gabriel
New
It's a big issue and I feel stereotyped as a conservative believer, which I don't believe is representative of my open-mindedness on the subjects Skeptiko discusses. However as you've asked, anger at a God one doesn't believe in simply doesn't add up. Is it that there's an area of doubt and if God does exist we should be pissed off at him for allowing it to happen (a legitimate if uninformed response from a Christian perspective), or is to prove religious views of God are inadequate and there's nothing to see (a study of nothing about nothing as Dawkins' has said of theology), or should the person respond in the only permissible way for a materialist, and say these things happen and he was an unfortunate victim of nature and nurture and we should all move swiftly on?Well you need to realise that even ISIS believe in a God but with somewhat different laws as compared with mainstream Islam, and further removed from Christianity. My point is that a non-believer can perfectly rationally become angry with a God that he doesn't believe in, because that is just a shorthand for being angry with the set of ideas that a particular conception of God contains.
David
In addition because I believe the Catholic world view accommodates such things as a failure of morality, it should not imply that I'm supporting other Christian sects - I'm thinking particularly of fundamentalist groups who think it's legitimate to kill abortion workers - or Muslim beliefs because we notionally share the idea of a deity. I'm not answerable for every nut with a gun, and it seems unclear whether he was religiously motivated, sexually confused or plain barking mad. Generally speaking Catholics do not run into crowded night clubs shouting Christ is King and murdering innocent bystanders. Until they do I feel no reason to conflate the murderer's beliefs with my own. Saying "it's all the same" is the kind of bigotry that would not be allowed in any other arena.
(continued...) I don't accept that my views are the result of sloppy thinking or a lack of realism. Rupert Sheldrake is viewed among proponents as a fearless and intelligent voice on the subject of psi in biology, and happens to be a practising Christian, and Bernardo Kastrup has softened his stance on the value of faith as a response to the universe. If people find my views incredible I would point to some of the other acts of faith that pass unnoticed, such as the fact that we are the puppet of genes, or that we live in a Matrix style hologram, or we are but one manifestation of a myriad of universes the evidence for which is completely non-existent.
I was asked why casual sex was anything other than unmitigated pleasure, and I offered the view that before chemical intervention (the consequences of which are still unknown in the wider environment), indulgence in such activities stood a significant chance of pregnancy (along with other hazards). For a materialist who views the human condition as one of an organism responding to a stimulus, it's no big deal. Flooding the water system with hormones or aborting the resulting organisms of a sex act are the inevitable result of a lack of free will and entirely unremarkable. For anyone who is compelled by a universal mind, neuroplasticity, psi effects, the survival of consciousness, reproduction on a semi-casual basis may be a very big deal and offer them pause for thought.
I fail to see why pointing out the bleeding obvious should mark me down as a reactionary handing out lofty edicts to moral inferiors.
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