₦airaland Forum

Kobojunkie:
1. I have yet to shift even an inch from my original position and claim. 😒

Shifting doesn't even begin to cut it. You didn't just shift the goalposts, you drifted down a river with it like a speedboat with no steering wheel, sliding wildly out of bounds. Then you looked us dead in the eye and claimed total immobility.

2. The Constitution is a document birthed from the existence of the Declaration of Independence, wherein the roots of the rights belonging to the citizenry are made clear. Those rights are granted to men not by other men but by their very Creator, is what it says. Unlike in places like Nigeria, where the rights of the individual are given and can be taken away by men, the rights of the citizenry in the United States are rooted not in the pen but in creation itself. The rights of individuals predate the Constitution and will remain even after the Constitution ceases. 😒

Have you ever pondered why courts cite the Constitution rather than the Declaration when deciding actual cases? Do you even know how how American jurisprudence actually functions in real life? You just don't get it, do you? How many times must scholars explain that political philosophy is not enforceable statutory law?

Get real, please, and stop peddling high-school civics myths. The Constitution derives power from human consensus alone. If you reject that, your analysis is worthless.

3. Your First Amendment literally says that what exists for the citizenry is freedom of religion. 😒

It also literally forbids the government from establishing a state religion. Freedom of religion is structurally impossible without freedom from state-enforced religious dogma. If the state favors one faith, your "freedom" becomes meaningless.

You can't have true religious liberty if the state imposes ancient myths or faiths you don't subscribe to on the public. Misinterpreting a dual-protection clause as a green light for state-backed theology is hilariously illiterate. Stop slicing amendments in half to save your argument.

4. Government does not need to be granted a religious foundation for it to have such. Culture/religion shapes government by way of shared values, expectations, etc. of the citizenry. 😒

Actually, social norms do not constitute a binding legal architecture, bro. As a result, your thesis collapses into meaningless sociological noise.

Kobojunkie:
Again, I am not the one slyly tangling things up here. You are! 😒

Then stop moving the goalposts, my hopelessly confused friend.

2. All that is gibberish given that, to this day, the Declaration of Independence states that people are endowed by their Creator with rights that cannot be taken away or given up. Yes, the rights that every American claims to have -- Unalienable rights --- to this very moment we speak are said to have been endowed by their Creator... not a human... with the Government as the protector of those rights. 🥱🥱🥱

Citing Jefferson’s Deistic prose to prove a state religious foundation is total clown-show logic. The Declaration is political rhetoric, whereas the godless Constitution actually governs. Rights are codified, protected, and enforced exclusively through human institutions, not celestial decrees.

3. For the individual, it is freedom of, not from, religion; it is instead the right granted in the First Amendment. That right allows individuals to have and keep their individual religion or none at all. For the government, however, it is freedom from religion in that all laws have to be secular so that no religion is placed above the other. A secular Government, can have a religious foundation. Nothing in the Constitution mandates that the Government abandon or never mentions its religious roots. 🥱🥱🥱

Oh please quit parroting those cheap talk-radio slogans. Freedom of religion inherently requires freedom from compulsory religion, otherwise, pluralism utterly dies. Coerced piety isn't freedom. Moreover, nothing in the U.S. Constitution grants government a "religious foundation." In fact, Article VI explicitly bans religious requirements, ensuring the legal foundation remains strictly secular, human, and rational

Kobojunkie:
Just so we are clear, a nation that codifies secularism... freedom of religion... IS NOT a nation without a religious foundation. Let's not conflate two totally different ideas here. 🤔

Then you've got it all tangled up, chief. When we study constitutional evolution, secular laws deliberately replace divine authority with human consent. Freedom from religion is the core pillar keeping societies functional in modern jurisprudence. It's fundamentally a secular containment strategy against fanatical proselytizing.

Now, much of what you know as Western nations is fundamentally shaped by a combination of Christian morality, Greco-Roman philosophy, Roman law, and architecture.

So where does this routine, surface-level trivia about Roman columns and legal precedents actually validate your silly claim that non-belief is a religion?

In the US, for example, what you refer to as inalienable rights are derived from ideas linked to a God, and that God happens to be the one linked to the Christian Religion. So, when people scream, "Rights this and rights that," in the United States, they refer to rights that are backed by rights that come from the religion of Christianity, and not out of thin air!🤔

Dude it's high time we stopped peddling thess debunked nationalist mythologies regarding American founding documents. Politics in early democracy evolved by breaking free from theological autocracy, grounding rights in human reason rather than divine revelation.

You do realize people like Jefferson explicitly excised supernatural miracles from his gospel? These were rationalist principles created to guarantee liberty for believers and non-believers alike. And even then, rights are sustained by civil courts, not divine intervention. I wonder what your take is on the Establishment Clause and/or Article VI prohibiting religious tests?

And then people like Mariangeles would be asking why atheists are obsessed with Christians, Muslims and other religious zealots.

Now you tell me, Mariangeles, just who is obsessed with who in this OP?

Kobojunkie:
1. All nations are founded on one religious idea or the other. There is no escaping that fact.

The United States Constitution literally codified a secular government, which completely debunks you here.

You go to even the communist/socialist/marxist nations, and you will find atheism codified in the system.

State-mandated anti-theism in Marxist systems is an instrument of political subjugation. It has absolutely nothing to do with religion. Please get your facts straight. None of those regimes you mention codify non-belief because they love rationalist philosophy. They just enforce it to demolish competing centers of authority and force total submission to the supreme leader. They systematically eliminate independent institutions to eliminate dissent and churches simply happen to be organized rivals for popular loyalty.

It's always been all about power. Faith and belief is completely irrelevant. So treating political tyranny as the canonical doctrine of everyday secularism is a hilariously desperate category error.

However, in the West, the idea of freedom of religion at the individual level allows most people to exist without having to have the religion of others shoved in their faces every day. This is the #1 of the other individual I had responded to.😒

Tell that to millions fighting for bodily autonomy against evangelical lobbies in the West. Religious fundamentalists routinely weaponize legal loopholes to ban books, restrict healthcare, and legislate scripture into public law daily. Having theoretical individual freedom doesn't mean pious loudmouths aren't aggressively invading public life.

2. I explained there how any comprehensive ideology/belief can take up a religious stronghold over those who allow themselves to be brainwashed by it.

This lazy semantic trickery is getting remarkably pathetic, my guy. Calling any organized set of principles a "religion" is a cheap equivocation tactic meant to mask the total lack of empirical evidence for your faith. There is a vast, unbridgeable chasm between dogmatic submission to unproven supernatural myths and the energetic defense of rational, evidence-based inquiry.

By your completely broken logic, a passionate belief in the scientific method, human rights, or environmentalism makes someone an ordained priest. Please stop stretching basic semantics before the English language utterly loses all meaning.

Anyone living in 2026 would know and understand this at this point. 😒

Anyone living in 2026 with a functioning brain can spot your desperate equivocation tactics from a mile away

Kobojunkie:
1. That is only true in a place like Nigeria where religion is air for the vast majority. That doesn't apply to athiests in other climes where religion rarely features in public life for most folks. 😒😒

Outside of your remarkably insulated worldview, religious hegemony subtly saturates Western culture, currency, pledges, and institutional holidays without question. At other times, dogmatic reactionaries orchestrate massive judicial takeovers specifically designed to subjugate non-conforming populations under holy law. Thus, declaring that public life abroad is free from religious tyranny is an absolute joke.

2. Unfortunately, there is also atheism, the religion, which is what is at play here. Literally every ideology out there can be turned into a religion by those who allow themselves to become brainwashed by it. Atheism, for a great number of athiests, is a religion that their entire universe is centered around, and like every other religion, one they feel pushed to proselytize, even against the very logic and truth they pretend to stand for. So, when a so-called atheist uses belief in atheism as a reason to attack other religions, he does so mainly from a religious standpoint, no different than when people from other religions do the same. 😒😒

It is quite unfortunate that so-called learned people are still making these elementary school arguments in 2026 after years of evolved theology and apologetics. Please what is this absurd definition of "religion" you've adopted if it applies to literally any vocal criticism of ancient divine mythology? Perchance do you also view total silence as an extreme form of noise too?

HeatSeeker:
Ok. Understood. But you went hard in your response to Dtruthspeaker. Like you were trying to use a bazooka to kill a fly . Take am easy jare

Lmao. Pfft, what have I said abeg, that intelligent posters don't already know about Dtruthspeaker a.k.a StillDTruth a.k.a Truespeak, except maybe OP Mariangeles who may or may not be familiar with him? Na him way, we don sabi am tey tey. Sometimes you just need lay down the facts so others don't waste their precious time engaging with circular nonsense. It was never about overkill, just about informing her on the background. When someone routinely derails threads with flawed, spurious, borderline insane reasoning, a detailed preamble "nota bene" from an observer with documented history about the habits and tendencies of the said individual is necessary to save everyone else from an endless, tedious un-merry go round.

HeatSeeker:
This is too brutal

You guys need to chill
We will all die one day and find out for ourselves.

Honestly, religion barely occupies my mind on an average Tuesday these days. I couldn't care less about distant theological debates or speculations of humans fate in the afterlife. I'm too busy living in the here and now. The only reason I even stepped into this thread at all was to address that hilarious myth that atheists are somehow obsessed with Christians.

Look at our cultural and socio-political landscape for five minutes and you'll quickly realize that the so-called obsession clearly runs in reverse, with religious dogma constantly intruding into public policy, education, and people's personal lives and individual liberties. The evidence is all around us. I've made my points clear and succinctly with my very first contribution here. Whatever headache anyone wants to have over my submission there is really not my cup of tea. Christians' personal salvation is the least of my troubles today.

Look closely at Dtruthspeaker's response, OP. And pay very especial attention to the logical architecture of his arguments, his off point ramblings and even his choice of words. What you are witnessing - if you'll be honest to admit it - is a masterclass in theological gymnastics, emotional guilt-tripping, and absolute logical decay.

Now he complains that I blocked him and muted his comments. The simple reason is because he's simply not worth the effort. Debating a half full water bottle would frankly be a more productive use of my time and probably the more intellectually stimulating exercise. Unlike him, I'm not chronically online at every point of the day.

Normally, I'd pay him no mind and allow him to stew in his own endless loop of absurdity as he desperately seeks my attention. But it would be unfortunate if I do not give you the full picture of who you're dealing with and who's coming to camp in your corner, for your sake. Hence this post.

Indeed I'm very familiar with Dtruthspeaker moniker and I should warn you beforehand, that he is fundamentally incapable of making a sentence without tripping over the shoelaces of his own poor logic.

Note that this moniker has been lurking around these forum corridors since 2019. That is 7 solid years of dedicated, unbroken service. If this forum were a corporate entity, he would already qualify for a pension, a commemorative wristwatch, and a plaque for long-term service. But instead of collecting dividends, he spends his days clocking 18-hour shifts on the Religion board like a self-appointed online gatekeeper of Paradise.

If you check his posting history, it reads less like a record of faith and more like a marathon of unprovoked antagonism. This poster treks from thread to thread like an unpaid traffic warden, handing out citations to anyone who - intentionally or otherwise - points out the absurdity of his reasoning. 😂

What makes his crusade truly fascinating is how remarkably broad his target roster is. He isn't picky at all. Oh no. He distributes terrible logic with complete impartiality:
Atheists? Unrepentant fools who reject "grace"
Jehovah's Witnesses? Misguided heretics off the track.
Muslims? Out of the fold entirely.
Anyone asking logical questions? Disrespecters of his celestial sovereign.

If you don't share his exact, highly specific, home-cooked interpretation of the cosmos, you are immediately targeted with arguments so fragile they would break if you sneezed too hard nearby. He doesn't bother building a coherent defense for his worldview. Nope. His strategy is simplistic and almost cute in its manifestation: throw a wall of dramatic, guilt-inducing prose at you, hurl a few ad hominem jabs here and there, declare a spiritual victory, and then sprint to the next thread to cause another scene before someone rightly corners him with his own failed logic.

And cornering him is not that difficult, trust me. It takes a while and countless nonsensical back and forths that may or may not have anything to do with the topic. But it's guaranteed to happen as the gap in intellectual reasoning is simply too wide when you properly engage.

Since 2019, rain or shine, economic boom or global crisis, this man is online. While the rest of humanity is working 9-to-5 jobs, navigating real-world responsibilities, or sleeping, he is sitting under a fan, overheating his phone battery, typing out nonsensical comments on the most banal and useless threads. Credit where credit is due though - cos it could never be me.
I'm sure if the Ministry of Labor ever needs to conduct an audit on underutilized workforce potential, his profile should be exhibit A. 😂

This is precisely why skeptics don't even need to write books or organize formal debates to expose the absurdities of dogmatic zealotry. They can just make their core points (like I've already done), sit back, relax, and let folks like this do all the heavy lifting for free. Notice he actually hasn't refuted anything I said with a cogent rebuttal worth reading. It's all distractions and disjointed logic you wouldn't find in any logic or philosophy textbook of good repute. He simply hasn't got the juice.

Every time he leaps into a comment section with awful logic, passive-aggressive threats of cosmic doom, and zero self-awareness, three more people quietly decide that rational thinking isn't such a bad idea after all. When a man has spent seven straight years arguing with internet strangers across every faith and non-faith on the planet, you start wondering if he's really defending truth or he's just desperately avoiding looking for a day job.

So perhaps you think you've got someone intelligent and reasonable in your camp, I'd suggest you think again. There are many more bright and intelligent Christians out there to hang with if you're looking for company. Intelligence isn't defined by what you believe or don't believe. It's defined by your reasoning and your conduct in debates.

Now since he's allergic to long detailed expositions, just watch how he will arrive to complain about the length of my riposte, single out 1 or 2 sentences off my entire wall of text and go off on an absurd tangent to make himself look good. That's his M.O. Like clockwork.

Dtruthspeaker:
Your talking about intellectual engagement already shows the classic atheist lack of intellectual engagement as despite your abundant verbosity, you gave only a sprinkle of substance. All others are in the trash of ad hominem fallacy.

Imagine confusing an unsparing intellectual dismantling with an ad hominem just because it hurt your fickle pride. Please grab hold of a paper bag, take a deep breath, read slowly, and actually address the arguments. It wasn't written in Spanish. But then again, it's also genuinely hilarious watching you hide behind logic terms you clearly skimmed on Wikipedia just five minutes ago.

And you obviously never got the memo that we discharged the burden of proof in the subject of the proof of God in pointing out the fact that no thing in this world created itself exactly as no camry or iPhone or a.i can reasonably and validly lay claim to creating itself.

Equating complex natural ecosystems to a manufactured iPhone is so painfully reductive it belongs in a middle-school Sunday class. You haven't discharged anything except your complete and embarrassing ignorance of biology.

And it is hoped that you do not give your popular fallacious mantra of a counter. So, that issue is settled.

If an iPhone needs a maker due to its complexity, then an all-knowing cosmic deity requires an infinitely more complex creator. You can't grant your God an exemption without committing glaring special pleading. Try again, my friend, because nothing here is settled except your defeat. And by the way, labeling an inevitable critique "fallacious" before it's even uttered is a textbook "poison the well" strategy. Although I guess - on the bright side - it shows you already know that your argument is utterly defenseless against basic logic.

Even mariangeles here once dabbled with atheism when she thought they were making sense and I'm surprised that she now opposes them.

So she "dabbled" in atheism and left. Who cares? Truth isn't determined by personal anecdotes or temporary ideological pitstops. People drift back into dogma for emotional security all the time. Using her journey as validation just shows how utterly desperate you are for external confirmation.

And funny you say you mind your business but here you are attacking a person who did not even know you exist, thereby proving the Truth of the said obsession you atheists have against Christians. Not Muslims or pagans (ritualist) oo who are also religious people too. But it is never them that is the object of hatred and obsession.

We address Christianity because you’re the ones aggressively trying to dictate societal norms. Get over yourself, stop crying and defend your logic like an adult. You've cornered yourself in a labyrinth of your own abysmal logic.

Anyway, it is the religion of atheists to lie when they see that they are cornered. Very sore losers like Argentina

Smh. Isn't it too early for you to be waving this tattered, paper-thin white flag disguised as a salty parting shot?

Alusiizizi:
Because real atheists are actually agnostics, that is, those that really care about the mystery of existence but admit that they don't have any sensible answers(actually, no one on this planet has any sensible answers to the mystery of existence, even though there are many who think they do)

Now, from the set of those who do not actually have any sensible answers to the mystery of existence but believe they do, exactly 2 subsets of people can extracted:

Atheists: Those that believe that God does not exists, and science, in its current form, explains everything. As a scientist myself, I can attest that this group of people are not only completely wrong but betray their lack of understanding of fundamental tenets of science in general.

Religious Faithfuls: Those that believe in a divine, all powerful being that created everything. From this group there can be obtained a wide spectrum of zealotry, from those that accept the existence of such all powerful creator but believe that he can be appreciated through the understanding of the nature that he created to those that deny even the possibility that man can understand said nature and therefore reject the results of science altogether.

So, coming back to your question. Atheists assert that there is no God, and they crave validation for this belief. They've been taught most of their lives that there is a God and turning away from God means going to hell. For whatever reason, the strict discipline required to follow Gods rules is not compatible with the life that they want to live and they want out. This is where they discover science, not that they learn it, but come to believe that science can explain all of nature, which it demonstrably cannot, and most importantly, do it without invoking a divine creator, which to them is the most attractive feature of science.

So, armed with their new belief(and ignorance) of science, as well as their desperate desire for validation, they go on a campaign, championing science over God with every given opportunity. That's why it may appear that atheists seem to make more noise that others.

Ha! I just had to laugh. I'll never understand why fellows like you feel so absurdly compelled to construct such elaborate, self-serving taxonomies just to soothe your own fragile, pseudo-intellectual worldview. I fail to see what's so hard for you lot to understand about atheism, except you're just being disingenuous.

Perhaps if you were even half as rigorously analytical as your delightfully pompous "as a scientist myself" preface attempts to signal to the forum, you would actually grasp basic philosophical definitions before masquerading as an enlightened authority on human consciousness and epistemic humility. But since you enjoy pulling random bs from your arse, let us get down to brass tacks and actually unpack the concrete philosophical - and also - sociopolitical reality(ies) you're so desperate to ignore.

Contrary to your bizarre fever dream assertion, atheism is not some dogmatic, gnostic insistence that modern scientific consensus currently explains every single metaphysical nuance or obscure corner of the cosmos, nor is it a desperate, adolescent cope crafted by uninhibited hedonists trying to run away from the "strict discipline" of divine oversight and moral accountability. A simple visit to any philosophy textbook or even a basic dictionary may have cautioned you beforehand, from spewing forth this blunder.

And another fun fact, bucko - eschewing belief in a celestial landlord is actually the default baseline of rejecting unevidenced claims about invisible sky deities. Shocked? Bet you didn't know this, did you? That tiny little detail just scraped by your head and missed you completely, betwixt your half baked pontifications.

Proper epistemic hygiene demands that the burden of proof rests squarely on the claimant asserting an omnipotent cosmic architect. The fact that you could so clumsily conflate a simple absence of belief with a positive, arrogant claim of absolute universal omniscience, is a testament to your capacity for intelligent reasoning, or lack thereof. This tired, armchair-psychoanalytic fanfiction you just cooked up about atheists is just pure, unadulterated copium and a shockingly lazy attempt to bypass intellectual engagement by impugning people's psychological motives.

Anyhoo, back to Mariangeles' question

Mariangeles:
I have never come across a people so obsessed with religion, and "religious people".

For a set of people that claim to not care about religion, how come they're so obsessed, huh?

Me for instance, I don't concern myself with what I don't care about.
I consider it a total waste of time and energy.

"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." - Plato

You aren't an atheist, Mariangeles, so you wouldn't know diddly squat the battles atheists face regularly, especially in hyper religious environments filled with obnoxious proselytizing like Nigeria or the US Bible Belt. When religious orthodoxy routinely dictates state policy, codifies social bigotry, invades governance, and throttles rational inquiry, sensible human beings feel a moral and social imperative to speak up and push back against the madness. It's not exactly rocket science. I personally have no business with religious people and are content minding my own business until they try to mind my business for me and start asking me spurious questions about giving my life to a Jewish carpenter.

WatchYourSix:
The bible is clear… it said…. “in all things, give thanks to God” …
if u decide to cherry pick what “all things” means to you… that’s fine…..
But why are u trying to force your own view of what “all things” means on another person ..? U are just using paracetamol for another person’s headache

Dude, let's not even pretend you answered the question. Irregardless of what you might think, accusing others of "cherry-picking" because they dare to question the absolute sanity of rejoicing over a fresh corpse is a spectacularly spurious take. Heck, even Job's friends knew to shut up for seven days before opening their mouths. OP asked a real question about ritual and meaning, you dodged the theology and threw a proverb instead.

helinues:
I don't need to waste my time on you

The beautiful thing about saying you "don't need to waste your time" is how thoroughly you waste your own time by announcing it at all.

helinues:
Your if didn't cover the poster you attached by yourself

Moreover, your epistle didn't answer my simple question. Where is it in Nigeria constitution that one can be a vice president for 3 times

I'm struggling to understand why you're demanding chapter-and-verse citations for a position nobody here - op included - has advanced?

helinues:
It's disappointing for you to make this kind of thread

You mean Atiku can become a VP for the third time?

Actually Atiku Abubakar served as Vice President of Nigeria from 1999 to 2007, under one president, in one continuous political relationship. That is one VP tenure. He has not been VP a second time. He has run, unsuccessfully, for President six times. So it would be a second VP term, not a third.

Kobojunkie:
It is the absence based on false conclusions. That false grounding makes it no different from a religion. 🥱🥱

Two things here :-

1. No serious philosopher of religion - not even the theistic ones - defines religion as "whatever I personally think is grounded in error." You've wandered so far off the map you might as well have fallen off the planet.
2. To brand atheism religiously equivalent because its conclusion is wrong, you'd first need to demonstrate the conclusion is wrong, which is precisely the matter in contention.

By the way, not all religions/traditions are characterized by a belief in a god. 🥱🥱

True, but ultimately irrelevant to whether atheism - which is defined by absence of belief - constitutes one.

Kobojunkie:
Atheists are mostly religious folks,

I'm not sure why this constant mischaracterization of atheism seems to butter your biscuits, but atheism is definitionally one thing: the absence of theistic belief. That's it. Full stop. You should probably consult a dictionary before constructing arguments on foundations made entirely of sand.

as their belief does not simply stop at a lack of belief(most of them seem certain that a god cannot exist, hence making them religious in their leaning).

Poppycock. In the entire philosophical tradition, strong atheism - the positive claim that no gods exist - is distinguished from weak atheism precisely because they occupy different epistemic territory. There's absolutely no logical basis for collapsing certainty into religiosity. And even if we entertained your baroque little redefinition, "religious in leaning" is doing considerably more intellectual lifting than you are.

Tradition is also of religion. So, a so-called atheist who describes himself as one with spiritual awareness is definitely not an atheist but at least a traditionalist, as he claims. 🥱🥱

Whether or not one distinguishes between spiritual awareness and organized religion is an entirely separate taxonomic question from whether gods exist. That you're latching onto semantic trivialities while the actual argument evaporates around you is rather telling.

If this does not help you sort your confusion there, I don't know what else can. 🥱🥱

And what's with the yawns, btw? Is assembling a coherent argument really that draining for you?

TV01:
You are free to your view. Mine is different. I am sufficiently convinced by the evidence there is that there is a Creator, and that He is perfect in all His ways. How could He not be.

Well, in that case, conviction is still not evidence, however warmly it is held

You do realise that for believers faith is a factor. If "verifiaility" is beyond us, who is to say? Could you explain what you mean by structurally - is that within what you'd call a logical framework, or something else?

In many quarters, the concept that "faith is a factor" functions as a philosophical ejector seat - deployed with remarkable precision the moment logical turbulence becomes genuinely uncomfortable. But the sad reality is that the instant you invoke faith as a counter to a structural argument, you have conceded the structural argument and simply elected not to file the paperwork. What then remains is not a rebuttal but an aesthetic preference. And by structurally unverifiable I mean precisely this: the claim is arranged such that no conceivable state of affairs could count as evidence against it.

Why does suffering "have to be prevented". Why is incumbent on The Creator to ensure there is no suffering? Christianity portrays "suffering" as an outworking of disobedience by mankind - for which warning was given. For beings created out of and for love, freewill has to be a part of the mix.

One may be momentarily seduced by the free will gambit - it carries a certain rhetorical elegance in the abstract, I'll grant it that much. Ultimately, it evaporates the moment you recall that omnipotence designed the entire system, possessed exhaustive foreknowledge of every resulting atrocity, and constructed it anyway. Permission? I think not.

Omnipotence acts likewise - with certain knowledge of the mercy and justness of the outcome. Again, you claim to know what is best. How? What is your framework for determining this?

I don't claim to know what is best. I claim to know what "omniscient", "omnipotent", and "omnibenevolent" mean, and I am holding your deity to His own advertised specifications rather than any standard I've imported. So no vex, but if your God demonstrably falls short of His own job description, that is not my framework malfunctioning, but yours. I only read the label on the tin, as presented.

Suffering is suffering. If you charge Omnipotence within your framework with the ability and foreknowledge to forestall it, why make any distinction?

Because being methodologically precise and having indifference to morality are not remotely the same thing, and conflating them would reveals a rather significant confusion about how these types of arguments work. Duh.

I have indicated why within my faith framework. I don't so much see a widening as no reason to restrict it. Omnipotence is in view is it not? .


TV

That's a fancy bit of footwork you're doing there, but I should warn you that you're tap-dancing smack dab in the middle of a minefield. In a debate about logical coherence, retreating into your faith framework is nothing but you choosing to forfeit but dressing said forfeit in dignified clothing and/or reframing it as rebuttal. You have essentially argued that within the system which presupposes the conclusion, the conclusion holds, which I have to say, is a breathtaking position to take on its own. Plus, your insistence that there is "no reason to restrict" the scope actually confirms my point with aggressive thoroughness - if omnipotence is in view across the totality of suffering, you have just volunteered an infinitely larger indictment than the modest one I originally tabled. So unless you're secretly supporting my argument, you've played yourself.

What you need to understand is that expanding the domain of divine responsibility does pretty muchnothing to fortify your position. If anything, it detonates it at scale and with considerably more collateral damage.

The preceding exchanges have demonstrated, with rather elegant consistency, that every manoeuvre you attempt here either begs the question outrightly or somehow multiplies the problem it was meant to dissolve in the first place. I would suppose a more nimble theologian might have identified these exits closing several turns ago. But, that would be a big laugh.

DeepSight:
The pleasure is all mine - the high quality in your thought processes was noticeable right away and for me such a thing is almost like a narcotic to a drug-addict.

This analogy is very, very dangerous. 😂

Classical theism aside, do you countenance the purely philosophical concept of the existence of a necessary thing, a necessary first cause of this material and finite world / plane / dimension / reality.

I refer to necessary things in philosophy as opposed to contingent things -

https://philosophy.lander.edu/intro/necessity.shtml

And if God were defined strictly as -

That self existent root of all other existence. Would you say that such exists.

Why call it God though? I mean, don't get me wrong here - if we're talking strictly on the basis of philosophical soundness, it's a coherent concept that's not easy to dismiss. A necessary being, a self-subsistent ground of all contingent existence, sidesteps several problems that cripple classical theism. I'll put it like this: if you wish to take the term "God" and define it strictly as that necessary root, but importing nothing further - no personality, no moral preferences, no codices, no interventionist agenda - then I may be considerably less resistant to the idea. The honest answer for me though is: I don't know. And when I don't know stuff, I withhold belief.

Cogito ergo sum. Descartes.

But this saying is used as logical deduction that we exist - and not of an explanation of what we are. But one concedes that it may also demonstrate that we are thinking beings.

Fair enough.

Do you think that a machine could achieve self consciousness? I ask this question because personally I doubt it strongly and it is related to the issue of whether any configuration of matter alone could achieve the same.

I think the honest answer to this question will depend entirely on what consciousness actually is, and we don't know, so... yeah. If consciousness is substrate-independent - tracking information patterns rather than biological tissue - then a sufficiently complex machine may already be having something like experience. If it requires something biology does that we haven't identified, then probably not.

In thinking of these questions please let me know if you think a machine can ever feel pain.

Again, don't know. And to be honest, that uncertainty should genuinely unsettle us.

Fair enough - at the subjective level. Am I to take it that you are firm in your mind that there is no purpose of this world inherent in any external factor beyond us?

Firmly is probably too strong a word. I hold it as my best current assessment, subject to revision. But yes, I find no compelling evidence for externally imposed purpose.

Eureka! I have found it!
I have finally found someone who wonders about one of the strange things I wonder about. Because I have strange thoughts, wondering for example if I have not already passed on and happen to still be having a human experience in another dimension cut off from the last point when I was awake or conscious. This leads to / springs from / is related to several other considerations some of which question whether this reality or experience is real or simulated. So let me ask if you think experience is real, or a sort of imposed virtual reality.

I've been there mate, trust. Too many times - that particular vertigo where you wonder whether the you who woke up is continuous with the you who fell asleep, or a new instance that merely inherited memories. It sits at the intersection of philosophy of mind, personal identity, and what we might loosely call simulation thinking. I can accept any definition for it, provided it has nothing to do with claims of being authored by a conscious designer.

What do you think of that possibility and of Simulation Theory? Maybe you can also chip in here -

https://www.nairaland.com/8621001/lordreed-revisiting-simulation-reality

Thank you. I've gone through the OP @link. Several of those arguments you put up there are not bad per se. Bostrom's trilemma especially is logically tight. Truly, if civilisations capable of ancestor simulations exist and tend to run many, the arithmetic does favour simulated existence over base reality.

Where I'd push back a little is the chain of inference. The Planck length is a resolution limit of our measurement tools and theoretical models that may actually indicate the limits of current physics rather than pixels in a program.
The observer effect is real and strange, but the consensus reading among physicists is that it doesn't require conscious observers, but physical interaction, which measuring instruments provide.
Some other stuff there like the double slit experiment isn't settled science. It's still a minority consensus.

The strongest argument you've got there is Bostrom's statistical one. However, I should point out to you - with regards to the argument - that the phrases "statistically probable" and "demonstrably true" occupy different epistemic categories - and that the simulation hypothesis, like God, risks becoming completely unfalsifiable, which kinda makes it scientifically inert, no matter how interesting it sounds.

budaatum:
Sorry for barging in. But I wonder how true this is, and if you have considered that 'you are, therefore you think'?

Essentially, did your "thinking" precede your existence, is what I am asking?

That's a sharp reversal, but then again I don't suppose Descartes was making a causal claim about sequence. He was establishing certainty from the inside. The thinking is the evidence of existence, not its cause. You've reframed the epistemology as ontology. Those aren't the same argument.

DeepSight:
Welcome, Nerdcat

Thanks for giving me audience.

Your very well weighed responses to a few theological / philosophical matters interest me. Can you summarize your worldview for our benefit. Lets start with -

- Do you believe in the existence of God

No. I find all evidence presented in support of the concept to be insufficient and the logical architecture of classical theism - in particular - to be structurally compromised.

- What do you think you are

I think, therefore I am. 🙃

Tho I suspect you're looking for a more rigorous answer, so I'll say that I'm an arrangement of matter that just happens to be conscious, and self-aware. I'm not entirely sure how I gained this awareness, though I can try to speculate. I'm equally not sure how much more time I have left on this planet.

- What is the meaning / purpose of life to you

Meaning for me isn't discovered, but constructed. I don't believe in an objective meaning of life, as per the religious rhetorics for instance. Personally, I build my own meaning of life from my curiosity of life itself, the people around me, the universe in general etc. If I hard to pick my current purpose/meaning - it's to acquire sufficient material resources in terms of food, money, and more, to satisfy myself and my loved ones for as long as I can breathe.

- Do you believe in life after death

No, and I think the desire for it is psychologically understandable but also quite dangerous in epistemic terms, as it too easily becomes the engine driving belief rather than the conclusion following from evidence. What I find more interesting is the question of whether "I" persist continuously even now, between sleep cycles. That one keeps me up at night, fittingly enough.

Many thanks.

The pleasure is mine.

DeepSight:
Completely resonates with me.

I am curious. Even tempted to create a thread to "interview" you here. I have a history as a resident Larry King on this board. Let's do it.

https://www.nairaland.com/8664951/welcome-nerd-philosophy-existentialism

With pleasure.
I'd be delighted to jump in.

DeepSight:
Very well weighed. Very. Interesting.
Agnostic thus? With possible / potential belief in / acceptance of the spiritual and intangible?

Agnostic feels the closest, yes. I don't dismiss the spiritual outrightly. The existence of consciousness alone gives me sufficient pause for that. But what I resist - often strongly - is the leap from "materialism is incomplete" to any specific theological architecture like perhaps Christianity or Islam.

DeepSight:
This kind of simple nuance you have laid out here is sadly beyond your co-discussant TV01, who notwithstanding all grandstanding to the slightest knowledge, is one of the most unscholarly discussants you can ever waste your time on.

Sounds like you're old buddies, haha.

You are one of the soundest writers I have come across in a long time. Are you new here or a returnee in disguise. And are you pure atheist? Are you strict materialist?

I appreciate the compliment.

To your first question, the answer is a mix of both. I've been around as a guest, but never registered to actually contribute until recently. As it is, I'm still primarily a ghost on this site.

To your second question, the answer is no - I hold the question genuinely open. Materialism hasn't closed every gap yet.

HeatSeeker:
Look for the finest babes in town. If the babes don't slay in the church don't even bother

I'm telling you - this is precisely what sustains young men's theological commitments. One cannot manufacture piety inside a congregation of the drearily unsightly.

No baddies, no viable redemption route. 😎

TV01:
I disagree. Evidence for a creator abounds. My faith is historically attested too. Evidenced.

While I find the evidentiary landscape barren on both counts, I should note here that evidence for a creator isn't synonymous with evidence for an omnibenevolent, omnipotent one. There's quite a gap there - and it's pulling serious overtime.

Again, you rightly limit your observations to "observable reality". That was my point - not an attack on your morality, but your ability to take into account, or even all the relevant dynamic.

If the bounds of my finite understanding disqualify me from indicting the divine, they equally disqualify you from vindicating it. You cannot selectively invoke epistemic humility only when it serves your argument. Forward from that point: a God whose goodness is structurally unverifiable is also a God whose goodness is functionally meaningless as a claim. To wit, you have not expanded the argument, but have quietly dissolved it by making it unfalsifiable on demand. I don't necessarily think you're arguing in bad faith, but you are arguing with a framework that immunises itself against every challenge by simply retreating into inscrutability.

All of God's attributes work in tandem. Actions by other players in the cosmos earthly and heavenly have consequences. Faith assures me that God has this all worked out. Whilst there may be pain and suffering now, redemption will come to all those who put their faith in Him.

And how exactly does "worked out" constitute a response to a logical problem? You've described a feeling of assurance, not a solution to the structural incompatibility between omnipotence and preventable suffering. Faith that everything eventually resolves doesn't address whether a morally perfect omnipotent being would permit the specific suffering in question to occur at all. That is the actual argument, and you've moved cleanly past it without engaging it. There's little here that constitutes a counter-argument rather than a restatement of belief.

Your take is temporal. A surgeon rips open a mans chest to perform open heart surgery. Tat is harm, damage, but the end thereof is healing. One who was limited view of only the ripping may come to a different conclusion.

That analogy doesn't hold, and I'll tell you why. First, the surgeon operates within knowable causal chains and with the patient's eventual consent, while an omnipotent deity operates under neither constraint and with total foreknowledge of the outcome before the disease even forms. Second, the surgeon cannot prevent the disease. Omnipotence, by definition, can. So you're comparing a limited agent doing their best with an unlimited one choosing not to.

Just filling out your postulation. Resorting to an emotional use-case is not required. If you declare omnipotence is responsible for and to alleviate pain, harm and suffering, surely it must be the totality of it?

I'm afraid the emotional charge of an example has zero bearing on its logical weight. I think you're simply struggling to distinguish between rhetorical intensity and argumentative precision. I cited children with brain tumours because the causal chain is clean and agent-neutral, not because I'm appealing to your sympathy rather than your reason.

The parent who abandons their offspring and leads to lots f hurt and poorer outcomes. The one who leaves a supposedly committed realationship causing heartbreak. Random muggings, assaults, terror attacks, wars, along with a host of other things all cause pain, harm or suffering. Why not charge omnipotence with them as well?


TV

Simple: human agents cause those harms precisely because omnipotence permits them to, which merely relocates the problem rather than dissolving it - and now you must explain why a morally perfect omnipotent being permits the enabling conditions at all. Besides, you're widening the scope as though that helps your case when it doesn't. If anything, it multiplies the problem considerably. It's worth noting I never excluded human-caused suffering from the indictment. I used the tumour case because it surgically - pun intended 😎 - removes the human-agency variable, nothing more.

TV01:
I said previously, perhaps consider your own finiteness and limited understanding. Maybe revisit your own contextualising mercy as an attribute of God.

Have you clocked yet, by the way, that the assertion "your understanding is too finite to indict God" renders it equally too finite to recognise, trust, or worship Him? That blade, my friend, is double-edged - thoroughly and symmetrically so.

Is mercy God's sole or primary attribute? What of Holiness, Justice and other attributes. Your wanting an explanation and your dissatisfaction with what you can fathom about how God dispenses mercy does not make you righteous, just or merciful. Nor does it legitimise how you choose to understand it and demand that God apply it.

Nobody claimed mercy was God's sole attribute. My dissatisfaction has hardly anything to do with the subject. The problem here is the logical structure of omnipotence colliding with observable reality, which no inventory of additional divine attributes actually resolves. Holiness doesn't explain tumours in children. Justice, interestingly, makes the problem worse, because justice applied to a child who has committed nothing arguably demands intervention. As for my righteousness being irrelevant - that's correct, and also entirely beside the point. My argument stands or falls on its own merits, independent of my moral CV. Attacking my standing rather than my logic is the oldest deflection in the catalogue.

As above, what makes you think you are able to perfectly take the measure of what is proportionate or not?

The same thing that makes you able to measure proportionality when you declare the plan ultimately just and good: basic moral reasoning applied to observable evidence. You can't simultaneously claim proportionality is assessable when it favours your theology and completely inaccessible when it inconveniently doesn't.

In light of omnipotence, all suffering is preventable. Could God not have excluded death from His creation? Is death not, suffering, harm or pain? Why focus on an emotive user case. Why do you limit your demand to "suffering children"?


TV

If all suffering is preventable under omnipotence, the moral responsibility calculus becomes total, not partial, so congratulations on that own goal. The fact that I keep bringing up brain tumours in children is me giving you a concrete, causally clean case. I focus there precisely because it resists your "human actions" deflection most ruthlessly. Scope it however broadly you like, the problem scales with you.

TV01:
Perhaps your insistence of what mercy means, explains and guarantees is what requires re-visiting?

Whatever we call the attribute in question, an omnipotent being who observes preventable child suffering and observes it anyway still has an explanation problem.

And who clearly stated what the consequences for mis-use would be. And who has an unfolding plan to restore all things to plan.

What kind of restoration plan requires centuries of children dying as operational overhead? Also, announcing consequences in advance doesn't absolve the designer who made the consequences disproportionately heritable by innocents.

So if there is any pain, harm or suffering by conscious beings, God is at fault? So death itself falls into that category. Are you charging that to God as well?


TV

Don't go rolling off the cliff now. Let's take it from the top once again - I charged an omnipotent deity who permits preventable suffering with moral responsibility, which is categorically not the same as blaming God for every scraped knee. Piggybacking on that, death as a natural biological phenomenon is a separate conversation entirely from a child's brain tumour.

TV01:
Why would I deny suffering exists? Your understanding and expectations are yours. I dont see mercy as having to explain in the way you do, or suppoe that any suffering means an absenc eor failing of mercy.

So mercy means nothing, explains nothing, and guarantees nothing - correct?

Sin and corruption are with us. Literally our inheritance through our first father Adam. That God does not del with things in a manner not to your liking or understanding means nothing. You are literally setting your expectations (based on literally nothing) for Omnipotence that you have no regard for and at once shaking your fist when they are not met.

Note that inherited corruption still requires an architect who designed the inheritance mechanism, approved the terms, and chose not to revise them.

Why in your worldview is is suffering bad - how do your quantify it?


TV

I'll oblige your deflection for now. In my worldview, suffering is bad because conscious beings experience it as bad, report it as bad, are affected by it and are subsequently destroyed by it - which is rather the point of the word "suffering." I quantify it the way any non-lobotomised observer does: by its effects on actual persons.

Beans and spaghetti.

It sounds like a nightmare, but I promise you, this combo is deceptively elegant. 😎

Kukutente23:
I'm not talking of you
You've not asked any reasonable question
Christianity ha an already answered question
While the general philosophy of the supreme being is a question that continually seeks answers

If Christianity has already been solved, then why do forty thousand denominations exist, each furiously disagreeing with the others about those very same answers?