Simon Paynton

Adam Rutherford is awesome, he’s a science-media figure in the UK.

religion and God get invented for a few cultural reasons

If you think about it, each of us is being monitored by everyone else in the group, and we monitor ourselves on behalf of the group, in order to see that we are behaving properly.  It’s not a stretch to invent an…[Read more]

@strega – all I’m saying is that for Christians, it adds up to say that.

@davis – those mechanisms – enforced God-believing, and threatening people with eternal torture, originated in the need to enforce long term cooperation, hopefully leading to thriving, although as we know, this often hasn’t worked out.

I haven’t ever read the Bible cover to cover.

I don’t believe in God.  However, if “God’s way” is long term cooperative thriving, then Jesus was a personification of that, so it’s not a stretch for Christians to say that Jesus was the son of God.

Do you believe Jesus is the son of god? Do you think Jesus wrote any of the NT? Do you think the people who did write it knew him? Have you sources other than the Bible to verify its authenticity?

In a way, these things are irrelevant, because the fact is that Jesus’ teachings and stories about him hold water philosophically, and so, whoever was…[Read more]

I make such a claim with reference to the New Testament.

The Church has a history of torturing people; Jesus did not.

On whose authority do you make such a claim Simon?

According to the New Testament, all Jesus did was preach and teach, he didn’t try and force anyone to convert.

Yes, I assume that is true.  But Jesus is remembered for those things, because he acted them out in his real life.

Davis wrote:

Christianity did nothing new…

Jesus’ advocating of forgiveness and self-sacrifice was an innovation.

Then why did the moral and loving Christian followers of Jesus put their neighbor Diderot in jail for being an atheist?

Because Jesus, and the Church, are two different things.  I’m pretty sure Jesus would have said, “well, it’s your loss” and left it at that.

Davis wrote:

You see a happy fuzzy new age Christianity and miss the history of horror…

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It’s good to break the Church’s monopoly on ethics and to rehabilitate human pleasure.  I agree with natural morality, or moral sense theory, in the form of ethical intuitism or “moral foundations theory” which states that there are six innate moral foundations that determine our sense of right and wrong.  In other words, right and wrong (in R…[Read more]

I want to avoid straw man arguments, and also, Jesus’ philosophy overlaps with the one I have come up with.

I’m just trying to get inside the other person’s point of view.

I’m just putting the other point of view.

There wasn’t any hell until Jesus turned up.

If that’s true, then it accords with the lack of “partner control” in his moral philosophy: Christians were encouraged to be toothless, and to let God take care of any offenses.

Where did Jesus get his teacher training from?

Wouldn’t it be obvious?  From his daddy.

But why would it make sense for an omnipotent God to send a messenger down to planet Earth? Would it not make more sense to communicate directly?

Presumably, a teacher like Jesus is for teaching, and a direct communication would be for the purpose of proving God exists, which is probably unnecessary, since people either believe or they don’t, and…[Read more]

How do they verify that Jesus is the right pathway.

He advocated a number of different behaviours that promote long-term cooperative thriving, for example:

• forgiveness, instead of tit-for-tat eye-for-an-eye retribution
• his sermon about “love God, and love your neighbour as yourself”
• befriending the poor and outcast
• his apparently giving…

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Noel wrote:

But being an atheist I chose my higher power to be society as a whole. It worked for me.

That’s interesting.  How does that work?