The Christians Thread

[Lasercakes]

I'd like to ask a question too that I've never really got a satisfactory answer to. Supposing that there is no God, no heaven, hell or afterlife at all. When we die, we cease to exist. What incentive is there for a person who believes that to live a moral life? Because you're making the world better for future generations? Why bother? You'll be dead, what do you care? Because you're making other people more comfortable in their lives? Why do you care, they're not you, so except for the people in your own social circle, there's no reason to help others. Because it's the right thing to do? Who determines what's right? Isn't what's right just whatever you need to do to make your own self as comfortable as you can for the present moment? I have trouble understanding the motivations of atheists to be moral. As for my own self, I would do whatever I could get away with if I thought there were no consequences for my actions, and I sure wouldn't expend any effort to help anyone other than my own friends and family, and even then only when it would somehow benefit me, directly or indirectly.

Sorry. I meant to answer your question, but never got back to it. The less personal and short version of why atheists can act morally is because we still feel certain biological emotions, empathy, shame, guilt, etc. We still act in ways to make our self feel good, just in respect to other people. You can argue that this is still psychological egoism (it's impossible to act in a way that's not self-interested), but a self-interested action is different from a selfish action since a selfish action is at the expense of others.

That's my answer, but I feel most religious people don't buy this, but remember that this point can also be flipped around on religion, "You are only acting good out of selfishness to get into heaven." Anyway, I think no matter what you are, you can agree there is more to human morality than just hedonism (Unless of course you're a hedonist of course lol).

 

[Wandrian]

What was it that the Catholic leadership kept secret by keeping non-Latin translations strictly forbidden for something in the nature of a thousand years? Was that the apocrypha or what was it? I can't recall, but I'm wanting to say it was something really important to believers of the faith. That, and I don't care enough to search through far too much info on the subject to figure it out myself(the amount of histories and analyses of the bible out there makes the document itself look like a comic strip by comparison, in terms of volume of content).

 

[UnseenWombat]

What was it that the Catholic leadership kept secret by keeping non-Latin translations strictly forbidden for something in the nature of a thousand years? Was that the apocrypha or what was it? I can't recall, but I'm wanting to say it was something really important to believers of the faith. That, and I don't care enough to search through far too much info on the subject to figure it out myself(the amount of histories and analyses of the bible out there makes the document itself look like a comic strip by comparison, in terms of volume of content).

No problem, that's what this thread is for.

First of all, you have to understand that it wasn't a cover-up that originally kept the Bible out of the hands of common people. Books in those days were painstakingly copied by hand and were thus very rare, so to pass the town church's single Bible around to the farmers and blacksmiths would have been very irresponsible on the part of the priests.

Secondly, people in the early days were illiterate anyway, so there was really no reason to translate the Bible into the common languages, and knowledge of Latin was much more common than it is today also.

Now, I'm not saying you're entirely mistaken, there was a cover-up in later years (though I don't think it lasted a 1000 years), as 13 years in Lutheran school made sure I understood very well lol. If I remember correctly, since I'm old and have been out of school for ages, the spark that lit the Reformation was that the church was selling indulgences to people for the forgiveness of sins. Martin Luther knew that the Bible says forgiveness is through grace alone and told people about it and translated the Bible into German so they could read it for themselves instead of being spoon fed the false doctrines that the corrupt leaders were giving them. There was also the doctrine of purgatory which also earned the church money by having people pay money to shorten the time their departed loved ones had to stay there. That's not mentioned in the Bible either, and the common translation let people see that for themselves, as there were now many more literate people than there were in the early days of the church.

To be honest though, I can't remember, and can't find any information saying that the Catholic church specifically forbade translating the Bible into other languages. I think I might have heard that during my Lutheran education, but I'm not positive.

 

[Wandrian]

The entire scriptute? I thought it was something big, but not that big. Hmm...hazy memories are hazy.

 

[Synalon]

For anyone who's interested, a more thorough explanation of why the paradox of the stone doesn't work:

Spoiler

The problem with it is that it's assuming logic is a set of laws that govern things in the world. What it really is is a language for accurately describing reality. We conceive of a statement to make, and the rules of logic tell us what conditions have to be present in the universe for that statement to be true. So, the statement "God lifts a rock" is only true if God does indeed lift a rock (this sounds pretty tautological, but that's because when we write we need to use statements to describe events. It makes more sense if you think of it like this: the statement "God lifts a rock" is true if [video of God lifting a rock]). Omnipotence means that God can do anything; he can engage in any activity or perform any action. But not every statement actually describes an action to perform.

For instance, God cannot gorbalise a meltion. He can perform any action, but no action that can be performed will make the statement "God gorbalises a meltion" true, because 'gorbalise' and 'meltion' are nonsense words with no definition. This is not a law of the world, or a restriction on God - it is a fact of language.

So. God cannot make a rock so heavy he can't lift it. He can still do anything, but in the same way, no action that can be performed will make the statement "God makes a rock so heavy he can't lift it" true, even though these words have definitions and actually mean something. This is because, by virtue of his omnipotence, any rock, or any possible rock, is a rock that God can lift. Therefore, the words "a rock so heavy God can't lift it" do not point to any rock in the domain of all possible rocks. It's like asking God to find an even prime number greater than 2; the restrictions you have placed on the set of possible actions render it empty.

Even if you don't accept this argument, it is reasonable for a theist to respond that God isn't 'omnipotent' by the loaded definition of the word you've come up with. The fact that God cannot create a rock so heavy he can't lift it does not disprove the idea that an all-powerful being exists and created the universe.