

-Ravi Zacharias

PastorAIO:
I'm sorry, I thought you were using it to support your case. So are you for the definition or not. Don't hide behind google one minute and then disown it the next.

Human thoughts are contained in human reality. This is probably the most intelligent thing you've said since I've started discussing with you.

Could you please tell us how you would measure a human thought? You say it's impossible to measure God's thoughts. I presume therefore that you know how to measure human thoughts.

Stop presuming. My point is that as God is eternal, he has higher thoughts than us, as he see's everything in our reality, including all of time

plaetton:
I have no idea what you mean by me insulting a position and yet subscribing to a form of its tenet.

But even so, I guess you have not grown up enough to have heard of " Separating The Wheat From The Shaff " ?

In your atheism and religion of science, there is only meaningless and oblivion in place of purpose and hope that true belief in God grants

What hope do you have in an accidental existence old man?

Kay17:
In what manner does God define good and evil, is it to his own convenience or to an objective standard independent from God?

Because we will apply the definition to violence.

It is to the order and convenience of the beings in creation.

PastorAIO:
Really? Please explain this to me.

Is rape good?

If I came into your home and killed your wife and children and stole your money, then escaped to someplace and eventually died. What hope would you have of justice?

What basis is there for our justice systems if morality is relative to superior definition and power?

plaetton:
You're in no position to dictate what science is capable of and not capable of, especially given all that scientific rationalism has gifted humanity in just over the past 2 hundred years , after eons of darkness.

It's small thinkers like you, ignorant absolutists like you, that have been continually shamed by every new advancement in science.

Left for people like you, there would been no need for advancements in transportation, because according to men of god, your God did not construct us to travel more than 22 miles per hour.

People like you also said, back then, that aviation should not be encouraged Because if god, the Toothfairy, wanted humans to fly, he would have been wise enough to have given us wings.

So, my friend, your angry and irrational rantings are irrelevant in the scheme of things. I just hope you live long enough to see how far science would take us in the next quarter or half a century.

And yes, I am free to borrow and evolve my worldview from just about anywhere.
That is not hypocrisy.
That is honesty anchored on freedom and sovereignty of one's mind.
It's a freedom that, pitifully, you might not ever understand or enjoy.

hypocrisy is insulting a position and yet subscribing to a form of its tenet to keep yourself rational and sane. It is refusal to follow a position through to its logical end.

People like me defined the foundation of the scientific method. Godly men. Who knew where science had foot, and where science logically would have no answer.

PastorAIO:
Actually Modern science has proposed theories to explain all these things you've mentioned.

Science has theories (philosophical theories to be honest) for Morality

Science has theories to explain our origin

The advances of Science have given a lot of people Hope as well as meaning.


And furthermore many honest and honourable religious people have become insane and suicidal, some become suicidal precisely because their religion encourages them to do so.

Nihilism and Existentialism are a lot deeper than what you seem to be aware.

No. Current popular theories only sponsor belief in an accidental existence, a purposeless origin, morality with no reference or objective point, materialism, and oblivion in death.

How does that grant purpose or hope or meaning to life?

Oblivion is what subscription to popular 'scientific' belief implies.

Atheism, materialism, and the religion of science only leads to a pointless and hollow existence, and suicide is a notable prescription to meaninglessness.

"we stray through an infinite nothing, with no up or down left. Lanterns must be lit in the morning hours and sacred games invented to take the place of religious ceremony...finally, a universal madness would break out when the truth of what mankind had done in 'killing God' dawned on us".


- Nietzsche

cloudgoddess:
Not even remotely. Your understanding of what you're trying to argue against is so poor though, that it's easy to see why you'd be confused.

lol. No, your understanding of the very theory you're arguing for, as well as your understanding of cellular genetics is poor. It is obvious you have only ever listened to one side of the story and have never bothered to look at it from another angle, as any true scientist would do.

YES there is. See the graded fossil record and geological information on early earth - the vast majority of present day organisms, especially the more complex ones, WOULD NOT be able to survive in the environment in which life first arose. Only microbes could exist in such harsh environments, and as the fossil record shows us, ONLY microbial fossils are found in rock dated ~4 billion years old. This is exactly what we would expect to see if the common ancestor prediction were correct.

This is a load of false assumptions based on false assumptions. You sound like an indoctrinated militant. There is no indoctrination in science. What evidence do you have that life arose in harsh environments or that life even arose by itself in a random accident? The probability of the random formation of an enzyme from amino acids on the earth's surface is calculated to be one in 10^20 (essentially zero).

And if more complex species are essentially species with more genetic material, and more specialized features as a result of that genetic material, then simpler genetic codes, subject to processes like gene duplication, mutation, and other means of alteration, can certainly give rise to more complex DNA, & thus more complex species. This is not a difficult concept to grasp.

This is a statement borne of ignorance of genetics. Look at processes like oxidative phosphorylation. There are so many complex enzymes and processes that make up important biochemical reactions in complex organisms. These enzymes and processes could not have evolved over time, because natural selection and the given course of said evolution would not favor their development. Non-functional DNA is ready for deletion, the formation of proteins and enzymes that have no use without their various pathways is a waste of cellular resources, and said enzymes being non-functional, would be weeded out and deleted by natural selection.

"The most basic processes upon which all life depends cannot be co-opted from pre-existing systems. For evolution to work, they have to come up from scratch, they have to be carefully balanced and regulated with respect to other processes, and they have to work before they will be kept."

Robert Carter.

YES it can when given sufficient time. Macro-evolution is literally just microevolution, on much larger time scales. Between year 1 and 1,000 you might not see more than a few handfuls of changes made to the genome. This is microevolution. But between year 1 and 1 million, you will see massive changes. That is macroevolution.

There is no feasible link between micro and macro. Micro is adaptive and readily seen in our environment and based on already basic genetic information and processes. Macro is an imaginative story. Radical changes in the genome that you point out cannot and have not been demonstrated. (you could give me one non-circular example to prove your stance, or remain silent and dogmatic)

"An organism had to learn to convert sunlight to sugar. Another had to learn to convert sugars to energy. These amazingly complex processes involve multiple steps and functions that will be selected away before they have a chance to develop into a working system"

-Robert Carter


In the end the very enemy of macroevolution is microevolution.

No, not necessarily. Under the correct conditions, species will speciate, PERIOD. Your uninformed and close-minded view of what an animal can and cannot become after millions of years of genetic modification is irrelevant to the facts. Labels like "horse" and "dog" are arbitrary, these names do not create boundaries for within which evolution must operate. There is no mechanism that halts evolution past a certain point. If the pre-existing genetic information and the environments under which this information is selected allows it, and sufficient time is allowed, a species will speciate. Traits will be gained and lost, morphologies will change, reproductive methods may be altered. That is all speciation is.

Yes. species will speciate. They will not gain relevant complexity to substantiate macroevolution though; this has never been shown to be true. All I hear is closeminded dogmatic irrational faith on your part.

It is precisely if there is God, that[b] everything[/b]is permitted to those who not only believe in God but who perceive themselves as instruments, direct instruments of the divine will.

This is nonsense.

It is only because God exists, that in the midst of everything, there is a defined good and evil, and there is hope of ultimate justice. Do you want to have this argument again?

What do you think he means by 'everything'? Does 'everything' encompass good and evil? If so, what is good and evil

plaetton:
Thank you Tex.

I will definitely look in the these.

And yes, I agree with you completely.

My stand, which I have repeated many times, is that scientific rationalism is, and has so far proven to be the most reliable arbiter of reality.
As such, this what we should all embrace for gradual and reliable understanding of the universe.

Unfortunately science is incapable of laying basis for bedrocks of our reality like our morality or our origin, it is incapable of giving us hope or giving us meaning. Either you remain a hypocrite, borrowing tenets of your worldview from theism and still denying God, or you spiral into the vacuum of meaningless nihility and occasional insanity and probable suicide as many honest and honourable atheists have done.

Nietzsche, Foucault, Hemmingway etc

Following.

Thanks very much Gombs

HARDDON:

Burnt out!

firestar:
Okay o.
The Peafowl is occupied.

You both will pay for this at the appropriate time.

my vengeful sword cannot be burnt out.

JackBizzle:
Great!

Many Nigerian doctors and nurses need to be retrained in customer care. They are just too harsh. I remember in the UK when I refused to take an important injection- the nurse begged me to take it and after a while, I did. In Nigeria, the nurse will insult you and then tell you to die since you dont want to take medication.

cc Joshthefirst

hey guys. Haven't talked much recently.I'm not abandoning my mentions. Very busy. Really sorry.

Sonoflucifer, kingebukasblog, firestar, harddon

JackBizzle:
In Nigeria, are there any legal barriers and safeguards against nonsense like this?
Can you see why I fear Nigerian hospitals?

Ignorance feeds fear. Knowledge casts it out.

Tufanja:
I am a freestyler, a rebel, a renegade,.... a landrover

A Dreamweaver, a model, you don't masquerade,....you never rollover.