Gabriella,
First, I don’t know why you just ignored my correcting your misrepresentation of what I actually said? We seem to be in Vlad territory here – he too just makes up something I haven’t said but attributes it to me anyway, I correct him on it, he replies by talking about something else as if the misrepresentation hadn’t happened. Maybe it’s something religious people have in common?
BHS,
Sorry for the delayed reply - I have been abroad and busy with some work.
First, I did not misrepresent you. In #747 you said "If I was an all-knowing and beneficent god, why would I frame my rules with such remarkable vagueness that they’d need millennia of interpretation and re-interpretation to fathom out, and even then with no means of knowing whether we'd ever got there?". I had already explained #638 and #720 that the Quran was not a set of legal statutes but a message in verse form containing moral principles that people would have to interpret based on the individual circumstances the moral principles might be applicable to. I have also explained that legal systems incorporating more detailed rules were derived from those moral principles by people based on their interpretations over time.
You asserted in #747 that there is some means of framing moral rules that would not need millennia of interpretation and that there is some means for a person to know that their interpretation of morals in verse form from the 7th century was the right interpretation, and presumably that is your logic for thinking a god that chose not to frame rules in this way and chose not to reveal the means of interpretation is flawed.
Yet you still haven't come up with a way of framing rules, for example framing a moral rule about fighting against oppression, that covers a variety of situations over millennia that isn't open to interpretation; and neither have you come up with any means to know that we'd got the interpretation right. Your assertions about interpretations and means to know they are right might be your sincerely held beliefs that you really, really, really want to be true, but they are worthless as convincing arguments.
Regarding your point about requiring less interpretation - I already answered that in #790. That's the post where you responded by trolling me - you know, where you had asked me in previous posts to answer every point you made, and when i did in #790 you responded by saying the exchange was becoming too unwieldy, asked me to pick my top 3 points and evaded answering the points you had asked me to respond to. I see you're trying your trolling tactic again as some kind of attempt to distract from your lack of a coherent argument. If you want the less interpretation point addressed go back and read #790 - I am not feeding the troll by re-writing it.
I won't imitate your prejudice about theists (badly disguised as a question) by making generalisations about all atheists being obnoxious trolls - I will just observe that your posts on this thread seem to be trolling. Neither am I so juvenile as to address you as Troll Boy on all future posts.
Second, of course that doesn’t work – think about it: you just posited a god who judges people (post mortem apparently) according to whether or not their interpretive skills pre mortem were infallible. Does that seem like the behaviour of a just god to you, or of a tyrant?
No, I posited a god who judges fallible people on their fallible interpretations and arrives at a just judgement, taking into account all the information, limitations, intentions, nature, nurture etc
No doubt, but the comparison was about the different ways society treats the two rather than about which you’d rather self-identify as belonging to.
That's up to society. If enough people in society feel there is something more to religious identity than to certain other identities (such as a tap dancing identity), because religious identities have more meaning and weight to individuals and groups than other identities - then society will treat the two differently. Bit like ethnicity, nationality and gender identities being treated differently from a tap dancing identity.
First, you didn’t explain it at all; you just attempted an answer to a different question.
Second, you’re using “faith” here only in the sense of “I have faith my car will start in the morning”. You do a sort of cost/benefit exercise (referred to in moral philosophy as “consequentialism”), and proceed accordingly. That though has nothing to do with faith in the religiously epistemic sense that concerns making claims of fact (“God”, “judgment”, what this god thinks about adultery, homosexuality etc) on the basis of supposedly revealed holy texts. You’re dancing between the meanings as if they're the same, but they’re not.
I am not dancing between any meanings. I don't claim to know as a fact how god feels about moral decisions made by fallible people in any particular, individual, unique set of circumstances - let alone make claims of fact on the basis of what I have interpreted from holy texts.
I already pointed out that religious people have various lines of reasoning behind their moral decisions, including cost-benefit analyses - it is simplistic and a misrepresentation on your part to claim they act purely based on faith, apart from possibly people who claim they heard a god's voice or the devil's voice inside their head ordering them to do something, which is not the majority of theists. Why would you expect me to follow right behind you in what I consider to be erroneous thinking on your part about how religious people arrive at moral decisions?
Third, the issue isn’t about “affecting other people in potentially harmful ways” at all. Rather it’s about privileging faith over guessing in the public square, and the damaging effect of legitimising it thereby for all concerned, faithful and faithless alike. Faith corrodes reason as rust corrodes metal – that not every metal thing is destroyed by it isn’t the point and moreover (to quote Neil Young) rust never sleeps.
Maybe society has done a cost-benefit analysis and decided that currently the corrosion is a benefit to society - since society is made up of individuals it is up to individuals to decide that there is a problem that requires action to remedy it. The privilege that faith receives has changed over time so it will balance out at the level that the majority in society currently want it to be, based on their cost-benefit analysis.
Maybe society has a different assessment to you about how faith affects society's ability to function effectively and society has determined which spheres it would like to prioritise reason and exclude faith, and in which spheres faith should be included. Faith is privileged in certain spheres because identity and moral reasoning based on identity is privileged. For whatever reason society has decided that whenever people make guesses about their identity - whether it is sexual identity, gender identity, religious identity - if they self-identify as one of these characteristics, these characteristic are recognised as important to people on some fundamental level, and society has decided that protecting that sense of identity, within certain limits and within certain spheres is a moral good and in the best interests of society.
Think about what you just did there. You reified the “god” bit and attached the unknowing to what this god is. “Faith” though is what gets you to “God” in the first place. What “He” is, thinks, wants etc are secondary matters for the same reason that whether leprechauns prefer Celtic folk or lounge jazz are secondary matters.
No I didn't. What I did just there was explain the belief in God and agree with your pixie dust comment that I was responding to where you said "The other type though is essentially the pixie dust you need to bridge the gap from thinking something is true (or wanting it to be true) to it being true with no connecting logic or evidence to support you. This is the “God is” type".
And the larger point remains in any case – what then do people do with “faith” once they convince themselves that it’s more reliable than just guessing...about anything?
Faith gives the people who hold it a particular sense of meaning related to their faith. Other than that there is no generalisation about what people do with faith. Some do law-abiding things and some don't. Some law-abiding actions are subsequently deemed by society to be wrong. Some non-law-abiding actions are deemed by society to have been a good thing on reflection, because they righted a wrong that society decided after the fact needed righting. Some non-law-abiding things continue to be condemned as wrong by society.
Do you not think you’d have to be pretty confident of you ground if, say, you wanted to use your faith belief to blow up a busload of schoolchildren in pursuit of your dream of a caliphate? (Just think of the rewards your cleric assured you you’d have in the afterlife for doing it too!) I do.
I already commented on your erroneous, simplistic thinking. You have not demonstrated that some religious people commit terrorist actions solely based on rewards in the after-life or even demonstrated the amount of influence their faith has on their decision. I have provided ample evidence that there is usually a more complex moral reasoning related to geo-political events, which, by the way, is why some non-religious people kill innocent civilians for geo-political gains, and why the vast majority of religious people don't kill innocent civilians. If I was going to argue people out of killing other people, I would use "it's illegal" argument and "the end does not justify the means" argument, the "it's immoral" argument, the "you will be in a worse position and cause all kinds of potential problems for everyone" argument - pretty similar to the arguments against invading Iraq in 2003.
That you personally don’t use your conviction about the value of faith to kill innocents isn’t the point – it’s the fact that you and the bomber equally think the same rationale is valid for your different actions I question.
You keep asserting this simplistic
the same rationale argument without providing any evidence to support your argument, other than your own assumptions and guesses. See above. Oh and also read my response #790, which you evaded replying to, where I responded to this same point when you tried it before.
Do you seriously think it’s not a lot easier if you think that what comes next is paradise rather than oblivion?
Seriously though?
Last time I checked, your guesses followed by "seriously though" is not considered an argument worth engaging with.
Establishing a Caliphate (or dying tying) seems fairly obviously to have religious faith at its root to me, and of course there are other, non-religious causes of violent and suicidal behaviour. A tu quoque (or maybe a "lui quoque"?) tells you nothing though about the rights and wrongs of the dogmatic use of faith in a religious context.
I think we already agreed some time ago that dogmatism was a bad thing in any context.
What I call it is neither here nor there. Rather I argue that societies that don’t privilege it above guessing and treat its adherents instead as a private members’ club as we do the Flat Earth Society will be less problematic than those that do.
Well, what can I say, our society seems to think it is beneficial to protect certain characteristics that go to someone's identity. But society has also given you a mechanism to argue your proposal and convince others to adopt it.
Which is no doubt all fine and dandy for you. You are though unhorsed if you want to argue against someone who treats his guessing similarly – practising rituals, handing it on to his children, framing his perspective of his purpose in relation to the rest of the world etc – and uses that rationale to blow up an aeroplane.
That’s the problem. However benign and inoffensive the behaviours your faith leads you to, you exit the discussion when someone else uses the identical rationale of faith for horrific outcomes.
No I'm not unhorsed because your assertion that it is the same rationale is nonsense. You claim that people use the same rationale to break the law and hurt people as they do to pass benign law-abiding traditions to their children, yet provide no evidence for your assertion. See #790 for my previous response on this.
The rituals I pass to my children are ones that I have tested and appear to have benefits, so the rationale is not even solely on faith.
Your argument needs to be based on evidence. You conspicuously failed to provide any evidence to support your equally nonsensical entrapment guesses on the Searching For God thread. If you want your argument taken seriously feel free to provide evidence, not your guesses followed by "seriously though", that faith is the rationale for a religious person blowing up an aeroplane, and they are not like every other person that I have provided ample evidence for whereby geo-political factors form a large part of the rationale for blowing up aeroplanes for religious and non-religious people.
