Sunday School
Sunday School January 13th 2019
This topic contains 37 replies, has 6 voices, and was last updated by Simon Paynton 2 years ago.
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January 13, 2019 at 12:39 pm #25096
Religious Privilege Day and Project Blitz.
Some news from the lark in the Park with the Ark.
A deluded Democrat wants bible classes back in high schools.
Faith Healing in Idaho.
Catholics in Manila really push the envelope when it comes to worshiping the Black Nazarene.
The abuse of nuns by the Catholic Church in India.
Love, not faith based bigotry will win the day.
Do you disagree with this argument?
This weeks’ Woo: All Detox products are a sham.
Climate Change: The world’s oceans are warming at a faster rate than previously estimated.
Is religious belief in decline?
What do secularists mean by Secularism?
Blasphemy Laws in Europe have being given new life.
Flat Earthers to take an over there and back again world cruise.
How an ancient cataclysm may have jump-started life on Earth.
There are just too many galaxies!
The Big Five mass extinctions.
Should we edit the genomes of human embryos?
Does middle-age make us better philosophers?
Do we have souls?
This week I am reading this book: American Overdose (on the opioid crisis).
We pause to remember: Nancy Grace Roman.
Some photographs taken last week.
While you are waiting for the kettle to boil…..
Coffee Break Video: A Ted Talk on quantum computing I uncertainly understood. The true nature of Light and Energy.
January 13, 2019 at 12:49 pm #25097Have a great week everyone!!
January 13, 2019 at 2:26 pm #25098“Love, not faith based bigotry will win the day.”
– trust the Dutch to be all free and easy about sexuality. This is one reason why we love ’em.
January 13, 2019 at 3:58 pm #25101Thanks For the Sunday School Reg!
How an ancient cataclysm may have jump-started life on Earth.: When I read articles that catalog the roughly 5 billion years that this rock has existed, and the massive upheavals that allowed life to form to eventually end with us it just makes me feel that much more insignificant in the whole scheme of things. You go RNA!!!!! Badass!!! LOL!
There are just too many galaxies!: Dark Matter! Obi Wan was right when he said to Luke: “an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us, penetrates us, and binds the galaxy together.” Well, scratch the living things part and insert Dark Matter…
January 13, 2019 at 4:26 pm #25102“Do you disagree with this argument?”
– this is interesting.
serious religious people do indeed think that absolute moral norms … must be grounded in something other than personal whim, social convention, or biological evolution. They must, in fact, find their justification in the deepest structures of reality, which is another way of saying in the very being of God.
This is really an assertion without justification. Bishop Barron makes the alternative sound flimsy, but there’s nothing flimsy about personal well being, prosocial behaviour and cultural matrices of values, and nothing flimsy about biological evolution.
According to the famous dictum of Will Herberg, morality severed from its religious source is like cut flowers placed in a vase. It will flourish for a short time, but without the enacted praise of God, it will fade quickly enough.
I believe he has some kind of point here. It’s difficult to maintain cooperative behaviour on a large scale, because it’s difficult to scale up interpersonal relations to a large scale. So, having a watchful God can be successful in this regard, even if some of His rules are quirky to say the least. But if we are lucky, there are strong state institutions to take His place.
Gottlieb goes on: “[Spinoza’s philosophy] rejects the idea of a personal God who created, cares about and occasionally even tinkers with the world.”
Philosophically, I think this is an unwarranted position in that it can’t be proved either way. In fact, the world does behave this way, as well as, it doesn’t.
We must come, finally, to some reality that exists simply through the power of its own nature. And we recognize that this unconditioned being is the source of the being of everything outside of itself; we acknowledge, in a word, that it is the creator of the universe.
We could just as easily say “the Big Bang”. But it is a truly interesting question, how did everything begin? Somehow I think a part of the answer to the puzzle is to recognise that time was created along with space, in the Big Bang. So it’s nonsensical to talk about “beginning” when time doesn’t exist in the way that we experience it.
is Spinoza at least correct in characterizing this uncaused cause as fundamentally impersonal? We must answer no, since that which is absolutely unconditioned remains incapable of being further actualized and hence is in possession of any and all perfections of being, very much including mind, will, and freedom. “It” must be, therefore, a “he,” a person.
This is very unwarranted wishful thinking, and actually, a bit childish in my opinion, to assume that whatever created the universe has all these qualities of a living being.
the supernatural is that which transcends the world of ordinary experience, of the visible and the measurable. Why should this be ruled peremptorily out of court? … And isn’t it just a crude prejudice to claim that reality is limited to what we human beings can take in with our senses and measure with our puny instruments?
This is a good point.
January 13, 2019 at 5:15 pm #25103….the supernatural is that which transcends the world of ordinary experience, of the visible and the measurable.
This is where I insist on being given an example of some experience so unique that it defies natural explanation. Can anyone assist with such an example?
Gottlieb goes on: “[Spinoza’s philosophy] rejects the idea of a personal God who created, cares about and occasionally even tinkers with the world.”
Why do you think it is an unwarranted position to hold? It is not about whether or not it can be proven but whether or not it is believed. Spinoza was not a theist so he had to hold that position, as all deists (and atheists) do.
January 13, 2019 at 5:22 pm #25104Hi Noel, yes we humans only arrived on the scene in the last second and so many of them claim it was all created by a god who put them at the center of it all. Religious humility is a strange beast.
January 13, 2019 at 7:30 pm #25105Thanks, Reg!
January 13, 2019 at 8:31 pm #25106This is where I insist on being given an example of some experience so unique that it defies natural explanation. Can anyone assist with such an example?
I was actually just thinking of mathematics.
January 14, 2019 at 12:03 am #25107Would Godel approve or would he now just think a MacBook was God?
Supernatural = that which exists outside of the natural world. Everything we see, the Earth, its contents and the entire Universe we exist in are all natural.
∴ the supernatural does not exist, only the unexplained. Even if it did we have no method of detecting it.
January 14, 2019 at 8:02 am #25108Fourth link to “Idaho” has been corrected.
January 14, 2019 at 10:43 am #25109“Would Godel approve or would he now just think a MacBook was God?”
– this has to be simplistic: there must be more to the argument than this, but it seems to be, if we can conceive of something then it must exist. Well, unicorns.
January 14, 2019 at 10:45 am #25110“[Spinoza’s philosophy] rejects the idea of a personal God who created, cares about and occasionally even tinkers with the world.”
Why do you think it is an unwarranted position to hold? It is not about whether or not it can be proven but whether or not it is believed.
Yes, but Spinoza’s grounds for believing that would have been just wishful thinking, since it can’t be proved either way.
January 14, 2019 at 11:45 am #25111How can not believing in an interventionist god be wishful thinking? None of us here do? It is the position we atheists hold.
January 14, 2019 at 11:48 am #25112Then offer me something supernatural that exists.
if we can conceive of something then it must exist
Existence is not a predicate. (Kant).
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