₦airaland Forum

@Christians

No scientist predicted that camels and monkeys will EVENTUALLY turn up as humans, but that all life has a root and they will always share some form of similarity. That life is dynamic, complex and ever adaptive as Earth's climate.

For human evolution, similarities are being sought btw our species and other human like species, which are obvious.

The dynamicism of Life is found easily in micro organisms: viruses, especially disease resistance and the immune system.

Species are found to tailor their environment like the Polar Bear, despite its similarities with warmer climate bears, this gives rise to the theory of natural selection and etc.

So its not magic

I noticed that its the atheists that are siding Science and its workings; and the Christians are castigating it. This suggests one thing, Christianity is comfortable ignorance.

Yea, valid question but a proper foundation is needed by these so called explanations

^^
Actions correlate with the relationship.

Let me make it easier, who created the causal relationship?

Sorry for responding late

Christians propagate hatred, division, total disrespect for people's uniqueness and perception.

TroGunn: Prophet of Islam is recognized only by muslims and remains useless and of no value to non-muslims. Same as the beliefs of Christians are only relevant to Christians. Someone insulting anothers belief is no excuse for senseless violence. U can't force respect. Muslims obsession with violently protecting the dignity of their god and prophet by killing innocent people diminishes respect for their religion.

On Point

Zalza: Lets put religion apart and ask ourselves if any of us can accept his father being insulted and mocked the way Muhammed is being insulted in this film. I'm sure American can not allow their president to be mocked like that as it will be tantamount to felony. Prophet of islam is recognised more than all fathers nor presidents. Lets stop provoking unnecessary unrest nor viol,ent in the name of civilization.

Therefore, fall into an insane fit and kill your neighbour?!

The movie is nothing but malicious criticism, which doesn't take away whatever truth Islam might have. Great leaders will always take the spotlight, will always be praised and criticised. Its life!

What this does is prove Islam has no qualms with violence and that Islam doesn't respect the individual and his mind.

[quote author=PAGAN 9JA][img]http://1.bp..com/-gNaN9WGMfJo/T6AzBBdFZ0I/AAAAAAAAA-c/_EfvcvdLvpQ/s1600/LiarsforJesus2copy.jpg[/img][/quote]LMFAOO!!

And the Christians and Muslims talk about Love like they know what it means.

I think the first cause argument is too suggestive. A better question is why is there something rather nothing.

^^^
The first problem is you presume the Universality of God in that everyone has a common perception/definition of what God is and not as a unique individual idea. As seen below.

I think you are stuck on textbook deism, seeing it as another religion, one that is traceable to some founder or founders in the Enlightenment era rather than the simple acknowledgement of God that it is

The Christians have stressed so many times that God's nature itself is what incomprehensible, consequentially his actions. The fact that they manage to say so many things about him despite that itchy attribute is the irony. Which you are committed to.

Different deists see things differently. The views held by some is just a remixing of Christian theology without the Christ. Others are radically differently. These are not necessarily what deism is all about. A creator exists, but he does not look over our shoulders individually – anyone thinking along these lines is usually classified as a deist.

In view of the above, the so called deists agree on certain and common grounds: that there is a single creator and that God is a person: in that he is conscious, sentient/wilful and intelligent and holds a non interventionist policy. Apart from being interventionist, this is remarkably similar to the Christian God!

Not a good image for Islam

God is dead, so why should I be good? The answer is that there are no grounds whatsoever for being good. There is no celestial headmaster who is going to give you six (or six billion, billion, billion) of the best if you are bad. Morality is flimflam.

Does this mean that you can just go out and rape and pillage, behave like an ancient Roman grabbing Sabine women? Not at all. I said that there are no grounds for being good. It doesn't follow that you should be bad. Indeed, there are those – and I am one – who argue that only by recognising the death of God can we possibly do that which we should, and behave properly to our fellow humans and perhaps save the planet that we all share. We can give up all of that nonsense about women and gay people being inferior, about fertilised ova being human beings, and about the earth being ours to exploit and destroy.

Start with the fact that humans are naturally moral beings. We want to get along with our fellows. We care about our families. And we feel that we should put our hands in our pockets for the widows and orphans. This is not a matter of chance or even of culture primarily. Humans as animals have gone the route of sociality. We succeed, each of us individually, because we are part of a greater whole and that whole is a lot better at surviving and reproducing that most other animals.

On the one hand, we have suppressed all sorts of common mammalian features that disrupt harmonious living. Imagine trying to run a philosophy class if two or three of the members were in heat. On the other hand, we have all sorts of sentiments about helping others and about the need to be fair. The love commandment is part of our biology.

It is true that we are aggressive at times, and it is even more true that thanks to our technology we can and sometimes do wreak the most terrible consequences on our fellow humans. But even so, compared to many other species, we are softies. The murder rate among lions, for instance, makes downtown Detroit look like a haven.

Morality then is not something handed down to Moses on Mount Sinai. It is something forged in the struggle for existence and reproduction, something fashioned by natural selection. It is as much a natural human adaptation as our ears or noses or teeth or joysticks or vaginas. It works and it has no meaning over and above this. If all future food were Pablum, we would probably be better off without teeth. If all future relationships could be done purely on a cost-benefit analysis, then we would probably be better off without morality. Why fall on a grenade to save your fellows when it hardly pays off for you?

Morality is just a matter of emotions, like liking ice cream and sex and hating toothache and marking student papers. But it is, and has to be, a funny kind of emotion. It has to pretend that it is not that at all! If we thought that morality was no more than liking or not liking spinach, then pretty quickly it would break down. Before long, we would find ourselves saying something like: "Well, morality is a jolly good thing from a personal point of view. When I am hungry or sick, I can rely on my fellow humans to help me. But really it is all bullshit, so when they need help I can and should avoid putting myself out. There is nothing there for me." The trouble is that everyone would start saying this, and so very quickly there would be no morality and society would collapse and each and every one of us would suffer.

So morality has to come across as something that is more than emotion. It has to appear to be objective, even though really it is subjective. "Why should I be good? Why should you be good? Because that is what morality demands of us. It is bigger than the both of us. It is laid on us and we must accept it, just like we must accept that 2 + 2 = 4." I am not saying that we always are moral, but that we always know that we should be moral.

Am I now giving the game away? Now you know that morality is an illusion put in place by your genes to make you a social cooperator, what's to stop you behaving like an ancient Roman? Well, nothing in an objective sense. But you are still a human with your gene-based psychology working flat out to make you think you should be moral. It has been said that the truth will set you free. Don't believe it. David Hume knew the score. It doesn't matter how much philosophical reflection can show that your beliefs and behaviour have no rational foundation, your psychology will make sure you go on living in a normal, happy manner.

God is dead. The new atheists think that that is a significant finding. In this, as in just about everything else, they are completely mistaken. God is dead. Morality has no foundation. Long live morality. Thank goodness!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2010/mar/15/morality-evolution-philosophy?CMP=twt_gu

Uyi Iredia: Not quite. When I talk of cause & effect I'm talking about the relationship between various elements of the physical world as expressed in the hard sciences (i.e physics, chemistry& biology). The causality engendered from the very act of creation is seperate from the cause-effect relationships I'm talking about.

I think its the same principle. Also demonstrates the pre existence of the Universe.

MyJoe: ^^^ So to you describing God as incomprehensible and uncaused and a conscious creator is the property of Christian theology. That is where your error lies. My paternal grandmother never set foot in a church till she passed on. She was not lettered so the Bible meant nothing to her. She believed all the above and more about God. I suggest you travel to your ancestral village, find an old fellow who never went to church all through their life and ask them to tell you about God.

Not that it is the exclusive property of Christianity, but the Christians laid the foundation for the concept of the incomprehensible God and almighty which we commonly associate Gods to via Aquinas and the negatively defined being centuries before the first deists came. Its a borrowed idea.

Can you kindly explain how a leads to b? Thank you.

I'm not saying a leads b, just that a complements b.

MyJoe: If I were your teacher, you would get a very low score for the above. In fact, that^^^ is an F grade write-up. Assuming, without conceding, that the Christian concept of God is older than the deist one, how does that mean that deism is derived from Christianity or that it borrows from the it? That is the point you have not addressed – how deism borrows from Christianity. But maybe your position is based on the view that Christianity taught us about God ab initio, which is not the case.

“Deist” is a label that does not refer to a group of people with a uniform set of beliefs. It loosely refers to anyone who believes God exists but repudiates or doubts the reality of the interventionist God with all his human traits described in the lore of most religions as well as the necessity of formal religion. Different deists explain their deism differently. There are agnostic deists and there are Christian deists. There are deists who believe firmly in “afterlife” and there are deists who say “we don’t know” when asked about that. There are deists who dismiss every possibility of prophetic inventions and miracles and there are deists who don’t.

That said, I don’t think there is any deists who claim to have answers to the “creator’s complexity”. But, of course. That is why I am a deist. So, yeah, that is left unanswered. Deism has never been about solving any paradox. It is not about explaining the First Cause. It is about recognizing the necessity of a First Cause. I don’t claim to understand God. In fact, God is incomprehensible and unknowable. “The sum total of all that exists”. “The uncased cause”. “The eternal sovereign lord”. These are all definitions that find earth with me because they don’t limit God. And I don’t think most deists see God in human form – at least, not in the same manner as the popular religions do. You are yet to provide any backing for your claims that they do.

Your assertions that deism borrows from Christianity or that it has an anthropomorphic concept of God, therefore, have no merit. Not that there is anything necessarily wrong with having ideas similar to Christianity. You, like many others, need to jettison this idea that ideas are defined relative to Christianity. And the idea of Us versus Them.

I did explain sufficiently and you went on further. Apart from being the non interventioning God and probably natural, all the attributes have been developed by christian theology already, namely his incomprehensible nature, uncaused, intelligent, conscious creator in essence a person.

^^
Or probably rational people with a rational God.

Hmmmm.

A suffering baby is a manifestation only IF there is an observer?!

MyJoe:
How does deism borrow from Christian theology? How is "the nature of their God" - whatever that is - anthropomorphic? What "paradox" do you mean exactly?

First, the Christian concept of God was developed earlier than Deist one, just like the Christian God is a person largely with characteristics and personality of a human. Given that intelligence is a complex attribute, the goal of causality is to trace the complex down to the simplest which a Creator solves the universe's complexity, however the Creator's complexity is left unanswered.

[quote author=Mr_Anony]You have not answered my question at all. For an animal to suffer or be traumatized, it must have an intelligence so as to know that it is suffering and that it's suffering is evil.
To even ponder the necessity of it's suffering, the animal should have an even higher intelligence capable of stepping outside itself and viewing it's situation from an objective viewpoint.

You said:

My question is: How do you know this to be true? You have not answered me.


Here again, you talk about the necessity of elongated suffering and how we can't think of any conceivable goal for it. I hope you do realize that these things require that an intelligence exists.....or how else can an event be conceived as evil if there is no intelligence to conceive it?

Secondly: If the premises that God is omniscient and omnipotent are true and God can permit suffering, then it doesn't matter how long the suffering lasts or how intense it is as only an omniscient being can rightfully tell exactly how much suffering is necessary.

Note: I am not trying to trivialize suffering at all. I have suffered myself and asked God questions in my desperate moments, but I am not going to use my emotions as basis for a logical argument.[/quote]Even if its a baby suffering needlessly and its unaware of it, its still an evil.

For a perfect benevolent creator, evil is not possible.

^^^
What is simply the use of freewill IF there are restrictions, if there are orders to be obeyed, with freedom comes zero responsibility.

Deism still borrows heavily from Christian theology, the Nature of their God is anthropomorphic, nonphysical and uncaused. And doesn't still explain the paradox of the intelligent Creator.

I'm suspicious of saviours and heroes, they tend to "keep the danger safe"

nezer76: @kay17 :arugment to me is nt being able to make noise or missing of words for another neither does it entitles me to dish insult on fellow commentators and in time past i av learnt nt to exchange word 4 word but rather make my view n opinions very clear 2 d extend dat audience will realise reasons y my ideas shld be accepted. In every civilize organise arguement,four facts are impotant (1) Issues of a case(2) Rulings(3)Authorities(4)Conclusion. Issue here i think is generally known to evey1 i mean the subject matter,Rulings are relevant laws ,enactment dat apply to the subject matter e.g d constitution,evidences act etc while d Authorities are opinions ,words, comment of learned minded people and decided cases dat has nt been overrule by a superior court they all togetherly formed judicial precedent. Observation is wht u as a reasonable human being can deduce frm all this afterall said point conceing d subject matter. I argued on facts nt just facts alone bt d ones in issue. In ur num1 paragraph d different btw crime and civil matters is very clear criminal assault is @criminal code defin. Sect.253 as when a person strickes,touches or moves or otherwise apply force of any kind 2 d person of another either directly or indirectly witout d consent of d person or if consent is obtain by fraud,force or otherwise in assault of this, it is d state dat usually prosecute offenders n d purnishment to it is either imprisonment or payment of fine depending on degree of harm inflicted. Note dat this does nt attract awarding of compesation 4 d victim. Civil assault is guilded by d law of tort known as 'trespass to person' it is am embodiment of 3 laws i.e assault, battery and false imprisonment but in this case one is needed. Assault here is define as the apprehension of unnecessary reasonable fear emanated frm d defendant, while battery is an unwanted,unwarranted physical contact on d person of d plaintiff witout his consent.which attract payment of damages after when proved...... Diginity u will realise through out d whole lawbk of Nig.there have nt been a law enacted on diginity except dat of d African charter dat forms part of our constitution,section 34 'right to diginity of person, it shows therefore dat it is a sensitive qaulity of a man n can nt bi decide by a 3rd party it is only d victim of d abuse who can tell hw accepted his dignity after an abuse save in d other instances in d constitn which u av quoted and interpretd blindly in d par.2 of ur argument permit me to say this endevour to get a book dat borders on EJUSDEM GENERIS RULE of interpreting status then u ll get 2 knw dat when a particular class of word is spoken in a status and general words follows d class first mention is 2 be taken as d most comprehensive n d general words treated as refering 2 matter ejusden generis. With this i think it will go a long way to also solve ur idea of consent impliedly given bt one thing in this(consent implied)is provided is nt by force,fraud or under duress or undue influence. Negilence is a rule nt law bt an authority of caution. My application of dis rule is plain and nt wit ambigourlity, if d young girl has fallen victim of an electric shock in d church auditorium then oyedepo may be held liable 4 nt takin necessary steps to protect his invitees who came to worship bt in dis case it was a slap on d alter,i think consent has been authorize if nt complains 4m d girls quarter will av suffice. wht if it was a blows of air frm d bishop on d girl and in d cause she fell will dat still be actionable in court? Par.3 the law is clear on who can sue onbehalf of infant so let nt module it wit matrimonial dat is clearly another tier of law,Family law . Finally in all d procedures laid down 4 an aggrieve party 2 approach a court of competent jurisdiction particularly in applications on d enforcement of human right d aggrived party is known as d plaintiff while d other party as d defendant and d two parties are expect to present themselves only if one is incarcirated otherwhile a default jugdement will be enter against d absentee. So tell us we av gotten a defendant here where is d plaintff?(miss justice)i guess u would say. Ur last questn on whether i knw wht d doctrine of 'persona non gratta'is , i think is 1 of d tins i av reserved 4 ur next comment. Thanx

Yea, there are many fields and specializations in law, however the principles remain the same and probably shaped by particular circumstances.

There could arise instances where a party feels its obliged to protect its identity and yet pursue its case, again common in matrimonial cases.

Isn't consent prior to assault?

^^
So the principle of Causality can't be caused.

Uyi Iredia: No I'm saying that God is the reason for the cause-effect relationship. Simple. That's not saying they existed and didn't exist prior to their creation.

Pay little attention, from what you said: the causal relation is created by God, the act and necessity of creation betrays causality already! therefore the principle is being expressed before its creation

Deep Sight: ^^^ I can't make sense of what you are saying. Are you suggesting that if human beings did not exist to conceptualize eternity, then eternity would not exist? That is patently false and eerily similar to Idehn's argument that things only exist in our heads. It is a horribly illogical argument. I opened a thread to show this to Idehn but he never addressed it - - - >

https://www.nairaland.com/970734/contentions-idehn-existence-god-time

Please read and respond to the arguments there.

Immanuel Kant did share similar views with Idehn, that space is a mental construct. For an empiricist, such is untenable.

Deep Sight: God is the eternal element which is not said to be created: the same way as eternity, having no beginning, is not created. For starter's see God as Eternity itself.

I don't think you mean that God is eternal. Time has a beginning

Uyi Iredia: How is it a contradiction.?

Saying that the causal principle existed and didn't exist prior to its creation.

nezer76: the notion that religion freedom cant create a parralle state is subject to d government of d day and legislations frm d various house of assembly cos a section in charpter 3 of the constitutiion empowers the lagislature to make law for the peaceful coexistence of the people one of which includes religion. So it is possible for Nigeria or a state to be declare a one religion state. Secondly
yes shaira law is a valid law and is inconsistence with d constitution of d fed. Repblic of Nig. but yet still exist and active infact shaira law happens to be one of the source of the northern penal code.

No, the Constitution identifies the Nigerian State as a secular and it is beyond the power of the legislature to change that.

Sharia law hasn't bEen challenged yet.

nezer76: still dont let us forget that the law is there only to cub our excess,regulate our ways of life nt to eradicate ways of life . On a light mode my brother i think i disagree with u dat xtian is a fraction of population 'no' wht i would expect u 2 say is dat religion generally is a way of life which can nt be eraditacated but regularize against it excesses. hence the need for customary law and d sharia law will nt be necessary. U will realize that the African charter adpoted in 1979 by 63 members of d now AU except Morocco equally guaranteed the right of every1 to practice the religion of his/her own choice and this does not exclude the primary rules and norms applicable in that religion for example d received sharia law states (a)any1 dat steals another fellow property shall by amputated on dat very hand he stole with,(b) unto any muslim brother who have d finacial ability can take unto himself more than 1 wife (c) as an husband in d shaira practice region u are entitle to beat ur wife to a reasonable extent b4 it amount to crime while on d contrary these three are the reverse here subject to d received english law in practice in our region (a) and (c) as in aboved item will be prevail by section 36 of d constitution and section 1 subsection 3 of d same constitution while item (b) will amount to bigarmy. We can see the different laws at work oppositely and yet still invoke here among us. Here are some testimony of the practice of this norms amist us. in zamfara the man who confess to stealin a cow and got his arm amputated, shld we say his a victim of acade rules or wht or the constitution was nt at work for him where as thousands of armed robbers get bailed both in court and police base on d fact dat his freedom can nt be overemphasy and d tens of fraudster released by d EFCC at custody and court on d note dat it is a bailable offence. Did u say is nt recent enough, of course our noble senator, a former governor of zamfara state who as a matter of few year ago got married to a 17yrs old eygptian girl despite the fact dat it is against the child's right as an infant. He was actually debar by modern laws but the religion norms avails him. In conclusion the law recognizes all this rules and practice of our religion else it will have stated 'thou shall not slap in the church' . Follows therefore that all norms , practices, customs and traditions of the people coulpe with series of conventions and charters made the law except the ones that are against natural justice, and the ones repugnant of reasonable public practice and opinions. You cant ailenate one from the other.

I don't think religious freedom extends to creating a parallel state. Is Sharia law valid and consistent with the constitution? I don't think so. It is best a personal law.