Religion: pros & cons pt1 (Religion)

by dhw, Friday, October 31, 2014, 19:14 (3676 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained

dhw: I have no problem with free will. But your God in his infinite wisdom would have known the choice Adam and Eve would make, so why the outrage? And punishing the whole human race for a crime committed by the first humans is not my idea of justice. 
TONY: That is illogical. First, it wasn't a human that defected first. Second, the two humans had been around for quite some time without making a mistake. Third, he might not have known it would be the very first generation that messed up. Had it been a member of a subsequent generation, he most likely could have punished one without punishing all. Lastly, allowing us to punish ourselves is not the same as punishing us directly.-First, Satan seems to have got away pretty lightly. Maybe God likes having him around. First, second, third and fourth, how does that make it fair to punish you and me for the first humans' “mistake”? Or are you saying God is punishing us for Satan/ Beelzebub/ Lucifer's ”mistake”?
 
DHW: No, I doubt your interpretation of sin and death. If I believed in God, I'd believe he created matter to be in a constant state of change. Permanence would be boring! Life, change and death are part of the endlessly shifting pattern. 
TONY: No one said anything about a lack of change, only a lack of death.-I see death as a change: one lot goes, another lot comes. If Eben Alexander and the host of other NDE-ers are right, though, it could mark a change from physical to spiritual. I don't hold out high hopes, though I'd consider it more likely than 10 billion skeletons rising from their graves and putting their flesh back on.
 
DHW: [...] I'm questioning the emphasis on badness and the need for redemption... If God does exist, I'm sure we'll all genuinely repent our ignorance. Otherwise my own mistakes or thoughtless, selfish actions remain on my conscience, and that's my punishment. Did Christ have to die in order for God to forgive me? 
TONY: Just like any crime, there must be an equivalent punishment, a repayment...Who can say they are perfect? That is why Christ HAD to die.-What crime? How many people do you know who have committed crimes you think they should die for? Is ‘not being perfect' a crime? According to you the vast majority of the imperfect human race will be dead forever anyway, so why did Christ HAVE to die? Certainly not for them. And wouldn't the best of the bunch, who will live forever, have obeyed God's commandments anyway? Job didn't need Christ to die for him, but it would be pretty sick if he didn't make it among the 10 billion.-DHW: Eben Alexander was brain dead, and found himself in a world of incredible beauty, with a woman he later discovered was the sister he'd never met. Why should I discount his version of death and accept John's? 
TONY: Because Alexander was not dead. He was not conscious, and he had no brain activity, but that is much much different than being dead. -I don't suppose John was dead either when he had his weird vision. How does that make his version true and Alexander's a delusion?-DHW: I doubt if most people's suffering has anything to do with their so-called sinfulness. In fact religion seems to have a greater hold among the suffering poor than among the rich and comfortable. But you're right, the negatives cast doubt on the rosy image.
TONY: Surely it does, their own sinfulness and the sinfulness of others. -I don't think every victim (including new born babies) of disease, drought, earthquakes, floods and other natural disasters, or of human selfishness, crime, oppression, incompetence etc. is being made to suffer for his/her own sinfulness, so once again you seem to be defending indiscriminate punishment for the sins of others.
 
Dhw: It's difficult to say thank you to something that might not even be there, let alone listening. Similarly, I can't condemn something that might not be there.

TONY: But even you have a hard time denying his existence. You see it and you can't turn away from it any more than I can. If you could you would be an atheist and not agnostic. You see as well as I do that the other explanations make no sense. The difference, I think, is that I embrace it, and you look for a way around it. Perhaps because some of the bitterness that you've seen or been through.-No, I can't see it. Neither“chance” nor “God” makes sense to me - they both depend on faith (though atheists rarely acknowledge that). Yours is in some vast, invisible, self-aware being of unknown and unknowable origin who can make universes and bacteria, and whose nature you try to mould through your subjective interpretation of words written centuries ago by people you know virtually nothing about. Atheists have faith in the ability of chance to assemble the almost unfathomably complex ingredients of life and evolution. Without such irrational faith, none of you have a leg to stand on, but both sides think we agnostics have some psychological hang-up that makes us avoid the obvious truth!