I dunno; this “all religious organizations on the planet” part causes a bit of a suspension-of-disbelief failure. All Abrahamic religious organizations, maybe … although I’m not sure about the non-secular Jewish stance on angels and demons. Secular Jews believe none of that stuff, of course.
And the greater amount of fun. I can’t think of any religion whose adherents have less fun than the Jews. It was probably better before the push towards monotheism.
Wild, Jewish youth want to party like it’s 799 … BCE.
Yeah, but why would those religions join the lawsuit? The lawyer said that all religions put aside their differences and joined together to sue. Why would those religions that I mentioned give a damn?
They didn’t. He’s just claiming he is because he could argue that anyone who goes against him is against religion. Even moreso if it’s by an actual religion, claiming that they are just using religion’s symbols. In this messed up world he would probably win every single time.
Heh heh heh. True enough. It’s the same as what we get out of the fundamentalist Christians who are trying to take over the US government.
When they want to throw out large numbers, as some sort of ad populum argument, they count 2.2 billion Christians worldwide, making them the largest religion. At any other time, anyone who isn’t a young-Earth creationist isn’t a real Christian.
Catholics … right out. Whoops, there go 1.2 million people from your total.
Nontrinitarian Christians? They aren’t real Christians if they don’t accept the Trinity. There go another 45 or 50 million.
By the time they get done removing all of the denominations who aren’t “real” Christians, they drop down to a distant fourth, behind Hinduism. All religious groups inflate their numbers. I was claimed by the Catholic church, despite never making my Confirmation, until I signed apostasy papers. Any other person who just wanders off and never goes to church again continues to be counted as a part of their old denomination.
If they can do it, there’s no reason this guy can’t. After all, he’s a lawyer. Cooking the facts is part of his trade.
By the way, which messed up world did you mean? The one in this web comic, or the real world? I can see your statement applying to either. ^.^
Then I’m not sure what point you were trying to make. The lawsuit is about religious iconography, not the supposedly divine beings that those icons represent.
This isn’t a religious apologetics issue; it’s a copyright/trademark issue, although the comic writers seem a bit fuzzy on the subject. We’re advancing the copyright/trademark issue within the fictional world of the webcomic, in which these beings probably exist in some form or other.
Oddly enough I think the comment about who is representing them is right.
Even the Buddhists have a militant branch that’s been in the news. All religions have some element of conflict. All branches of Christianity have conflict with each other. There are various sects of Muslim. Making public acknowledgement makes more strife among the religions as they argue over which of them is more right.
Sure, every religion is capable of having a radical, extremist branch. I’ve never said anything on that subject.
The point is that GG isn’t using the iconography of any religion other than Christianity. If the representatives of any of those other religions bring a lawsuit of some kind, it will get thrown out for lack of standing. Any of those groups joining a class-action lawsuit would imperil the entire lawsuit by tainting it, with the majority of the plaintiffs having no case against the defendant.
I am sure his confessor and the priest who made her are aquatinted through the local diocese. She has no reason to hide anything, seeing as she has never hidden her identity. Finding that priest and hearing his side shouldn’t be difficult, unless he has died, which is very possible. Exorcism is the most stressful of all Rites, and each one can take years off the mortal coil.
The assorted faiths are his legal representatives on Earth, and they as such have a lawyer representing them. Though I’m still confused as to why they’re now suing her, even with willful suspension of belief. Perhaps it’ll make sense in a few weeks.
Ah ha! But God is everywhere. In every child’s smile, in every sunset, in every loving embrace. So by definition he is present in the court room… Or are you saying every christian rock song is wrong? I can understand doubting religion but doubting the string base beat of Third Day? No sir, that will not stand.
Yeah, I was raised Catholic, even though I never believed any of the stuff, from as young an age as I can remember … probably 5 or 6 or so. I LOVE religiously themed movies and other media, though, both then and now. Constantine is one of my favorite movies of the past decade or so. The Last Temptation of Christ was fantastic. The Passion of the Christ … not so much …
The first two are great, though, because they’re exercises in the contemplation of religious themes and ideas. Most Christian music isn’t so interesting. It’s mindless-happy-making stuff, for the easily manipulated.
There are plenty of more interesting songs, such as Flood, by Jars of Clay; Meant to Live, by Switchfoot; and Bother, by Stone Sour, which got a good deal of play on mainstream radio stations, because they’re … you know, good music. I’ve yet to encounter any praise-rock songs that did anything for me except drive me from the room or cause an almost epileptic twitch towards the power button on the radio.
I would make a good scholarly monk, if I was at all religious, contemplating matters to pass on to the flock. I would make a very poor sheep in the pews.
As the symbols predate the modification of the Berne Convention that allows for automatic copyright, unless there is an actual copyright filing there is no possibility of damages.
I was thinking the same sort of thing. I don’t think this is how copyrights work. For that matter, copyright is limited to a certain period of time, no matter the longevity of the copyright holder.
Actually, I believe it is currently 70 years after the death of the copyright holder, although as Chris pointed out, religious iconography predates the current statute by a few millennia.
It used to be only 40 years, but The Disney company had it extended so they wouldn’t lose control of Micky and others that Walt owned. It is the hight of hypocrisy seeing how most of their works are their own public domain interpretations.
When did Friedrich Nietzsche declare that “Gott ist tot”? somewhere between1893-1899. So copyright would have expired no later than 1969…
And anyway, shouldn’t they be arguing trademark rather than copyright?
GG is, after all using the iconography of religion, which would be more infringement of trademark than an infringing derivative work…
Also, considering how crap she is as a superhero, they should be able to argue for parody as a defense…
Anyone else getting the impression that goading the other side into a “prove that God is dead!” is not just just his FIRST trick to resot to, it’s the only thing he has like some sort of religious Chewbacca Defense?
How they can proceed if Good Girl’s lawyers actually are competent:
If God filed the copyright, is it on record?
She was given her abilities by a priest, hence a direct permission from religion to use their symbolism.
If there is a copyright, it can only be put into effect if she has received income off her angelic form. At least that’s how I understand the copyright law to work. Let me look it up… Found a simple website called CopyrightKids.
Ideas, principles, titles, and names are not protected under copyright, but might be under Trademark. Copyright Courts are supposed to see if 1) the infringed work is close to the original copyright (how many angels look like her angelic form) and 2) if she had access to the copyrighted material (quickly google’d ‘catholic angels’, she looks more like Greek demigods than angels and likely didn’t have access to them).
Then there’s the Fair Use. Good Girl wasn’t using it for commercial purposes, the nature of the work was very factual and almost nothing of creativity, again her angelic form doesn’t match most angelic depictions, and no money was being made by her NOR was Religion losing potential revenue due to her angelic form (having a real angel around may actually be doing the opposite!).
Before 1978, Copyright only lasted 28 years, starting with the date the work was registered, and needed renewal during the 28th year continuously. So, if God made a copyright, it should be well documented. If not, then any work before 1923 is a guaranteed safe zone for free use.
So, for all intents and purposes of the law, Good Girl is presiding well within Fair Use, and even if not she isn’t condemned under copyright.
Narf, I agree. But the opening statement for the pro-copyright infringement is that God (not the Christian Bible) made a copyright on angelic beings, and I was commenting on how copyright actually works against the Religions (not just Christians).
Yup, I was just adding to that. I think Yahweh forgot to file, so the fact that GG wasn’t violating copyright, if there was one, is just an additional factor. I don’t think that any non-Abrahamic religions use anything approaching the Christian imagery for angels.
For the copyright law to come into it, the property would have had to have been copyrighted in the last century or so. Patent/copyright trolls, in other words.
Various Greek deities and demigods are winged humans. Nike, Eros, Thanatos, Zetes, Calais, Iris… With garb like that, it reminded me of Greeco-Roman garb, and hence only Christian in her use of the cross on her chest (which isn’t trademarked, and is only copyright infringement if they can find another identical cross that was).
So, what you’re saying is that the Greek pantheon should sue Christianity, while we’re throwing around lawsuits like crazy? Christianity and its Jewish precursor are pretty late to the scene. I think that the monotheistic version of Judaism has only been around since 700 or 800 BC.
I was listing various ways the prosecution’s case can be dismantled. One of them was that GG’s use of wings was in line with the Greek Demigods.
Unless that lawyer represents Greco-Roman believers as well, AND he can prove she copied an image/artwork that has been copyrighted, he holds no case for copyrighted image infringement.
Are there enough believers in the Greco-Roman pantheon for anyone to give a damn what they think on the subject? I only know of a few wacky pagans who do so.
I’m still all for suing Christianity as a whole, though. No reason that just the Catholics should have all of the fun. Although, the Catholics haven’t exactly been getting sued for copyright infringement …
Psalms is the main source for inferring “wings” on Angels, but is meant more to represent an ability of great speed then actual physical flight. If the Orthodox Jewish idea of Angels is translated into superhero terms, Angels might be more like a cross between Quick Silver, and Shadow Kat, able to run super fast anywhere, through anything, but not really fly, save through hidden portals to The Silver City they alone can find. Maybe the Phantom Stranger’s problem is that he has a limp, and has to walk instead of run.
I really liked a lot of things they state in the City of Angels movie. They can move at the speed of thought, can’t be hurt, but also can’t feel a thing and being a falling angel is not such a bad thing.
I enjoy talks like these. By critiquing each other, we both learn something new, and have to double-check our sources to make sure we both know what we’re talking about. You taught me; I hope I taught you.
A lot of the specifics about the exact numbers are new to me. I’m fairly well versed in the fair-use clause.
Tossing semantics back and forth is a good way to sort out exactly what we actually mean, though, yes. Precision of language is very important, most of the time.
Yeah, this thing would have to wait until a bit higher up in the appeals process, when they can get it before a rational judge. Of course they’ll sort it out in some other manner, since multiple rounds of appeals don’t make for a good super hero comic.
Wouldn’t it be a trademark violation rather than a copyright infringement. On the other hand, considering god created the angels, wouldn’t She hold the patent providing the necessary documentation was filed with the US patent office considering the case is being tried in a US court. All Good Girl would need to do would be to pay a fine, negotiate damages relative to the patent infringement, and also negotiate a license. Considering god is omnipotent losses would be inconsequential and be determined by harm, if any, done to the brand. It could be argued that Good Girl is augmenting Her brand’s image thereby dismissing the suit.
Oh, the quote wasn’t properly shown in my email. About that line, I was saying that Religion gave her those powers, and hence making them hypocritical in their suing her for properly using what they gave her.
A priest (legal acting leader of religion) performed an exorcism on her, resulting in those powers. If that isn’t divine transference of religious/superhero power, I don’t know what is.
Her initial powers were a result of the priest, yeah. I’m not sure he can be directly credited with her recent level-up, which I believe is what inspired this lawsuit.
True… That’s one potential counter-argument dismantled… But I think the most compelling case we have is the pre-1978 copyright renewal law. Can you think of any rebuttals Pinky can come up with?
P.S. I wonder if Mr. Dork and Mr. Sausage have been following this commentary… If you are, thoughts on our legal disputes?
I always thought technicalities are what superheroes thrive on. Batman defeating a rainbow bear by wearing a rainbow Batman costume, Superman getting a guy to say his name backwards… as well as basically defeating any villain by use of a flaw in their powers or master plan.
But have you played (or watched those two episodes of) Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney? Technicalities with dramatic flair can become superpowered.
That’s only a few select heroes and villains that fit that method of story progression, though. I can’t see any of the characters in this comic fitting that style of story.
Can’t reply directly to your comment on Phoenix Wright. I found it on watchcartoononline, called Gyakuten Saiban: Sono “Shinjitsu”, Igi Ari! If a character makes a profound declaration about the case, it can become an aerial wave powerful enough to knock Phoenix Wright down.
Yes, but filing with the Copyright Office is a very good idea, unless the work is placed somewhere publicly visible, with a clear time-stamp. If you write something and leave it sitting in a folder in your office for several years, when someone steals it and publishes it, you’re going to have a hell of a time proving that you’re the rights holder, in court.
I usually settle for uploading the files to my webspace and leaving them there. The upload logs will suffice as evidence, in a court case.
GG should say that if Religion doesn’t want her to appear angelic, they can have the halo back – and stick it on the other lawyer’s head. Let’s see how he acts then.
Are you saying that all religious people are wrong in their beliefs? Oh, yes I am, at least for the Abrahamanic ones: isn’t the Genesis proven wrong already? It is! Hence I denounce those preachers as scammers. It happened in Italy in fact…
Depends upon the version of Christianity. Most modern, liberal theists have pushed their god-concept off into a corner, making it unfalsifiable.
You have to evaluate each claim independently. The fundamentalist Christians will pull the sort of thing that you just did. Either the Bible is 100% true, or it’s 100% false. Then, in their arguments, the slightest confirmation of anything in the Bible provides evidence for everything in their religion being true, such as the real existence of a lot of the places mentioned in the Old Testament somehow proving that the events described in the Bible actually happened in those places. That’s not a rational position for them to take, and similarly, what you’ve said about Genesis doesn’t support your absolute position.
Anyone who claims that the events in Genesis through Joshua were real events is flat-out wrong. We’re as certain of that as it’s possible to be certain of anything.
However, the more reasonable, thoughtful Christians will say that everything before Saul, David, and Solomon is just a collection of stories told for some sort of moral purpose, or … something like that. Of course there’s some archaeological evidence that there really were kings named David and Solomon. They weren’t anything like the ones depicted in the Bible, however.
The hardest position you can take against that sort of believer, if you want to have a logically-defensible position, is that of basic skepticism. “There’s no good reason for me to believe the things you believe, and based upon the evidence you’ve provided, you don’t have a rational basis for your own acceptance of those beliefs, either.”
… or something to that effect.
In the US, of course, we have one of the highest concentrations of science-denying, fundamentalist Christians in the world, so that’s what you’re usually going to find yourself arguing against almost every time, if you’re over here.
There can be no “versions of Christianity” because all them agree in one thing: the Bible (both OT and NT) are “word of God”. They can disagree among each other about bishop authority and what not but not put words in their so-called “God’s” mouth.
I was trained as Christian in my youth, by none less than Jesuits, I know the job. No Jesuit stands 30 seconds debating theology against me, because I soon realized that the coolest and most genuine thing about Jesus was him as a kid smashing the rabbis to pieces. So I try with all my heart to imitate Jesus in that essential aspect of him, although I’m not Christian (nor Jewish nor Muslim nor any other label) at all: just another godly seeker.
Also, believe me, Jesuits are not that persuasive without the Inquisition. They are actually pretty boring and rather dumb in fact.
I know Christians of the type you say, many (most Catholics today in fact) but they can’t really be that: unless they totally throw to the trash bin all the OT, i.e. stop being Jewish altogether. I have yet to find one who is as daring as that: protestants, orthodox, catholics, puritans, muslims, mormons, baha’is… all types of Christians accept one way or another the OT, none rejects it as explicitly “false”, and that means the Genesis, and that means that they have been proven wrong (thank you Charles Darwin, William Wallace and so many others).
Fundy Xtians are right at the core (within their ideological paradigm): you can’t cherry-pick the Bible, unless you are willing to agree that all the rest is false, what not a single Xtian or equivalent does because they don’t have the guts to challenge their own tradition, because they are acritical sheep, something I’m sure Jesus himself would have if not hated at least disliked a lot.
“Then, in their arguments, the slightest confirmation of anything in the Bible provides evidence for everything in their religion being true”…
Well, that’s not how science works: science works by elimination, not by “proving things right”. Nothing at all can be proven “right beyond doubt”, only “not clearly wrong” as far as we can test. Science is not for people in need of “certainties” (no matter how false) but for seekers of truth.
“… the real existence of a lot of the places mentioned in the Old Testament somehow proving that the events described in the Bible actually happened in those places”.
Actually a lot of the OT is probably half-true. Most legends have a truthful core. But that’s not enough: if it is the word of “God”[TM], then every single passage must be true to the letter, and that’s where things go awry: either their “God” is imperfect, prone to error, or “he” is a liar, in any case not any “God” worth any respect.
The argument of Genesis being just just a tall tale for infantile humans, is one that contradicts what they (Catholics specifically, the most ambiguous of all) say in the mass: “it is God’s word”. If so, your “God” is not “truth” but actually a liar. The same scientific process can be applied to many other sections of the Bible, notably Apocalypse/Revelation, which can be easily proven wrong.
The only remaining Christian (or Jewish, or Muslim, etc.) legitimacy is “si no è vero, è ben trovatto”, but that’s love for literature and legend, not religion in any sustainable theological or philosophical sense. One can say that of Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion for instance, yet it does not make up the basis of any credible religion.
The problem of religious people of all sorts (excepting probably agnostic “spiritual” people without a dogma) is that they need certainties but those “certainties” are necessarily false, at least largely so. The only correct certainty is that nothing is too certain but they would never accept such an approach because it goes against their most basic psychological needs.
You’re dead in the water, right out of the gate, when you said this:
There can be no “versions of Christianity” because all them agree in one thing: the Bible (both OT and NT) are “word of God”. They can disagree among each other about bishop authority and what not but not put words in their so-called “God’s” mouth.
The “word of their god” has a very broad interpretation. In fact, that’s exactly the issue that we’re dealing with: interpretation. They aren’t sticking words into the mouth of their god; they’re interpreting the words that are already there, for the most part.
Various groups of Christians believe in all sorts of various things. If you want to stick with a strict interpretation of the Bible, you’re going to have to consider all Trinitarian Christians to not be real Christians, since the Trinity isn’t explicitly spelled out in the Bible.
It’s their belief system, though. What they believe about their holy book is their own issue. You can’t wade into the discussion, declaring that, “No, no, you don’t believe that! You believe this, because it’s what your holy book says, going by the strictest, fundamentalist reading of the text!”
Anyone that you tried that sort of thing against would accuse you of straw-manning their position. And they would be right. If you want to make those people reconcile their fuzzy, new-agey, Oprah-Christianity with the atrocities committed by their god in the Old Testament (or what moral lessons were being taught by telling stories about their god committing atrocities), then fine. Of course you need to be ready to deal with the “That’s the Old Testament; we have Jesus now,” argument, since it will inevitably make an appearance.
I was dealing with one atheist who wanted to settle the issue of what a god is, so that we would have a standardized target to attack, in theistic debates. If he went into a debate with a theist, declaring that this is what the theist believes, if he wants to call himself a theist … then yeah, the guy is propping up a straw-man, and the theist automatically wins.
I don’t care about discussing the finer points of Christian mythology/theology with the Christian. Until the Christian gives me a reason to take anything in the Bible seriously, it isn’t even a part of the discussion. In fact, that’s what the discussion is going to have to be about, since any Christian who just throws Bible quotes at someone who doesn’t accept the truth of anything in the Bible is an idiot who deserves nothing but mockery. I’m speaking on a philosophical level, not a theological one.
Atheism is a reactionary position. We can only respond to the claims that are being brought to the table by the theist, evaluating the claims and deciding whether or not we accept them.
… all types of Christians accept one way or another the OT, none rejects it as explicitly “false” …
Uh, yes, many effectively do. It’s allegory … or a metaphor … or a parable. Jesus told parables, right? So, Yahweh probably did the same, when dictating the Pentateuch.
That’s the sort of argument that you get from liberal theists. The parable interpretation even makes a sort of sense, even if I don’t take the foundation of their beliefs at all seriously.
They aren’t saying that it’s false, just that the events didn’t literally happen, if you can appreciate the difference.
Well, that’s not how science works: science works by elimination, not by “proving things right”.
I’m well aware. I was describing the sort of arguments that the theistic apologists make. That’s why I was speaking about the falsifiability of propositions, in my previous comment.
Actually a lot of the OT is probably half-true. Most legends have a truthful core.
Personally, I’m a fan of Israel Finkelstein’s interpretation of the current archaeological evidence. I’ve read most of his books, along with those of several others.
The history of the OT is probably fairly accurate from a certain point up to the present day, even if those largely historical parts are mythologized a bit. Finkelstein places that point somewhere in the 7th century, BCE, I think it was. Maybe 8th century; I can’t remember … the rule of King Josiah, whenever that was. Everything before that is either a serious distortion of the actual events or was flat-out made up from scratch.
The conquest of Canaan never happened, for example. Everything before that is clearly mythical, either borrowed from the myths of the religions around them or made up from scratch. A few of the bits could have been based upon something, but I don’t accept your statement about ‘most’ legends having a truthful core. I wouldn’t try to put any kind of firm percentage on it, but I wouldn’t think it was anywhere near 50%.
Sometimes … quite often, really … people make things up, because they want an anecdote that supposedly proves a point that they were trying to convince someone of. For that matter, how much of the OT was a collection of random cultural stories and tall tales, later applied to the names of real, historical kings? That would be similar to the centuries-long process that ended with the names that we currently know being stuck onto the anonymously-written gospels.
But that’s not enough: if it is the word of “God”[TM], then every single passage must be true to the letter, and that’s where things go awry: either their “God” is imperfect, prone to error, or “he” is a liar, in any case not any “God” worth any respect.
And now you’re straw-manning them. Being true to the letter is not the same thing as being true. Like I said before, theologians have come up with hundreds of dodges, over the centuries, and you have the address the position of the person you’re facing.
If you try to argue against a fundamentalist position, when dealing with a liberal Christian … like I said, straw-man.
The argument of Genesis being just just a tall tale for infantile humans, is one that contradicts what they (Catholics specifically, the most ambiguous of all) say in the mass: “it is God’s word”.
I’ve never encountered a liberal Christian who said that the Pentateuch is a collection of ‘tall tales’. They’ll generally characterize those parts of the Bible as some sort of parable, meant to teach some sort of moral or philosophical truth. Damned if I know what sort of moral truth they can extract from the genocide of The Flood, the genocide that took place during the Conquest of Canaan … or a prophet of Yahweh causing a pair of bears to tear apart 42 children, when he clearly could have used some other power of his god to get back at them for mocking his baldness.
I’ll leave that up to them to justify the immoral things in their holy book to themselves.
The same scientific process can be applied to many other sections of the Bible, notably Apocalypse/Revelation, which can be easily proven wrong.
Revelation wasn’t even supposed to be a portrayal of anything happening in the future, according to most serious biblical scholars that I’ve read. It was written as a political commentary of the times in which the author found himself, written in code, using numerology and similar things. I don’t even know why it made it into the Bible, except perhaps that many early church fathers liked the wild imagery that they could use to terrify their flocks into line.
I wouldn’t say that we can prove Revelation ‘wrong’, as much as we can demonstrate that it almost certainly wasn’t intended to say what lots of Christians think it says.
I’m not interested on what they “believe”, I’m interested in the evidence on God, specifically here Yaveh, and that’s the Bible. If the Bible is wrong, then Yaveh is proven non-true. You can believe whatever you want but, scientifically speaking, that is the issue, unless you have some other “divine revelation” up your sleeve, in which case it falls outside of this discussion.
“Atheism is a reactionary position”.
Whatever. I’m not “atheist”, although I usually mark that box in opinion polls because it is the closest one (arguably). I’m Pantheist and Chaotist, at least most days. I have an improved “theory of God” than the one of the so called “theists” (and of atheists too, yes).
As for the core truth of the Bible’s legend, well, there’s also a core truth in the Iliad, and that does not make Aphrodite more real, except in my wettest and weirdest dreams. There is a core truth surely in the narration of Herakles and the Hesperides, yet that does not make Atlas a real being holding the sky (and not Earth as some modern representations suggest). So well, if we don’t want to begin ranting about very off topic matters of the final Mediterranean Bronze Age (very interesting no doubt), we better leave it here.
I’m not interested on what they “believe”, I’m interested in the evidence on God, specifically here Yaveh, and that’s the Bible.
I’m not interested in the evidence for any god, or Yahweh in particular … or rather, I would be if there was any, but there isn’t any. I only care about what others believe. As far as I’m concerned, personally, the question is settled.
Nothing, which most people would consider a god, exists and cares enough about us to let us unambiguously know that it’s out there. There could be some sort of deistic god that created the universe and then buggered off to wherever he hangs out. There could be some sort of trickster god that just likes @#$%^*& around with us. None of the possible gods are ones that I would consider worshiping.
Every excuse that I’ve heard theists give, for why their god demands that we follow his commandments without him providing evidence that those commandments even come from him, rather than a bunch of megalomaniacal schizophrenics who lived a few thousand years ago, comes to the same result. “The god you’re worshiping is an asshole. Why would you worship someone like that?”
There could be any number of unfalsifiable gods, but unfalsifiable propositions are not to be taken seriously. If you can’t even conceive of what would prove that a proposition is wrong, to yourself or others, then you have no reason to ever think that it’s correct. If you want to throw around ridiculous, philosophical propositions with your friends, while you’re all drunk or high, that’s one thing. But once everyone has sobered back up, it’s time to go back to things that can be demonstrated within reality.
I have a great deal of interest in religion, from a fictional and cultural/anthropological perspective. I find the subject entertaining, and I find it useful for understanding things about our species. From a philosophical perspective, my primary interest is in helping others break out of their primitive, superstitious beliefs. So,what those people are bringing to the table is of utmost importance.
Sure, if anyone out there has evidence for something of a “spiritual” nature, I want to know about it, but I can’t see that ever happening. If there was anything of the sort within the bounds of reality, we would know about it by now. There have been so many people out there, desperately trying to show that their claims about some sort of non-material reality are true, and no one has been able to present us with anything that withstands scientific scrutiny. At a certain point, you have to just give up and accept that we’re alone here, in our physical reality, and that if there’s anything out there that cares what we think about it, it needs to damned well give us something unambiguous.
Also, you’re wrong about the Bible. Nothing in the Bible is evidence of or about Yahweh. The Bible is a collection if claims about this Yahweh guy. Those claims have to be examined and supported with evidence for and against, from outside of the Bible.
If the Bible is wrong, then Yaveh is proven non-true.
The second half of your statement doesn’t follow from the first half of your statement.
If the claims made in the Bible are incorrect, then Yahweh is not the kind of god that people claim he is. That’s as far as your conclusion about the Bible can take us.
Maybe Yahweh takes care of our souls (which I have no reason to think exist, but let’s roll with this) after we die, and he wants us to do things that will help us become better people in the next life. However, he’s far from omniscient, and he’s almost completely impotent within the material universe. And just once, within the history of our species, he was able to work up enough will and power to break through the barriers to our material universe, and he was able to communicate what he wants us to do, to a handful of Bronze-Age shepherds.
And those people completely screwed up his message, or Yahweh’s original message was corrupted by some power-hungry priests who changed his message to their own benefit. Off in the next life, Yahweh is sitting there cursing himself for screwing up so badly, in the one opportunity that he had to communicate his message to our species.
So, he totally exists, but the claims in the Christian Bible about him are utterly wrong or distorted beyond recognition. I can come up with dozens of other scenarios in which the being described in a holy book exists, but the holy book is absolutely wrong in what it claims about that being.
You can believe whatever you want but, scientifically speaking, that is the issue, unless you have some other “divine revelation” up your sleeve, in which case it falls outside of this discussion.
That’s why I’m a strict empiricist. And that’s why my primary concern on this subject is what other people believe about it.
Whatever. I’m not “atheist”, although I usually mark that box in opinion polls because it is the closest one (arguably). I’m Pantheist and Chaotist, at least most days. I have an improved “theory of God” than the one of the so called “theists” (and of atheists too, yes).
Well, when you can properly articulate this proposal of yours, I’d love to hear it.
No, seriously, I’d love to hear it. I love philosophical discussions and bouncing around ideas with other people who are also interested in this sort of thing.
It can’t really be better than the atheistic proposition for gods, though. Our proposition is that we don’t accept the propositions put forth by any theistic people, at least those which have been proposed to us thus far. Anything more than that falls outside the bounds of atheism.
As a skeptic, I’ll believe something when the evidence for the proposition is sufficient to justify the acceptance of that proposition. Until that demand is met, I’ll withhold belief.
You’ve been a bit too vague about your position and your proposal (what you called a theory) for me to have an opinion on it either way.
As for the core truth of the Bible’s legend, well, there’s also a core truth in the Iliad, and that does not make Aphrodite more real, except in my wettest and weirdest dreams.
Yes, but what about the Odyssey? Plenty of wet dreams in that one, as well. Circe is great for guys who like dangerous women, and Calypso is great for guys who like clingy, codependent women. Or those two could be great for women with those preferences, as well, if either of those characters swing both ways.
So, what is the core truth in The Odyssey? And no, you don’t get to use the Trojan War for that one, too. :-P
Sure, you can pull out plenty of examples of myths with a core of truth, but is that most of the myths out there?
There is a core truth surely in the narration of Herakles and the Hesperides …
Err, there is? Are we sure about that? A lot of the stories in Greek mythology are ones that people made up, either while horny out of their minds, drunk out of their minds, or both.
Do we have any real evidence for the existence of some guy who was the basis of the Herakles legends? Kevin Sorbo is a real guy, but I don’t think that’s sufficient evidence.
So well, if we don’t want to begin ranting about very off topic matters of the final Mediterranean Bronze Age (very interesting no doubt), we better leave it here.
Hate to tell you this, man, but we went off-topic several comments back. :-D
Well, hopefully one or two other people around here are watching and getting something out of this.
Beliefs are irrelevant in any serious scientific (i.e. philosophical) discussion about “god”. What matters is what can be proven wrong and what can be considered plausible (nothing can be proven unmistakably correct). You argue Popperistically that one should provide the road to negative prove but that is not my business: it is that of my opponents in fact. Why would the defense attorney help the accusation? Please! Popper was wrong in sooo many things and this one is one of the most blatant ones. In fact most scientists consider the Popperian demand wrong but in any case it’s not the problem of the proponent but of the counterpart.
Unlike you I don’t make any difference between spirituality and science. My most intense spiritual moments are generally in connection to cosmology or nature (biology, ecology). And I’m not the only one: many scientists experience the same. Of course it’s a subjective matter: spirituality is always subjective, whatever makes you feel “trascendent” one way or another, usually by temporarily forgetting of the self and other material constraints.
“The second half of your statement doesn’t follow from the first half of your statement.”
It does: the ONLY argument for Yaveh is the Bible, if this one is false, then so is Yaveh. Q.E.D.
You then proceed to reinvent something you call Yaveh outside of the constraints of the Bible and then you are using one name to call some other thing: what you say is not Yaveh, you’re cheating with the nomenclature as much as if I say that my nose is Yaveh. Even if I could argue that my nose is God (I can but beyond the point here) it would not be Yaveh, because Yaveh is the god of the OT, the god of Judaism (all derived sects, incl. Christianity, Islam, etc.) and you cannot in good faith use that term to define some other idea of The Divine.
“… when you can properly articulate this proposal of yours, I’d love to hear it”.
I suggest you read Spinoza’s “Ethics”, first part (which I think it’s titled “On God” or “About God”).
Or anything else about Pantheism will probably do. The premise is that God is not and cannot be external nor finite. Hence everything, everyone is God or, if you wish, a divine avatar or manifestation.
I’ll continue with core-truths in Mythology in a separate answer.
Beliefs are irrelevant in any serious scientific (i.e. philosophical) discussion about “god”. What matters is what can be proven wrong and what can be considered plausible (nothing can be proven unmistakably correct).
This is preposterous, particularly on the second point.
Beliefs are definitely a part of science. If a pre-existing belief can be expressed as a testable, falsifiable proposition, then you have a working hypothesis. You can proceed from there to scientific testing of that hypothesis.
Just because pretty much every coherent, falsifiable claim made by religious sorts fails doesn’t mean they aren’t part of the scientific process.
Saying that beliefs have no place within a philosophical discussion is even more silly. Are you really trying to tell me that philosophy can’t address them? That’s just wrong.
And … umm … are you saying that you don’t care in the slightest what people in your society believe? You don’t want them to become more rational, moral people who will make your society better? That seems to be what you’re saying, when you dismiss the beliefs of others as mattering in any way.
It does: the ONLY argument for Yaveh is the Bible, if this one is false, then so is Yaveh. Q.E.D.
That’s not how logic works. I don’t even know where to go with you, on this one.
If stories told about a being in a book are wrong, that does not mean that the being does not exist. Parson Weems wrote a book about the life of George Washington. Many of the stories in Parson Weems’s book are mythical, such as the popular story about the cherry tree.
The falsity of those stories in no way implies that George Washington did not exist. If you can’t see what a ridiculous argument it is that you’re making, then I don’t know how to help you understand.
You evaluate a set of claims on a claim-by-claim basis.
And no, it doesn’t matter if the only source for claims about Yahweh is the Christian Bible. That isn’t even true, but even if it was, that wouldn’t matter. What you’re saying is not a validly-constructed, logical statement.
Your statement is “These claims about this thing are false: therefore this thing does not exist.” That’s nothing approaching a valid argument construction. It’s an absolute non sequitur.
I don’t know what to say about all of the stuff you said about the Greek mythology, either. None of it amounts to evidence of a real historical core to the stories/myths. All of it is easily explained by people from various cultures wandering around, as they did, sharing their own cultural stories with others, as they did.
“Beliefs are definitely a part of science. If a pre-existing belief can be expressed as a testable, falsifiable proposition, then you have a working hypothesis.”
Sure, why not? But it belongs to the proponents of the hypothesis the search for evidence that can further advance it, and also even to articulate the hypothesis in terms scientific, something I’m pretty sure 99.99% of “believers” don’t even care about – because for them is not any “hypothesis” but “the absolute truth”, which needs of no evidence whatsoever and cannot be defeated no matter how much and how good negative evidence piles up.
“Just because pretty much every coherent, falsifiable claim made by religious sorts fails doesn’t mean they aren’t part of the scientific process”.
It does: because they won’t admit to the evidence, falling back outside the sphere of science into that of superstition.
“… are you saying that you don’t care in the slightest what people in your society believe?”
I care: I’m very much worried about irrational beliefs, particularly when organized in cult form, and I wish I had a magic wand to solve that irrationality issue. There’s already a tendency in favor of what I hope for but it is too slow.
“If stories told about a being in a book are wrong, that does not mean that the being does not exist”.
We are not discussing illiterate species described by third people, we are talking about a supposed all-knowing, all-powerful being that is believed to have dictated the book word by word himself. Otherwise the evidence would be even more feeble because nowhere in the book any evidence is presented in any way, much less in replicable ways (and of course there would not be any reason to have faith either, because it’d be all mere human opinion, maybe fantasy).
And, if we assume the hypothesis that (per the Bible) we are made at the image of the elusive being, then Yaveh is also a rational scientific-minded being, what makes even less likely that “he” intently makes replicability impossible. Rather than “the God”, it’d be Descartes’ demon, which was already discarded as most unlikely centuries ago. Although admittedly back then they did not know enough about virtual reality: the hypothesized holographic universe does not fit the Genesis anyhow.
“You evaluate a set of claims on a claim-by-claim basis”.
To demonstrate the set false you only need to demonstrate false one of the claims.
“it doesn’t matter if the only source for claims about Yahweh is the Christian Bible. That isn’t even true”…
If you remove the word “Christian” from that statement it is exactly true. The Bible (OT) is much more than just “Christian” and it is primarily Jewish (that’s why Christians, etc. are Jewish in fact). There are no substantive difference between the various OT versions.
“Your statement is “These claims about this thing are false: therefore this thing does not exist.” (…) It’s an absolute non sequitur.”
It’s absolutely correct in fact. You would not be saying what you say if I was talking of dragons rather than “God”, would you? You would much more easily accept that dragons are an imaginary human construct, regardless of the truthful core (say snakes) that underlies the myth. If you then change the parameters to claim not anymore dragons’ existence but snakes’ one, then you’d be first of all conceding on dragons’ non-existence.
Now, when you reformulate the Yaveh hypothesis without key elements (the dragon’s wings, fire breathing…, the creation story), then you are fundamentally altering the Yaveh hypothesis into something that is not anymore it but something else. Unlike what happens with snakes, which we are all familiar with, you still have to prove it.
Say that you go all the way, dump the Bible altogether, and adopt a pure deist perspective, in which the legend (biblical or otherwise) becomes irrelevant. Then you’d have a hypothesis but no evidence whatsoever: it’d be untestable. And going back to dragons, Carl Sagan wrote something about that, something that not only affects the Judaic view on god but any deistic approach to reality: where is your personal god distinct from reality, from the universe/multiverse/metaverse?, where is the evidence?, how is it any more credible than dragons or cyclops?
That’s a very good question because indeed the Odyssey is full of outright fantasy. Yet there is probably a core truth in the individual figure of Odysseus/Ulysses and his Ithaca Kingship problems, which is what the bard sings about. The griot fills the blank with all kind of fantasies (each of which may or not have some core-truth of its own but hard to discern) but he tells us the truth or a version of it in the Cretan Lie, when Ulysses pretends (confesses, it’s a wink to those-in-the-know in the original audience) that he was all those years in Egypt. That fits well with the chronology of the late “Sea Peoples” attacks, which should be right after the Trojan War: 1178 destruction of Ugarit, 1175 failed raid against Egypt, in which plausibly the historical Ulysses was taken prisoner.
Anyhow, it’s possible that I’m wrong and this legend’s core-truth does not exist but I think that there must be something to it.
“Err, there is?” [re. Hesperides]
Yes, I’m pretty sure. It is archaeologically demonstrated intense relations between the SE Spanish (and proto-Iberian) civilization of El Argar and Mycenaean Greece. Argarians adopted in the “B phase” the Greek custom of burial in “pithos” (large jars), while Greeks sometimes adopted the Iberian custom of burial in “tholos” (beehive tombs, also found in Ireland and other Western areas, always before Greece). The interaction is unmistakable in terms archaeological, in fact it was largely to the benefit of warlike Mycenaean Greeks, because the main tin deposits of the age were all at the Atlantic, being South Iberia a necessary port of call if not the direct middleman, and Greeks needed tin, lots of tin, to forge their Naue II type swords (and every other Bronze Age half-decent weapon or armor). Iberia also produced many other minerals like gold, silver and the more common copper, minerals that were historically exploited or traded by Phoenicians and Romans at later times.
Atlas is almost certainly a god of the South Iberian pantheon described by archaeologists as “antropomorph of jar-like arms” (“brazos en jarra” in Spanish) and more modernly claimed as tourist icon of the province of Almería with the invented new name of “índalo” (make an image search for this word and you’ll see how they imagined Atlas).
There is a parallel narration of Herakles in the Mediterranean Far West (i.e. the Hesperides, probably from Vesperus: the evening star), in which he fights the triple headed king Geriones and his minions. They are plausibly two versions of the same generic episode, whose real details we can only speculate about. A third version not involving Herakles but indeed Mycenaean Greeks, labeled as “Athenians” (Athens was one of the Mycenaean cities, as were Thebes, Argos, etc.) is the narration of Atlantis by Plato. A lot of the details that Plato attributes to Atlantis fit well with another South Iberian civilization, this one in Portugal, in the area of modern Lisbon (actually the main city, known as Castro do Zambujal is farther north, near Torres Vedras, and was back in the day connected to the Ocean by a “sea branch” of almost exactly the length Plato provides: 10 km, branch that was mysteriously silted at the end of the period, maybe by a tsunami). The key issue is anyhow again that we see in legend Bronze Age Greeks fighting wars in the Far West, in the Hesperides. So it’s three stories, all them converging to some core-truth, whose realistic detail we can only speculate about because no other source exist beyond these legends and the archaeological evidence, but that in general terms means that Mycenaean Greeks fought some wars in the Iberian Peninsula and looted parts of it at some point, much as they did with Crete, Troy, Ugarit and tried to do in Egypt as well. This conclusion is for me pretty much beyond question.
God’s Not Dead 2, you mean? Yeah, that movie was something else. There wasn’t a single thing in that movie that was even vaguely accurate, in regards to the actual legal state of affairs, here in the US. In real life, the ACLU would have been DEFENDING the woman who got sued, not prosecuting her.
Not that they ever even explained what the lawsuit was supposed to be over … what the charges were, what the civil complaint might be, why the school board was suing THEIR OWN FREAKING TEACHER.
I recommend the God Awful Movies podcast episode that covered it, from April 5th. FYI, explicit podcast.
He should be forced to prove that god is not dead for that sort of claim. Maybe suspend the charges until god can attend the hearing and provide some documents that he is alive.
Let me move this down to the bottom, since it’s turned into a nesting cluster-@#$%, Maju.
Sure, why not? But it belongs to the proponents of the hypothesis the search for evidence that can further advance it, and also even to articulate the hypothesis in terms scientific, something I’m pretty sure 99.99% of “believers” don’t even care about – because for them is not any “hypothesis” but “the absolute truth”, which needs of no evidence whatsoever and cannot be defeated no matter how much and how good negative evidence piles up.
The STEP project was run by the Templeton Foundation, which is a foundation that pursues this sort of religious stuff. Unlike most religious organizations, they actually have the integrity to report everything, including this one, which showed a negative impact upon patients who were being prayed for and knew they were being prayed for. The last I heard, people were still trying to account for that bizarre outcome … possibly some sort of induced stress … performance anxiety … I dunno.
Sure, after the absolute failure of the studies, most of the believers will start spin-doctoring the results like crazy, coming up with any excuse that they can. Note my usage of the word “most”. There’s a certain percentage of believers who are actually intellectually honest and can be snapped out of their religious brainwashing.
Those are the people we’re doing this for. In some of my own local atheist groups, we have at least 5 ex-preachers that I’m aware of, and most of the members are ex-believers. People can be snapped out of it.
“Just because pretty much every coherent, falsifiable claim made by religious sorts fails doesn’t mean they aren’t part of the scientific process”.
It does: because they won’t admit to the evidence, falling back outside the sphere of science into that of superstition.
That’s just wrong. The refusal of a portion of the population to accept the results doesn’t have the slightest effect upon whether or not the examination of the subject is a scientific inquiry.
Going by your statement here, the theory of Natural Selection and the simple observed fact of biological evolution are not matters for science, because those same fundamentalist nut-jobs refuse to accept the results. I don’t think you would agree to anything of the sort, so you have to accept that your statement here is false, if you want to be consistent.
I care: I’m very much worried about irrational beliefs, particularly when organized in cult form, and I wish I had a magic wand to solve that irrationality issue. There’s already a tendency in favor of what I hope for but it is too slow.
Well, I’m doing something about it. The slow rate of progress is something that we just have to accept. Most social ills like racism, sexism, and homophobia are corrected by having the older generations die off.
If you want to change the world, you have to reach the kids. People under the age of 30, here in the US, are vastly less homophobic than their parents’ generation. They’re also vastly less religious. We should try to reach those in the older generations, as well, but we need to accept that we aren’t going to reach most.
———-
And with everything below that, we’re just retreading familiar ground. You can’t seem to separate the hypothesis (as you call it) about the being’s characteristics from the supposed being itself. And most of the claims of the Old Testament have almost nothing to do with the being of Yahweh, except perhaps in the most tangential form.
The mythical nature of the Flood of Noah and the Tower of Babel has pretty much no impact upon the character of Yahweh, except for demonstrating that he would be a flaming asshole, if he was real. You can remove those stories from the narrative, dismissing them as parables, and the rest of the case for that being remains untouched.
Plus, you seem to be stuck against the issue about the Omni’s. You’re ignoring the point that I’ve made a few times now. What if those characteristics are one of the sets of details that are inaccurate?
After all, if you read the Pentateuch without bringing any presuppositions to the text, the stories are obviously not describing an omniscient, omnipotent being. I don’t know how Christians manage to twist that one around within their minds to make the text describe what it doesn’t describe.
When Yahweh came out of the Ugaritic pantheon of gods, he was clearly not anything approaching what he morphed into by the New Testament’s writing. Most of the stories in the early Old Testament/Jewish Bible probably come from that set of mythology or from the stories told about the gods of other pantheons. When the Old Testament was compiled, the editors did a very bad job of smoothing the edges between the older, personified myths and the omni-max god of the Jewish prophets, in the later parts of the OT.
I hoped we could drop the debate, Narf, as suggested by Broken Eye. Incidentally kissing does not necessarily imply any sort of sexuality and I’m seriously offended by your apparent homophobia (I also “don’t swing that way” but have many gay friends and do kiss with some of them, as well as with some straight ones, often just as hello ritual). So I’d ask for an apology because I’m not keen at all to tolerate homophobia, sexism, racism or fascism. If I’m debating with a bigot, I’d rather not: rot in your misery alone.
Now, let’s assume that yoga or similar forms of oriental meditation do work (as seems quite likely, judging on some scientific data): does that mean that Shiva exists? Not necessarily. If you believe in a Rain God, does rain prove it true? Nope. So not sure which utility have those prayer research workshops, although I’m concerned about the ethics in the case where the patients get worse: are you doing evil witchery without knowing it? Beware!
“You can remove those stories from the narrative, dismissing them as parables, and the rest of the case for that being remains untouched”.
No you cannot if you accept that “he” is a truthful god, an all powerful god and that the Bible is directly inspired by “him”. These three tenets are part of the belief set of at least Judaism and Christianity, so if you find inaccuracies, more so such fantastic stories with no base whatsoever, you literally kill Yaveh. I think that was possible because science provides actual benefits that religion just doesn’t: scientists are much better medicine men than religious fanatics, at least in the plane of technological achievements: they get satellites in orbit and make deadly but effective nukes, among many other things, while priests and monks just parrot old stories and perform pointless rituals that have no use beyond social manipulation (and even in that TV and radio proved to be much much better).
” What if those characteristics [the “omnis”] are one of the sets of details that are inaccurate?”
Then it does not seem to fit the common notion of God, capitalized. It’d be a most a lesser god, not good enough for a monotheistic religion. If we have to go with a lesser god that created humankind out of clay and loved it enough to get martyred for us, Prometheus makes for a much much better story, also much shorter and much less demanding.
I haven’t read the Pentateuch in full, only the Genesis and Exodus, but it’s clear in the latter that Moses (Amenmese?) and Aaron were inventing a nameless god (initially sometimes “gods”) in order to allow people of various religious roots to coalesce more easily around their new warlike cult. After all it’s evident that Yaveh’s mythology is a mix of Egyptian (the creation is a total ripoff of Ptah’s creation without the good parts), Sumerian (the flood for example) and Semitic ideas (El), each of which had their own pantheon and legends. But they key role of Yaveh is I’d say as warrior god, lord of the armies, because they intend, much as Mohamed did much later, with much greater direct impact, to create a militarist theocracy to conquer lands (in this case Southern Canaan).
I leave it here and won’t reply anymore unless you offer a convincing apology on the nasty issue mentioned above. I don’t feel any need to debate with bigots, really.
Incidentally kissing does not necessarily imply any sort of sexuality and I’m seriously offended by your apparent homophobia (I also “don’t swing that way” but have many gay friends and do kiss with some of them, as well as with some straight ones, often just as hello ritual)
I don’t know where you’re from, but in the US, kissing is pretty much an exclusively romantic activity. A little kid kissing a parent or something like that is different, but otherwise, no. People don’t generally kiss each other at random, over here.
If I went up to one of my gay friends and kissed him (there are several in my local atheist groups, which isn’t surprising, considering how Christians treated them), he would probably be freaked out. The most that ever happens is a hug.
If you can’t follow the joke, it isn’t my problem. Read my last sentence in that comment, and it should be pretty freaking obvious. I’m not going to apologize for homophobia that wasn’t there.
So not sure which utility have those prayer research workshops, although I’m concerned about the ethics in the case where the patients get worse: are you doing evil witchery without knowing it? Beware!
“Evil witchery”? Heh heh heh heh heh. Are you serious? Please tell me you’re joking.
There are no ethics issues involved. They ran a double-blinded study over a period of several years. You can look up their methodology on Duke University’s website. A simple Google search of the study’s name should turn up the paper, which is publicly available. The one statistical anomaly was the fact that the one group — people who were being prayed for and knew they were being prayed for — came back with bizarre figures: the opposite of what anyone was expecting. There are people who are currently looking into potential psychosomatic causes of that anomaly.
It wasn’t a “workshop”. It was a long-running, scientific study on the effects of intercessory prayer. It had a null effect.
As for the utility of the study: this is what I’ve been trying to get through to you. Christians make a claim, that intercessory prayer can help people who are sick. It’s a testable, falsifiable claim, so they did a study to test it. The claim was falsified, as the results indicated no statistical difference between people who were prayed for and people who weren’t, except for that one group which had the bizarre, reverse effect.
“You can remove those stories from the narrative, dismissing them as parables, and the rest of the case for that being remains untouched”.
No you cannot if you accept that “he” is a truthful god, an all powerful god and that the Bible is directly inspired by “him”.
Do you understand what a parable is? Jesus used them nonstop, in the New Testament.
Then it does not seem to fit the common notion of God, capitalized. It’d be a most a lesser god, not good enough for a monotheistic religion.
I don’t ever capitalize the word god. If I’m speaking of the god of the Abrahamic religions, I use his proper name, Yahweh.
And you should say that the current incarnations of the Abrahamic religions won’t accept a lesser god. Zoroastrianism doesn’t have an omni-max god. Or at least many versions of it don’t; I can’t speak to all versions of the religion. Zoroastrianism has morphed considerably, since 1,000 BCE. Most versions are monotheistic, but there are some versions that are dualistic, some that are polytheistic, and some that are a more complex mess of theology.
And as I already said in a previous comment, there’s considerable evidence that early versions of Yahweh were neither omniscient nor omnipotent. The Ugaritic pantheon of the early Canaanites included a creator god, El, and a war god, Yahweh, which were later merged together into the Hebrew, monotheistic god. The “we” in Genesis is probably a reference to the pantheon from which El and Yahweh came.
I haven’t read the Pentateuch in full, only the Genesis and Exodus, but it’s clear in the latter that Moses (Amenmese?) and Aaron were inventing a nameless god (initially sometimes “gods”) in order to allow people of various religious roots to coalesce more easily around their new warlike cult.
I’ve read the Bible, cover to cover; Catholic version, with the Apocrypha.
Actually, the scholarly consensus of archaeologists (barring the young-Earth creationist, fundamentalist ones) is that the conquest of Canaan never happened. The Jews were never in Egypt, as described in Exodus, and Moses, Aaron, and Joshua almost certainly never existed.
Also, the early part of the Jewish scriptures are full of anachronisms. Many of the wars described in the first several hundred years of Kings and Chronicles were fought against tribes that didn’t migrate into the area until long after the wars were supposedly fought.
Israel Feinkelstein, as I mentioned before, believes that the early history of the Judaic kings was assembled sometime in the 7th or 8th century BCE, much of it filled in with mythology, from barely remembered previous kings. The Bible Unearthed is a very interesting read, if you’re interested in that sort of thing.
The accumulation of the myths in the early Pentateuch was probably a bit more complex and messy than what you described, but a lot of what you said it a pretty good guess. They probably got a lot from the Sumerians … a bit less from the Egyptians … and the core of the religion probably grew from the pantheon of Ugarit, the earlier civilization in the area near Canaan.
But they key role of Yaveh is I’d say as warrior god, lord of the armies, because they intend, much as Mohamed did much later, with much greater direct impact, to create a militarist theocracy to conquer lands (in this case Southern Canaan).
That’s pretty much correct, going from my reading on the Ugaritic pantheon. As their war god, Yahweh’s behavior makes a hell of a lot more sense than that of a supposedly omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent god.
I leave it here and won’t reply anymore unless you offer a convincing apology on the nasty issue mentioned above. I don’t feel any need to debate with bigots, really.
Like I said, there was no bigotry there. You misread a joke. I’m not going to issue an insincere, “I’m sorry if you were offended,” apology, when there was nothing there to apologize for. I hate when politicians do that, because their public-relations people said that they should issue a public apology.
Just found something interesting: Part of an official statement by the US Copyright Office:
The office will not register works produced by nature, animals, or plants. Likewise, the Office cannot register a work purportedly created by divine or supernatural beings, although the office may register a work where where the application or deposit copy(ies) state that the work was influenced by a divine spirit.
In other words, God is legally prohibited from owning the copyright on anything.
I say screw them all. They took billions of dollars out of our pockets already in the ILLEGAL, UNCONSTITUTIONAL GOVERNMENT BAIL OUT – It you’re in debt that you can’t pay….FILE FOR BANKRUPTCY. It’s not as bad as you think it is. Talk to a lawyer. If you can’t afford the lawyer, call your county’s Bar Association, they will be able to point you in the right direction to get legal help.
Second, I agree that the bailout was a bad decision on any number of different fronts (including economic, ethical, and common fucking sense reasons), but I also know that there is absolutely nothing about anything even remotely like that sort of thing in the Constitution or any of its amendments. Go read it if you don’t believe me. Don’t worry, I’ll wait. Oh, and it wasn’t illegal either. Just stupid.
Hi, I hope to join you guys on the next BonPen Festival, I’ve hear great stories of your experience there. On the side may be it would a sight if I experience Pipay’s halo halo
So the lawyer representing every religion on the planet is the devil? That makes way to much sense.
Representing the bureaucracy of every religion is what he actually means.
What about Hindus and Buddhists?
Wiccans? Sikhs?
I dunno; this “all religious organizations on the planet” part causes a bit of a suspension-of-disbelief failure. All Abrahamic religious organizations, maybe … although I’m not sure about the non-secular Jewish stance on angels and demons. Secular Jews believe none of that stuff, of course.
The non-monotheists are in it for the precedent.
And the greater amount of fun. I can’t think of any religion whose adherents have less fun than the Jews. It was probably better before the push towards monotheism.
Wild, Jewish youth want to party like it’s 799 … BCE.
He’s Satan. He doesn’t actually give a crap about what the various religions believe.
Yeah, but why would those religions join the lawsuit? The lawyer said that all religions put aside their differences and joined together to sue. Why would those religions that I mentioned give a damn?
They didn’t. He’s just claiming he is because he could argue that anyone who goes against him is against religion. Even moreso if it’s by an actual religion, claiming that they are just using religion’s symbols. In this messed up world he would probably win every single time.
Heh heh heh. True enough. It’s the same as what we get out of the fundamentalist Christians who are trying to take over the US government.
When they want to throw out large numbers, as some sort of ad populum argument, they count 2.2 billion Christians worldwide, making them the largest religion. At any other time, anyone who isn’t a young-Earth creationist isn’t a real Christian.
Catholics … right out. Whoops, there go 1.2 million people from your total.
Nontrinitarian Christians? They aren’t real Christians if they don’t accept the Trinity. There go another 45 or 50 million.
By the time they get done removing all of the denominations who aren’t “real” Christians, they drop down to a distant fourth, behind Hinduism. All religious groups inflate their numbers. I was claimed by the Catholic church, despite never making my Confirmation, until I signed apostasy papers. Any other person who just wanders off and never goes to church again continues to be counted as a part of their old denomination.
If they can do it, there’s no reason this guy can’t. After all, he’s a lawyer. Cooking the facts is part of his trade.
By the way, which messed up world did you mean? The one in this web comic, or the real world? I can see your statement applying to either. ^.^
Err, if you discount the Catholics, you lose 1.2 BILLION people from the total, not 1.2 million. Typo.
It’s the lord of lies, of course he’s lying. Duh.
Yup, I lied there. I’m just disguising it as a typo. ^.^
Probably wrong too. Any categorization of what is divine and what is not is wrong, read Spinoza please.
Err, which one was that in reference to? I can’t visually trace my way back to the comment on which you hit the Reply button.
It was to the comment that began with this question: “What about Hindus and Buddhists?”
Then I’m not sure what point you were trying to make. The lawsuit is about religious iconography, not the supposedly divine beings that those icons represent.
This isn’t a religious apologetics issue; it’s a copyright/trademark issue, although the comic writers seem a bit fuzzy on the subject. We’re advancing the copyright/trademark issue within the fictional world of the webcomic, in which these beings probably exist in some form or other.
Oddly enough I think the comment about who is representing them is right.
Even the Buddhists have a militant branch that’s been in the news. All religions have some element of conflict. All branches of Christianity have conflict with each other. There are various sects of Muslim. Making public acknowledgement makes more strife among the religions as they argue over which of them is more right.
Sure, every religion is capable of having a radical, extremist branch. I’ve never said anything on that subject.
The point is that GG isn’t using the iconography of any religion other than Christianity. If the representatives of any of those other religions bring a lawsuit of some kind, it will get thrown out for lack of standing. Any of those groups joining a class-action lawsuit would imperil the entire lawsuit by tainting it, with the majority of the plaintiffs having no case against the defendant.
I was responding specifically to the “so the devil is representing” post, but good point
Ah, gotcha now, I think. Hard to tell where things go, sometimes, when the nesting structure gets sufficiently complex.
So we are getting the lawyers backstory, yes?
that*
He used to be angel but then he was banished from heaven for thinking he was greater than God.
Michael, this is not the time for family issues.
What? Was the flaming sword a bit much?
I don’t even want to know what that’s a euphemism for.
Why not? Obviously nothing but good things and great times can come from such a euphemism. :D
I dunno, man. Any time I hear something with the word “burning” or “flaming”, it makes be think of an STI/STD.
… so following good times, yeah. I’m not so sure that it leads to good times, though. ^.^
Daredevil vs TheDevil
“Where-in-the-hell is the up-vote button on this thing…?”
I am sure his confessor and the priest who made her are aquatinted through the local diocese. She has no reason to hide anything, seeing as she has never hidden her identity. Finding that priest and hearing his side shouldn’t be difficult, unless he has died, which is very possible. Exorcism is the most stressful of all Rites, and each one can take years off the mortal coil.
It’s because of the girls with the heads that spin around and puke at you, isn’t it?
This means that God holds the copyright, and unless God himself shows up to press charges this entire case is invalid.
Okay but that makes too much sense to be the case here.
The assorted faiths are his legal representatives on Earth, and they as such have a lawyer representing them. Though I’m still confused as to why they’re now suing her, even with willful suspension of belief. Perhaps it’ll make sense in a few weeks.
btw, I like the storyline.
Because, you know… devil.
Ah ha! But God is everywhere. In every child’s smile, in every sunset, in every loving embrace. So by definition he is present in the court room… Or are you saying every christian rock song is wrong? I can understand doubting religion but doubting the string base beat of Third Day? No sir, that will not stand.
Only the religious ones.
I dunno, man. Even if I was a Christian, worship-rock music would bore the hell out of me. That stuff is so freaking repetitive.
As a Christian, this is often true.
Yeah, I was raised Catholic, even though I never believed any of the stuff, from as young an age as I can remember … probably 5 or 6 or so. I LOVE religiously themed movies and other media, though, both then and now. Constantine is one of my favorite movies of the past decade or so. The Last Temptation of Christ was fantastic. The Passion of the Christ … not so much …
The first two are great, though, because they’re exercises in the contemplation of religious themes and ideas. Most Christian music isn’t so interesting. It’s mindless-happy-making stuff, for the easily manipulated.
There are plenty of more interesting songs, such as Flood, by Jars of Clay; Meant to Live, by Switchfoot; and Bother, by Stone Sour, which got a good deal of play on mainstream radio stations, because they’re … you know, good music. I’ve yet to encounter any praise-rock songs that did anything for me except drive me from the room or cause an almost epileptic twitch towards the power button on the radio.
I would make a good scholarly monk, if I was at all religious, contemplating matters to pass on to the flock. I would make a very poor sheep in the pews.
Upvote the sensible comment and, as God myself, I reclaim all royalties, mwahahaha!
That’s the coolest thing of being Pantheistic: being God.
There is only one possibility: call God to the witness stand.
Or a ton of holy water.
I’m telling you, she should’ve gotten Daniel Webster
As the symbols predate the modification of the Berne Convention that allows for automatic copyright, unless there is an actual copyright filing there is no possibility of damages.
I was thinking the same sort of thing. I don’t think this is how copyrights work. For that matter, copyright is limited to a certain period of time, no matter the longevity of the copyright holder.
Actually, I believe it is currently 70 years after the death of the copyright holder, although as Chris pointed out, religious iconography predates the current statute by a few millennia.
Here’s a good rundown that just came up from a quick Google search, from Stanford:
http://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/faqs/copyright-basics/
It used to be only 40 years, but The Disney company had it extended so they wouldn’t lose control of Micky and others that Walt owned. It is the hight of hypocrisy seeing how most of their works are their own public domain interpretations.
When did Friedrich Nietzsche declare that “Gott ist tot”? somewhere between1893-1899. So copyright would have expired no later than 1969…
And anyway, shouldn’t they be arguing trademark rather than copyright?
GG is, after all using the iconography of religion, which would be more infringement of trademark than an infringing derivative work…
Also, considering how crap she is as a superhero, they should be able to argue for parody as a defense…
Is his name, by any chance, Lucious Cypher, or John Milton?
Stan Beazell, or “Bub” to his friends.
(“Lewis”, shortened to “Lou” makes more sense than “Lucious? )
Malcolm Locke, actually, or “Mal” for short.
Oh I cannot wait to see how they solve this. Also the judge has a more punchable face than this guy.
I think that part about the judge is kind of the point. ^.^
Anyone else getting the impression that goading the other side into a “prove that God is dead!” is not just just his FIRST trick to resot to, it’s the only thing he has like some sort of religious Chewbacca Defense?
But they can’t be in copyright because they predate the existence of copyright law!
How they can proceed if Good Girl’s lawyers actually are competent:
If God filed the copyright, is it on record?
She was given her abilities by a priest, hence a direct permission from religion to use their symbolism.
If there is a copyright, it can only be put into effect if she has received income off her angelic form. At least that’s how I understand the copyright law to work. Let me look it up… Found a simple website called CopyrightKids.
Ideas, principles, titles, and names are not protected under copyright, but might be under Trademark. Copyright Courts are supposed to see if 1) the infringed work is close to the original copyright (how many angels look like her angelic form) and 2) if she had access to the copyrighted material (quickly google’d ‘catholic angels’, she looks more like Greek demigods than angels and likely didn’t have access to them).
Then there’s the Fair Use. Good Girl wasn’t using it for commercial purposes, the nature of the work was very factual and almost nothing of creativity, again her angelic form doesn’t match most angelic depictions, and no money was being made by her NOR was Religion losing potential revenue due to her angelic form (having a real angel around may actually be doing the opposite!).
Before 1978, Copyright only lasted 28 years, starting with the date the work was registered, and needed renewal during the 28th year continuously. So, if God made a copyright, it should be well documented. If not, then any work before 1923 is a guaranteed safe zone for free use.
So, for all intents and purposes of the law, Good Girl is presiding well within Fair Use, and even if not she isn’t condemned under copyright.
I’ve read the Christian Bible, cover to cover. I don’t recall any copyright symbols, except for those of the translators.
Narf, I agree. But the opening statement for the pro-copyright infringement is that God (not the Christian Bible) made a copyright on angelic beings, and I was commenting on how copyright actually works against the Religions (not just Christians).
Yup, I was just adding to that. I think Yahweh forgot to file, so the fact that GG wasn’t violating copyright, if there was one, is just an additional factor. I don’t think that any non-Abrahamic religions use anything approaching the Christian imagery for angels.
For the copyright law to come into it, the property would have had to have been copyrighted in the last century or so. Patent/copyright trolls, in other words.
Various Greek deities and demigods are winged humans. Nike, Eros, Thanatos, Zetes, Calais, Iris… With garb like that, it reminded me of Greeco-Roman garb, and hence only Christian in her use of the cross on her chest (which isn’t trademarked, and is only copyright infringement if they can find another identical cross that was).
So, what you’re saying is that the Greek pantheon should sue Christianity, while we’re throwing around lawsuits like crazy? Christianity and its Jewish precursor are pretty late to the scene. I think that the monotheistic version of Judaism has only been around since 700 or 800 BC.
I was listing various ways the prosecution’s case can be dismantled. One of them was that GG’s use of wings was in line with the Greek Demigods.
Unless that lawyer represents Greco-Roman believers as well, AND he can prove she copied an image/artwork that has been copyrighted, he holds no case for copyrighted image infringement.
Are there enough believers in the Greco-Roman pantheon for anyone to give a damn what they think on the subject? I only know of a few wacky pagans who do so.
I’m still all for suing Christianity as a whole, though. No reason that just the Catholics should have all of the fun. Although, the Catholics haven’t exactly been getting sued for copyright infringement …
Psalms is the main source for inferring “wings” on Angels, but is meant more to represent an ability of great speed then actual physical flight. If the Orthodox Jewish idea of Angels is translated into superhero terms, Angels might be more like a cross between Quick Silver, and Shadow Kat, able to run super fast anywhere, through anything, but not really fly, save through hidden portals to The Silver City they alone can find. Maybe the Phantom Stranger’s problem is that he has a limp, and has to walk instead of run.
I really liked a lot of things they state in the City of Angels movie. They can move at the speed of thought, can’t be hurt, but also can’t feel a thing and being a falling angel is not such a bad thing.
I enjoy talks like these. By critiquing each other, we both learn something new, and have to double-check our sources to make sure we both know what we’re talking about. You taught me; I hope I taught you.
Thanks!
A lot of the specifics about the exact numbers are new to me. I’m fairly well versed in the fair-use clause.
Tossing semantics back and forth is a good way to sort out exactly what we actually mean, though, yes. Precision of language is very important, most of the time.
Very interesting comments we are having here. I wonder if they can follow with saying that she is a Parody, so it would still fall into fair use.
Well, all those logical arguments will fall into deaf ears, as we have seen the kind of person the Judge is.
I didn’t consider parody, because I didn’t want to treat a team of superheroes as a joke.
Wait… Nice idea!
You do realize which team of super heroes we’re talking about here, right? ^.^
Hence the “Wait… Nice idea!”
Just wait when the blind lawyer asks LP to help him get to the bathroom. They will end up in Japan fighting some zombie ninjas or something like that.
Yeah, this thing would have to wait until a bit higher up in the appeals process, when they can get it before a rational judge. Of course they’ll sort it out in some other manner, since multiple rounds of appeals don’t make for a good super hero comic.
Wouldn’t it be a trademark violation rather than a copyright infringement. On the other hand, considering god created the angels, wouldn’t She hold the patent providing the necessary documentation was filed with the US patent office considering the case is being tried in a US court. All Good Girl would need to do would be to pay a fine, negotiate damages relative to the patent infringement, and also negotiate a license. Considering god is omnipotent losses would be inconsequential and be determined by harm, if any, done to the brand. It could be argued that Good Girl is augmenting Her brand’s image thereby dismissing the suit.
Oh, the quote wasn’t properly shown in my email. About that line, I was saying that Religion gave her those powers, and hence making them hypocritical in their suing her for properly using what they gave her.
I’m not sure that we can say that “religion” even gave her these new powers. Seems like a self-actualized thing.
A priest (legal acting leader of religion) performed an exorcism on her, resulting in those powers. If that isn’t divine transference of religious/superhero power, I don’t know what is.
Her initial powers were a result of the priest, yeah. I’m not sure he can be directly credited with her recent level-up, which I believe is what inspired this lawsuit.
True… That’s one potential counter-argument dismantled… But I think the most compelling case we have is the pre-1978 copyright renewal law. Can you think of any rebuttals Pinky can come up with?
P.S. I wonder if Mr. Dork and Mr. Sausage have been following this commentary… If you are, thoughts on our legal disputes?
I doubt they’ll use any of the real, obvious problems with the lawsuit. Too technical and not dramatic enough for a super hero comic.
We can only hope…
I always thought technicalities are what superheroes thrive on. Batman defeating a rainbow bear by wearing a rainbow Batman costume, Superman getting a guy to say his name backwards… as well as basically defeating any villain by use of a flaw in their powers or master plan.
But have you played (or watched those two episodes of) Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney? Technicalities with dramatic flair can become superpowered.
That’s only a few select heroes and villains that fit that method of story progression, though. I can’t see any of the characters in this comic fitting that style of story.
And nope, haven’t seen those two episodes.
Can’t reply directly to your comment on Phoenix Wright. I found it on watchcartoononline, called Gyakuten Saiban: Sono “Shinjitsu”, Igi Ari! If a character makes a profound declaration about the case, it can become an aerial wave powerful enough to knock Phoenix Wright down.
Yup, once you hit maximum nesting depth, you just go up to the last one with a Reply link, and it’ll fall in order after the others.
So, Yu-Gi-Oh with legal briefs, instead of cards?
Implicit copyright. You don’t need to explicitly state, as long as the author is clear.
However it is highly questionable that priests are representatives of God. As God myself, I flatly reject that claim upfront.
Yes, but filing with the Copyright Office is a very good idea, unless the work is placed somewhere publicly visible, with a clear time-stamp. If you write something and leave it sitting in a folder in your office for several years, when someone steals it and publishes it, you’re going to have a hell of a time proving that you’re the rights holder, in court.
I usually settle for uploading the files to my webspace and leaving them there. The upload logs will suffice as evidence, in a court case.
And they say you can’t learn anything from webcomics. Well, me and my copyright law beg to differ!
GG should say that if Religion doesn’t want her to appear angelic, they can have the halo back – and stick it on the other lawyer’s head. Let’s see how he acts then.
That is probably how this is going to end. Either that, or on the judge.
And when the judge starts acting howlier-than-thou, BGG will kick him in his hammer…
Wait a minute he’s already acting howlier-than-thou!
Just point out that the Judge is agreeing with the devil, then watch what happens.
Not to mention that the priest practically forced her powers by performing an exorcism on an innocent child.
Are you saying that all religious people are wrong in their beliefs? Oh, yes I am, at least for the Abrahamanic ones: isn’t the Genesis proven wrong already? It is! Hence I denounce those preachers as scammers. It happened in Italy in fact…
Depends upon the version of Christianity. Most modern, liberal theists have pushed their god-concept off into a corner, making it unfalsifiable.
You have to evaluate each claim independently. The fundamentalist Christians will pull the sort of thing that you just did. Either the Bible is 100% true, or it’s 100% false. Then, in their arguments, the slightest confirmation of anything in the Bible provides evidence for everything in their religion being true, such as the real existence of a lot of the places mentioned in the Old Testament somehow proving that the events described in the Bible actually happened in those places. That’s not a rational position for them to take, and similarly, what you’ve said about Genesis doesn’t support your absolute position.
Anyone who claims that the events in Genesis through Joshua were real events is flat-out wrong. We’re as certain of that as it’s possible to be certain of anything.
However, the more reasonable, thoughtful Christians will say that everything before Saul, David, and Solomon is just a collection of stories told for some sort of moral purpose, or … something like that. Of course there’s some archaeological evidence that there really were kings named David and Solomon. They weren’t anything like the ones depicted in the Bible, however.
The hardest position you can take against that sort of believer, if you want to have a logically-defensible position, is that of basic skepticism. “There’s no good reason for me to believe the things you believe, and based upon the evidence you’ve provided, you don’t have a rational basis for your own acceptance of those beliefs, either.”
… or something to that effect.
In the US, of course, we have one of the highest concentrations of science-denying, fundamentalist Christians in the world, so that’s what you’re usually going to find yourself arguing against almost every time, if you’re over here.
There can be no “versions of Christianity” because all them agree in one thing: the Bible (both OT and NT) are “word of God”. They can disagree among each other about bishop authority and what not but not put words in their so-called “God’s” mouth.
I was trained as Christian in my youth, by none less than Jesuits, I know the job. No Jesuit stands 30 seconds debating theology against me, because I soon realized that the coolest and most genuine thing about Jesus was him as a kid smashing the rabbis to pieces. So I try with all my heart to imitate Jesus in that essential aspect of him, although I’m not Christian (nor Jewish nor Muslim nor any other label) at all: just another godly seeker.
Also, believe me, Jesuits are not that persuasive without the Inquisition. They are actually pretty boring and rather dumb in fact.
I know Christians of the type you say, many (most Catholics today in fact) but they can’t really be that: unless they totally throw to the trash bin all the OT, i.e. stop being Jewish altogether. I have yet to find one who is as daring as that: protestants, orthodox, catholics, puritans, muslims, mormons, baha’is… all types of Christians accept one way or another the OT, none rejects it as explicitly “false”, and that means the Genesis, and that means that they have been proven wrong (thank you Charles Darwin, William Wallace and so many others).
Fundy Xtians are right at the core (within their ideological paradigm): you can’t cherry-pick the Bible, unless you are willing to agree that all the rest is false, what not a single Xtian or equivalent does because they don’t have the guts to challenge their own tradition, because they are acritical sheep, something I’m sure Jesus himself would have if not hated at least disliked a lot.
“Then, in their arguments, the slightest confirmation of anything in the Bible provides evidence for everything in their religion being true”…
Well, that’s not how science works: science works by elimination, not by “proving things right”. Nothing at all can be proven “right beyond doubt”, only “not clearly wrong” as far as we can test. Science is not for people in need of “certainties” (no matter how false) but for seekers of truth.
“… the real existence of a lot of the places mentioned in the Old Testament somehow proving that the events described in the Bible actually happened in those places”.
Actually a lot of the OT is probably half-true. Most legends have a truthful core. But that’s not enough: if it is the word of “God”[TM], then every single passage must be true to the letter, and that’s where things go awry: either their “God” is imperfect, prone to error, or “he” is a liar, in any case not any “God” worth any respect.
The argument of Genesis being just just a tall tale for infantile humans, is one that contradicts what they (Catholics specifically, the most ambiguous of all) say in the mass: “it is God’s word”. If so, your “God” is not “truth” but actually a liar. The same scientific process can be applied to many other sections of the Bible, notably Apocalypse/Revelation, which can be easily proven wrong.
The only remaining Christian (or Jewish, or Muslim, etc.) legitimacy is “si no è vero, è ben trovatto”, but that’s love for literature and legend, not religion in any sustainable theological or philosophical sense. One can say that of Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion for instance, yet it does not make up the basis of any credible religion.
The problem of religious people of all sorts (excepting probably agnostic “spiritual” people without a dogma) is that they need certainties but those “certainties” are necessarily false, at least largely so. The only correct certainty is that nothing is too certain but they would never accept such an approach because it goes against their most basic psychological needs.
You’re dead in the water, right out of the gate, when you said this:
The “word of their god” has a very broad interpretation. In fact, that’s exactly the issue that we’re dealing with: interpretation. They aren’t sticking words into the mouth of their god; they’re interpreting the words that are already there, for the most part.
Various groups of Christians believe in all sorts of various things. If you want to stick with a strict interpretation of the Bible, you’re going to have to consider all Trinitarian Christians to not be real Christians, since the Trinity isn’t explicitly spelled out in the Bible.
It’s their belief system, though. What they believe about their holy book is their own issue. You can’t wade into the discussion, declaring that, “No, no, you don’t believe that! You believe this, because it’s what your holy book says, going by the strictest, fundamentalist reading of the text!”
Anyone that you tried that sort of thing against would accuse you of straw-manning their position. And they would be right. If you want to make those people reconcile their fuzzy, new-agey, Oprah-Christianity with the atrocities committed by their god in the Old Testament (or what moral lessons were being taught by telling stories about their god committing atrocities), then fine. Of course you need to be ready to deal with the “That’s the Old Testament; we have Jesus now,” argument, since it will inevitably make an appearance.
I was dealing with one atheist who wanted to settle the issue of what a god is, so that we would have a standardized target to attack, in theistic debates. If he went into a debate with a theist, declaring that this is what the theist believes, if he wants to call himself a theist … then yeah, the guy is propping up a straw-man, and the theist automatically wins.
I don’t care about discussing the finer points of Christian mythology/theology with the Christian. Until the Christian gives me a reason to take anything in the Bible seriously, it isn’t even a part of the discussion. In fact, that’s what the discussion is going to have to be about, since any Christian who just throws Bible quotes at someone who doesn’t accept the truth of anything in the Bible is an idiot who deserves nothing but mockery. I’m speaking on a philosophical level, not a theological one.
Atheism is a reactionary position. We can only respond to the claims that are being brought to the table by the theist, evaluating the claims and deciding whether or not we accept them.
Uh, yes, many effectively do. It’s allegory … or a metaphor … or a parable. Jesus told parables, right? So, Yahweh probably did the same, when dictating the Pentateuch.
That’s the sort of argument that you get from liberal theists. The parable interpretation even makes a sort of sense, even if I don’t take the foundation of their beliefs at all seriously.
They aren’t saying that it’s false, just that the events didn’t literally happen, if you can appreciate the difference.
I’m well aware. I was describing the sort of arguments that the theistic apologists make. That’s why I was speaking about the falsifiability of propositions, in my previous comment.
Personally, I’m a fan of Israel Finkelstein’s interpretation of the current archaeological evidence. I’ve read most of his books, along with those of several others.
The history of the OT is probably fairly accurate from a certain point up to the present day, even if those largely historical parts are mythologized a bit. Finkelstein places that point somewhere in the 7th century, BCE, I think it was. Maybe 8th century; I can’t remember … the rule of King Josiah, whenever that was. Everything before that is either a serious distortion of the actual events or was flat-out made up from scratch.
The conquest of Canaan never happened, for example. Everything before that is clearly mythical, either borrowed from the myths of the religions around them or made up from scratch. A few of the bits could have been based upon something, but I don’t accept your statement about ‘most’ legends having a truthful core. I wouldn’t try to put any kind of firm percentage on it, but I wouldn’t think it was anywhere near 50%.
Sometimes … quite often, really … people make things up, because they want an anecdote that supposedly proves a point that they were trying to convince someone of. For that matter, how much of the OT was a collection of random cultural stories and tall tales, later applied to the names of real, historical kings? That would be similar to the centuries-long process that ended with the names that we currently know being stuck onto the anonymously-written gospels.
And now you’re straw-manning them. Being true to the letter is not the same thing as being true. Like I said before, theologians have come up with hundreds of dodges, over the centuries, and you have the address the position of the person you’re facing.
If you try to argue against a fundamentalist position, when dealing with a liberal Christian … like I said, straw-man.
I’ve never encountered a liberal Christian who said that the Pentateuch is a collection of ‘tall tales’. They’ll generally characterize those parts of the Bible as some sort of parable, meant to teach some sort of moral or philosophical truth. Damned if I know what sort of moral truth they can extract from the genocide of The Flood, the genocide that took place during the Conquest of Canaan … or a prophet of Yahweh causing a pair of bears to tear apart 42 children, when he clearly could have used some other power of his god to get back at them for mocking his baldness.
I’ll leave that up to them to justify the immoral things in their holy book to themselves.
Revelation wasn’t even supposed to be a portrayal of anything happening in the future, according to most serious biblical scholars that I’ve read. It was written as a political commentary of the times in which the author found himself, written in code, using numerology and similar things. I don’t even know why it made it into the Bible, except perhaps that many early church fathers liked the wild imagery that they could use to terrify their flocks into line.
I wouldn’t say that we can prove Revelation ‘wrong’, as much as we can demonstrate that it almost certainly wasn’t intended to say what lots of Christians think it says.
I’m not interested on what they “believe”, I’m interested in the evidence on God, specifically here Yaveh, and that’s the Bible. If the Bible is wrong, then Yaveh is proven non-true. You can believe whatever you want but, scientifically speaking, that is the issue, unless you have some other “divine revelation” up your sleeve, in which case it falls outside of this discussion.
“Atheism is a reactionary position”.
Whatever. I’m not “atheist”, although I usually mark that box in opinion polls because it is the closest one (arguably). I’m Pantheist and Chaotist, at least most days. I have an improved “theory of God” than the one of the so called “theists” (and of atheists too, yes).
As for the core truth of the Bible’s legend, well, there’s also a core truth in the Iliad, and that does not make Aphrodite more real, except in my wettest and weirdest dreams. There is a core truth surely in the narration of Herakles and the Hesperides, yet that does not make Atlas a real being holding the sky (and not Earth as some modern representations suggest). So well, if we don’t want to begin ranting about very off topic matters of the final Mediterranean Bronze Age (very interesting no doubt), we better leave it here.
I’m not interested in the evidence for any god, or Yahweh in particular … or rather, I would be if there was any, but there isn’t any. I only care about what others believe. As far as I’m concerned, personally, the question is settled.
Nothing, which most people would consider a god, exists and cares enough about us to let us unambiguously know that it’s out there. There could be some sort of deistic god that created the universe and then buggered off to wherever he hangs out. There could be some sort of trickster god that just likes @#$%^*& around with us. None of the possible gods are ones that I would consider worshiping.
Every excuse that I’ve heard theists give, for why their god demands that we follow his commandments without him providing evidence that those commandments even come from him, rather than a bunch of megalomaniacal schizophrenics who lived a few thousand years ago, comes to the same result. “The god you’re worshiping is an asshole. Why would you worship someone like that?”
There could be any number of unfalsifiable gods, but unfalsifiable propositions are not to be taken seriously. If you can’t even conceive of what would prove that a proposition is wrong, to yourself or others, then you have no reason to ever think that it’s correct. If you want to throw around ridiculous, philosophical propositions with your friends, while you’re all drunk or high, that’s one thing. But once everyone has sobered back up, it’s time to go back to things that can be demonstrated within reality.
I have a great deal of interest in religion, from a fictional and cultural/anthropological perspective. I find the subject entertaining, and I find it useful for understanding things about our species. From a philosophical perspective, my primary interest is in helping others break out of their primitive, superstitious beliefs. So,what those people are bringing to the table is of utmost importance.
Sure, if anyone out there has evidence for something of a “spiritual” nature, I want to know about it, but I can’t see that ever happening. If there was anything of the sort within the bounds of reality, we would know about it by now. There have been so many people out there, desperately trying to show that their claims about some sort of non-material reality are true, and no one has been able to present us with anything that withstands scientific scrutiny. At a certain point, you have to just give up and accept that we’re alone here, in our physical reality, and that if there’s anything out there that cares what we think about it, it needs to damned well give us something unambiguous.
Also, you’re wrong about the Bible. Nothing in the Bible is evidence of or about Yahweh. The Bible is a collection if claims about this Yahweh guy. Those claims have to be examined and supported with evidence for and against, from outside of the Bible.
The second half of your statement doesn’t follow from the first half of your statement.
If the claims made in the Bible are incorrect, then Yahweh is not the kind of god that people claim he is. That’s as far as your conclusion about the Bible can take us.
Maybe Yahweh takes care of our souls (which I have no reason to think exist, but let’s roll with this) after we die, and he wants us to do things that will help us become better people in the next life. However, he’s far from omniscient, and he’s almost completely impotent within the material universe. And just once, within the history of our species, he was able to work up enough will and power to break through the barriers to our material universe, and he was able to communicate what he wants us to do, to a handful of Bronze-Age shepherds.
And those people completely screwed up his message, or Yahweh’s original message was corrupted by some power-hungry priests who changed his message to their own benefit. Off in the next life, Yahweh is sitting there cursing himself for screwing up so badly, in the one opportunity that he had to communicate his message to our species.
So, he totally exists, but the claims in the Christian Bible about him are utterly wrong or distorted beyond recognition. I can come up with dozens of other scenarios in which the being described in a holy book exists, but the holy book is absolutely wrong in what it claims about that being.
That’s why I’m a strict empiricist. And that’s why my primary concern on this subject is what other people believe about it.
Well, when you can properly articulate this proposal of yours, I’d love to hear it.
No, seriously, I’d love to hear it. I love philosophical discussions and bouncing around ideas with other people who are also interested in this sort of thing.
It can’t really be better than the atheistic proposition for gods, though. Our proposition is that we don’t accept the propositions put forth by any theistic people, at least those which have been proposed to us thus far. Anything more than that falls outside the bounds of atheism.
As a skeptic, I’ll believe something when the evidence for the proposition is sufficient to justify the acceptance of that proposition. Until that demand is met, I’ll withhold belief.
You’ve been a bit too vague about your position and your proposal (what you called a theory) for me to have an opinion on it either way.
Yes, but what about the Odyssey? Plenty of wet dreams in that one, as well. Circe is great for guys who like dangerous women, and Calypso is great for guys who like clingy, codependent women. Or those two could be great for women with those preferences, as well, if either of those characters swing both ways.
So, what is the core truth in The Odyssey? And no, you don’t get to use the Trojan War for that one, too. :-P
Sure, you can pull out plenty of examples of myths with a core of truth, but is that most of the myths out there?
Err, there is? Are we sure about that? A lot of the stories in Greek mythology are ones that people made up, either while horny out of their minds, drunk out of their minds, or both.
Do we have any real evidence for the existence of some guy who was the basis of the Herakles legends? Kevin Sorbo is a real guy, but I don’t think that’s sufficient evidence.
Hate to tell you this, man, but we went off-topic several comments back. :-D
Well, hopefully one or two other people around here are watching and getting something out of this.
Beliefs are irrelevant in any serious scientific (i.e. philosophical) discussion about “god”. What matters is what can be proven wrong and what can be considered plausible (nothing can be proven unmistakably correct). You argue Popperistically that one should provide the road to negative prove but that is not my business: it is that of my opponents in fact. Why would the defense attorney help the accusation? Please! Popper was wrong in sooo many things and this one is one of the most blatant ones. In fact most scientists consider the Popperian demand wrong but in any case it’s not the problem of the proponent but of the counterpart.
Unlike you I don’t make any difference between spirituality and science. My most intense spiritual moments are generally in connection to cosmology or nature (biology, ecology). And I’m not the only one: many scientists experience the same. Of course it’s a subjective matter: spirituality is always subjective, whatever makes you feel “trascendent” one way or another, usually by temporarily forgetting of the self and other material constraints.
“The second half of your statement doesn’t follow from the first half of your statement.”
It does: the ONLY argument for Yaveh is the Bible, if this one is false, then so is Yaveh. Q.E.D.
You then proceed to reinvent something you call Yaveh outside of the constraints of the Bible and then you are using one name to call some other thing: what you say is not Yaveh, you’re cheating with the nomenclature as much as if I say that my nose is Yaveh. Even if I could argue that my nose is God (I can but beyond the point here) it would not be Yaveh, because Yaveh is the god of the OT, the god of Judaism (all derived sects, incl. Christianity, Islam, etc.) and you cannot in good faith use that term to define some other idea of The Divine.
“… when you can properly articulate this proposal of yours, I’d love to hear it”.
I suggest you read Spinoza’s “Ethics”, first part (which I think it’s titled “On God” or “About God”).
Or anything else about Pantheism will probably do. The premise is that God is not and cannot be external nor finite. Hence everything, everyone is God or, if you wish, a divine avatar or manifestation.
I’ll continue with core-truths in Mythology in a separate answer.
This is preposterous, particularly on the second point.
Beliefs are definitely a part of science. If a pre-existing belief can be expressed as a testable, falsifiable proposition, then you have a working hypothesis. You can proceed from there to scientific testing of that hypothesis.
Just because pretty much every coherent, falsifiable claim made by religious sorts fails doesn’t mean they aren’t part of the scientific process.
Saying that beliefs have no place within a philosophical discussion is even more silly. Are you really trying to tell me that philosophy can’t address them? That’s just wrong.
And … umm … are you saying that you don’t care in the slightest what people in your society believe? You don’t want them to become more rational, moral people who will make your society better? That seems to be what you’re saying, when you dismiss the beliefs of others as mattering in any way.
That’s not how logic works. I don’t even know where to go with you, on this one.
If stories told about a being in a book are wrong, that does not mean that the being does not exist. Parson Weems wrote a book about the life of George Washington. Many of the stories in Parson Weems’s book are mythical, such as the popular story about the cherry tree.
The falsity of those stories in no way implies that George Washington did not exist. If you can’t see what a ridiculous argument it is that you’re making, then I don’t know how to help you understand.
You evaluate a set of claims on a claim-by-claim basis.
And no, it doesn’t matter if the only source for claims about Yahweh is the Christian Bible. That isn’t even true, but even if it was, that wouldn’t matter. What you’re saying is not a validly-constructed, logical statement.
Your statement is “These claims about this thing are false: therefore this thing does not exist.” That’s nothing approaching a valid argument construction. It’s an absolute non sequitur.
I don’t know what to say about all of the stuff you said about the Greek mythology, either. None of it amounts to evidence of a real historical core to the stories/myths. All of it is easily explained by people from various cultures wandering around, as they did, sharing their own cultural stories with others, as they did.
In a simple statement: I don’t buy it.
“Beliefs are definitely a part of science. If a pre-existing belief can be expressed as a testable, falsifiable proposition, then you have a working hypothesis.”
Sure, why not? But it belongs to the proponents of the hypothesis the search for evidence that can further advance it, and also even to articulate the hypothesis in terms scientific, something I’m pretty sure 99.99% of “believers” don’t even care about – because for them is not any “hypothesis” but “the absolute truth”, which needs of no evidence whatsoever and cannot be defeated no matter how much and how good negative evidence piles up.
“Just because pretty much every coherent, falsifiable claim made by religious sorts fails doesn’t mean they aren’t part of the scientific process”.
It does: because they won’t admit to the evidence, falling back outside the sphere of science into that of superstition.
“… are you saying that you don’t care in the slightest what people in your society believe?”
I care: I’m very much worried about irrational beliefs, particularly when organized in cult form, and I wish I had a magic wand to solve that irrationality issue. There’s already a tendency in favor of what I hope for but it is too slow.
“If stories told about a being in a book are wrong, that does not mean that the being does not exist”.
We are not discussing illiterate species described by third people, we are talking about a supposed all-knowing, all-powerful being that is believed to have dictated the book word by word himself. Otherwise the evidence would be even more feeble because nowhere in the book any evidence is presented in any way, much less in replicable ways (and of course there would not be any reason to have faith either, because it’d be all mere human opinion, maybe fantasy).
And, if we assume the hypothesis that (per the Bible) we are made at the image of the elusive being, then Yaveh is also a rational scientific-minded being, what makes even less likely that “he” intently makes replicability impossible. Rather than “the God”, it’d be Descartes’ demon, which was already discarded as most unlikely centuries ago. Although admittedly back then they did not know enough about virtual reality: the hypothesized holographic universe does not fit the Genesis anyhow.
“You evaluate a set of claims on a claim-by-claim basis”.
To demonstrate the set false you only need to demonstrate false one of the claims.
“it doesn’t matter if the only source for claims about Yahweh is the Christian Bible. That isn’t even true”…
If you remove the word “Christian” from that statement it is exactly true. The Bible (OT) is much more than just “Christian” and it is primarily Jewish (that’s why Christians, etc. are Jewish in fact). There are no substantive difference between the various OT versions.
“Your statement is “These claims about this thing are false: therefore this thing does not exist.” (…) It’s an absolute non sequitur.”
It’s absolutely correct in fact. You would not be saying what you say if I was talking of dragons rather than “God”, would you? You would much more easily accept that dragons are an imaginary human construct, regardless of the truthful core (say snakes) that underlies the myth. If you then change the parameters to claim not anymore dragons’ existence but snakes’ one, then you’d be first of all conceding on dragons’ non-existence.
Now, when you reformulate the Yaveh hypothesis without key elements (the dragon’s wings, fire breathing…, the creation story), then you are fundamentally altering the Yaveh hypothesis into something that is not anymore it but something else. Unlike what happens with snakes, which we are all familiar with, you still have to prove it.
Say that you go all the way, dump the Bible altogether, and adopt a pure deist perspective, in which the legend (biblical or otherwise) becomes irrelevant. Then you’d have a hypothesis but no evidence whatsoever: it’d be untestable. And going back to dragons, Carl Sagan wrote something about that, something that not only affects the Judaic view on god but any deistic approach to reality: where is your personal god distinct from reality, from the universe/multiverse/metaverse?, where is the evidence?, how is it any more credible than dragons or cyclops?
For Criswell’s sake, you two, just kiss already
Sorry, man. I don’t swing that way. You’ll have to go elsewhere for your gay porn.
How much are you paying?
“but what about the Odyssey?”
That’s a very good question because indeed the Odyssey is full of outright fantasy. Yet there is probably a core truth in the individual figure of Odysseus/Ulysses and his Ithaca Kingship problems, which is what the bard sings about. The griot fills the blank with all kind of fantasies (each of which may or not have some core-truth of its own but hard to discern) but he tells us the truth or a version of it in the Cretan Lie, when Ulysses pretends (confesses, it’s a wink to those-in-the-know in the original audience) that he was all those years in Egypt. That fits well with the chronology of the late “Sea Peoples” attacks, which should be right after the Trojan War: 1178 destruction of Ugarit, 1175 failed raid against Egypt, in which plausibly the historical Ulysses was taken prisoner.
Anyhow, it’s possible that I’m wrong and this legend’s core-truth does not exist but I think that there must be something to it.
“Err, there is?” [re. Hesperides]
Yes, I’m pretty sure. It is archaeologically demonstrated intense relations between the SE Spanish (and proto-Iberian) civilization of El Argar and Mycenaean Greece. Argarians adopted in the “B phase” the Greek custom of burial in “pithos” (large jars), while Greeks sometimes adopted the Iberian custom of burial in “tholos” (beehive tombs, also found in Ireland and other Western areas, always before Greece). The interaction is unmistakable in terms archaeological, in fact it was largely to the benefit of warlike Mycenaean Greeks, because the main tin deposits of the age were all at the Atlantic, being South Iberia a necessary port of call if not the direct middleman, and Greeks needed tin, lots of tin, to forge their Naue II type swords (and every other Bronze Age half-decent weapon or armor). Iberia also produced many other minerals like gold, silver and the more common copper, minerals that were historically exploited or traded by Phoenicians and Romans at later times.
Atlas is almost certainly a god of the South Iberian pantheon described by archaeologists as “antropomorph of jar-like arms” (“brazos en jarra” in Spanish) and more modernly claimed as tourist icon of the province of Almería with the invented new name of “índalo” (make an image search for this word and you’ll see how they imagined Atlas).
There is a parallel narration of Herakles in the Mediterranean Far West (i.e. the Hesperides, probably from Vesperus: the evening star), in which he fights the triple headed king Geriones and his minions. They are plausibly two versions of the same generic episode, whose real details we can only speculate about. A third version not involving Herakles but indeed Mycenaean Greeks, labeled as “Athenians” (Athens was one of the Mycenaean cities, as were Thebes, Argos, etc.) is the narration of Atlantis by Plato. A lot of the details that Plato attributes to Atlantis fit well with another South Iberian civilization, this one in Portugal, in the area of modern Lisbon (actually the main city, known as Castro do Zambujal is farther north, near Torres Vedras, and was back in the day connected to the Ocean by a “sea branch” of almost exactly the length Plato provides: 10 km, branch that was mysteriously silted at the end of the period, maybe by a tsunami). The key issue is anyhow again that we see in legend Bronze Age Greeks fighting wars in the Far West, in the Hesperides. So it’s three stories, all them converging to some core-truth, whose realistic detail we can only speculate about because no other source exist beyond these legends and the archaeological evidence, but that in general terms means that Mycenaean Greeks fought some wars in the Iberian Peninsula and looted parts of it at some point, much as they did with Crete, Troy, Ugarit and tried to do in Egypt as well. This conclusion is for me pretty much beyond question.
And yet it moves
I lost my copy of De Chelonian Mobile. Can I copy yours?
Somebody is working off a _lot_of anger over God’s Not Dead.
God’s Not Dead 2, you mean? Yeah, that movie was something else. There wasn’t a single thing in that movie that was even vaguely accurate, in regards to the actual legal state of affairs, here in the US. In real life, the ACLU would have been DEFENDING the woman who got sued, not prosecuting her.
Not that they ever even explained what the lawsuit was supposed to be over … what the charges were, what the civil complaint might be, why the school board was suing THEIR OWN FREAKING TEACHER.
I recommend the God Awful Movies podcast episode that covered it, from April 5th. FYI, explicit podcast.
He should be forced to prove that god is not dead for that sort of claim. Maybe suspend the charges until god can attend the hearing and provide some documents that he is alive.
I doubt Judge Hathorne over there would let that argument fly
Let me move this down to the bottom, since it’s turned into a nesting cluster-@#$%, Maju.
You’re wrong. Look up the MANTRA II study and the STEP project, if you want the two most recent major studies into intercessory prayer. You can start here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Studies_on_intercessory_prayer#The_MANTRA_study
The STEP project was run by the Templeton Foundation, which is a foundation that pursues this sort of religious stuff. Unlike most religious organizations, they actually have the integrity to report everything, including this one, which showed a negative impact upon patients who were being prayed for and knew they were being prayed for. The last I heard, people were still trying to account for that bizarre outcome … possibly some sort of induced stress … performance anxiety … I dunno.
Sure, after the absolute failure of the studies, most of the believers will start spin-doctoring the results like crazy, coming up with any excuse that they can. Note my usage of the word “most”. There’s a certain percentage of believers who are actually intellectually honest and can be snapped out of their religious brainwashing.
Those are the people we’re doing this for. In some of my own local atheist groups, we have at least 5 ex-preachers that I’m aware of, and most of the members are ex-believers. People can be snapped out of it.
That’s just wrong. The refusal of a portion of the population to accept the results doesn’t have the slightest effect upon whether or not the examination of the subject is a scientific inquiry.
Going by your statement here, the theory of Natural Selection and the simple observed fact of biological evolution are not matters for science, because those same fundamentalist nut-jobs refuse to accept the results. I don’t think you would agree to anything of the sort, so you have to accept that your statement here is false, if you want to be consistent.
Well, I’m doing something about it. The slow rate of progress is something that we just have to accept. Most social ills like racism, sexism, and homophobia are corrected by having the older generations die off.
If you want to change the world, you have to reach the kids. People under the age of 30, here in the US, are vastly less homophobic than their parents’ generation. They’re also vastly less religious. We should try to reach those in the older generations, as well, but we need to accept that we aren’t going to reach most.
———-
And with everything below that, we’re just retreading familiar ground. You can’t seem to separate the hypothesis (as you call it) about the being’s characteristics from the supposed being itself. And most of the claims of the Old Testament have almost nothing to do with the being of Yahweh, except perhaps in the most tangential form.
The mythical nature of the Flood of Noah and the Tower of Babel has pretty much no impact upon the character of Yahweh, except for demonstrating that he would be a flaming asshole, if he was real. You can remove those stories from the narrative, dismissing them as parables, and the rest of the case for that being remains untouched.
Plus, you seem to be stuck against the issue about the Omni’s. You’re ignoring the point that I’ve made a few times now. What if those characteristics are one of the sets of details that are inaccurate?
After all, if you read the Pentateuch without bringing any presuppositions to the text, the stories are obviously not describing an omniscient, omnipotent being. I don’t know how Christians manage to twist that one around within their minds to make the text describe what it doesn’t describe.
When Yahweh came out of the Ugaritic pantheon of gods, he was clearly not anything approaching what he morphed into by the New Testament’s writing. Most of the stories in the early Old Testament/Jewish Bible probably come from that set of mythology or from the stories told about the gods of other pantheons. When the Old Testament was compiled, the editors did a very bad job of smoothing the edges between the older, personified myths and the omni-max god of the Jewish prophets, in the later parts of the OT.
I hoped we could drop the debate, Narf, as suggested by Broken Eye. Incidentally kissing does not necessarily imply any sort of sexuality and I’m seriously offended by your apparent homophobia (I also “don’t swing that way” but have many gay friends and do kiss with some of them, as well as with some straight ones, often just as hello ritual). So I’d ask for an apology because I’m not keen at all to tolerate homophobia, sexism, racism or fascism. If I’m debating with a bigot, I’d rather not: rot in your misery alone.
Now, let’s assume that yoga or similar forms of oriental meditation do work (as seems quite likely, judging on some scientific data): does that mean that Shiva exists? Not necessarily. If you believe in a Rain God, does rain prove it true? Nope. So not sure which utility have those prayer research workshops, although I’m concerned about the ethics in the case where the patients get worse: are you doing evil witchery without knowing it? Beware!
“You can remove those stories from the narrative, dismissing them as parables, and the rest of the case for that being remains untouched”.
No you cannot if you accept that “he” is a truthful god, an all powerful god and that the Bible is directly inspired by “him”. These three tenets are part of the belief set of at least Judaism and Christianity, so if you find inaccuracies, more so such fantastic stories with no base whatsoever, you literally kill Yaveh. I think that was possible because science provides actual benefits that religion just doesn’t: scientists are much better medicine men than religious fanatics, at least in the plane of technological achievements: they get satellites in orbit and make deadly but effective nukes, among many other things, while priests and monks just parrot old stories and perform pointless rituals that have no use beyond social manipulation (and even in that TV and radio proved to be much much better).
” What if those characteristics [the “omnis”] are one of the sets of details that are inaccurate?”
Then it does not seem to fit the common notion of God, capitalized. It’d be a most a lesser god, not good enough for a monotheistic religion. If we have to go with a lesser god that created humankind out of clay and loved it enough to get martyred for us, Prometheus makes for a much much better story, also much shorter and much less demanding.
I haven’t read the Pentateuch in full, only the Genesis and Exodus, but it’s clear in the latter that Moses (Amenmese?) and Aaron were inventing a nameless god (initially sometimes “gods”) in order to allow people of various religious roots to coalesce more easily around their new warlike cult. After all it’s evident that Yaveh’s mythology is a mix of Egyptian (the creation is a total ripoff of Ptah’s creation without the good parts), Sumerian (the flood for example) and Semitic ideas (El), each of which had their own pantheon and legends. But they key role of Yaveh is I’d say as warrior god, lord of the armies, because they intend, much as Mohamed did much later, with much greater direct impact, to create a militarist theocracy to conquer lands (in this case Southern Canaan).
I leave it here and won’t reply anymore unless you offer a convincing apology on the nasty issue mentioned above. I don’t feel any need to debate with bigots, really.
I don’t know where you’re from, but in the US, kissing is pretty much an exclusively romantic activity. A little kid kissing a parent or something like that is different, but otherwise, no. People don’t generally kiss each other at random, over here.
If I went up to one of my gay friends and kissed him (there are several in my local atheist groups, which isn’t surprising, considering how Christians treated them), he would probably be freaked out. The most that ever happens is a hug.
If you can’t follow the joke, it isn’t my problem. Read my last sentence in that comment, and it should be pretty freaking obvious. I’m not going to apologize for homophobia that wasn’t there.
“Evil witchery”? Heh heh heh heh heh. Are you serious? Please tell me you’re joking.
There are no ethics issues involved. They ran a double-blinded study over a period of several years. You can look up their methodology on Duke University’s website. A simple Google search of the study’s name should turn up the paper, which is publicly available. The one statistical anomaly was the fact that the one group — people who were being prayed for and knew they were being prayed for — came back with bizarre figures: the opposite of what anyone was expecting. There are people who are currently looking into potential psychosomatic causes of that anomaly.
It wasn’t a “workshop”. It was a long-running, scientific study on the effects of intercessory prayer. It had a null effect.
As for the utility of the study: this is what I’ve been trying to get through to you. Christians make a claim, that intercessory prayer can help people who are sick. It’s a testable, falsifiable claim, so they did a study to test it. The claim was falsified, as the results indicated no statistical difference between people who were prayed for and people who weren’t, except for that one group which had the bizarre, reverse effect.
Do you understand what a parable is? Jesus used them nonstop, in the New Testament.
I don’t ever capitalize the word god. If I’m speaking of the god of the Abrahamic religions, I use his proper name, Yahweh.
And you should say that the current incarnations of the Abrahamic religions won’t accept a lesser god. Zoroastrianism doesn’t have an omni-max god. Or at least many versions of it don’t; I can’t speak to all versions of the religion. Zoroastrianism has morphed considerably, since 1,000 BCE. Most versions are monotheistic, but there are some versions that are dualistic, some that are polytheistic, and some that are a more complex mess of theology.
And as I already said in a previous comment, there’s considerable evidence that early versions of Yahweh were neither omniscient nor omnipotent. The Ugaritic pantheon of the early Canaanites included a creator god, El, and a war god, Yahweh, which were later merged together into the Hebrew, monotheistic god. The “we” in Genesis is probably a reference to the pantheon from which El and Yahweh came.
I’ve read the Bible, cover to cover; Catholic version, with the Apocrypha.
Actually, the scholarly consensus of archaeologists (barring the young-Earth creationist, fundamentalist ones) is that the conquest of Canaan never happened. The Jews were never in Egypt, as described in Exodus, and Moses, Aaron, and Joshua almost certainly never existed.
Also, the early part of the Jewish scriptures are full of anachronisms. Many of the wars described in the first several hundred years of Kings and Chronicles were fought against tribes that didn’t migrate into the area until long after the wars were supposedly fought.
Israel Feinkelstein, as I mentioned before, believes that the early history of the Judaic kings was assembled sometime in the 7th or 8th century BCE, much of it filled in with mythology, from barely remembered previous kings. The Bible Unearthed is a very interesting read, if you’re interested in that sort of thing.
The accumulation of the myths in the early Pentateuch was probably a bit more complex and messy than what you described, but a lot of what you said it a pretty good guess. They probably got a lot from the Sumerians … a bit less from the Egyptians … and the core of the religion probably grew from the pantheon of Ugarit, the earlier civilization in the area near Canaan.
That’s pretty much correct, going from my reading on the Ugaritic pantheon. As their war god, Yahweh’s behavior makes a hell of a lot more sense than that of a supposedly omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent god.
Like I said, there was no bigotry there. You misread a joke. I’m not going to issue an insincere, “I’m sorry if you were offended,” apology, when there was nothing there to apologize for. I hate when politicians do that, because their public-relations people said that they should issue a public apology.
Your call, man.
Just found something interesting: Part of an official statement by the US Copyright Office:
The office will not register works produced by nature, animals, or plants. Likewise, the Office cannot register a work purportedly created by divine or supernatural beings, although the office may register a work where where the application or deposit copy(ies) state that the work was influenced by a divine spirit.
In other words, God is legally prohibited from owning the copyright on anything.
I say screw them all. They took billions of dollars out of our pockets already in the ILLEGAL, UNCONSTITUTIONAL GOVERNMENT BAIL OUT – It you’re in debt that you can’t pay….FILE FOR BANKRUPTCY. It’s not as bad as you think it is. Talk to a lawyer. If you can’t afford the lawyer, call your county’s Bar Association, they will be able to point you in the right direction to get legal help.
First off… where the hell is this coming from?
Second, I agree that the bailout was a bad decision on any number of different fronts (including economic, ethical, and common fucking sense reasons), but I also know that there is absolutely nothing about anything even remotely like that sort of thing in the Constitution or any of its amendments. Go read it if you don’t believe me. Don’t worry, I’ll wait. Oh, and it wasn’t illegal either. Just stupid.
It’s a spambot, man.
Hi, I hope to join you guys on the next BonPen Festival, I’ve hear great stories of your experience there. On the side may be it would a sight if I experience Pipay’s halo halo
Sheesh, now I see why they are cheap.
God is not a legal person (whether it exists or not), so it can’t hold copyright.