A simple question that can have a very complicated answer depending on the depth and philosophical route you wish to take. This is not some kind of mid-life crisis or existential crisis video, its an explanation of how you cannot fully answer who you are no matter how deep your answers may be, how you cannot fully know another and my advice for dealing with it.
I asked God, why did you take my loved one?
His reply came in a letter which read ” Dear son or daughter of god, your life is important to me. Please wait patiently for your answer, you will know when you have it.”
Man, I thought, that’s weird why not answer right away? maybe it’s to teach me something… so I waited and pondered the question.
Later that year I got another letter which read “Dear Richard, you have experienced loss and it must hurt terribly, though I know the feeling of loss because I sent my son there and he died for your sins so if you wouldn’t bother me with the minute portions of my plan I would appreciate it if you would only concern me with matters of pertinence” signed sincerely yours God.
Well, that sucks yeah his son died for my sins was that a guilt trip to get me to go along and not question? What does he mean his minute portions of his plan? what a cop out! he seems so overt and uninterested in my life. So I called his number that I got from a priest through a book that was written in Latin, translated into Hebrew, translated into German, and then translated into English, and then revised into a conservative novella about the desperation of a gay man on an island filled with beautiful women, but since he’s gay God kills him and the women die too after the flood that only saved the cockroaches because the cockroaches are the only things that truly obey gods will and that is why they would survive a nuclear holocaust. The number was thus : 3.14. in puzzlement I re-read the number and was puzzled all over again, or rather the puzzle had me. Anyway I dial 3.14 into my cell phone and I get the operator asking what the hell i thought i was doing I quickly hang up and thought hard… I asked my pastor what it might mean and he said something about 3.14 being proof of God’s existence, though he didn’t explain why. hmmm proof of God without validation well I’ve swallowed things larger than dogma so I let it slide. Eventually I learn that 3.14 is what you get when you divide the something by something else that is geometrically significant about a circle… I think it was a circle… anyway so I dial in the seven digit number — the others must have gotten lost in the translations. The other line picked up and a woman said in a nasally prude and obnoxious fashion — like a Mormon I thought — she said “suicide help line” there was clatter in the background of a thousand calls being answered by a thousand different people. I said ” um, I need to talk to God” the reply was quick and sounded rehearsed ” Are you feeling suicidal? have you thought about suicide and how to do it? could I call anyone to talk you down from the ledge… ” and then a totally unsatisfying “my friend?” “No, I just wanted some answers.” To which her response was ” Hold please while a traaaaansfer you.”
While on hold I was listening to Prince, and while tapping my toes half impatiently and half with the beat I thought about how weird that raspberry beret would be God’s hold music for the suicide line. After waiting so long I nearly dozed the other line cut off meat loaf singing ” I would do anything for love, but I won’t do” I guess I’ll never know what he wouldn’t do I thought “Sir? are you there?” I heard on the other line “Yes” I replied, ” Is god there?” “I’m sorry sir, God doesn’t answer calls. But maybe I can help you, I’m a certified tech support engineer.” “Tech support?” I said incredulous. How could I have gotten to tech support? “Yes sir, we handle all kinds of things now, we have India to compete with.” I assumed this was some sort of tech support joke and continued in the same vein ” I need to talk to God, it’s important I need some answers.” He said ” I understand your concern sir, but I’m fairly sure that I can be of some assistance today.” To which I said ” Okay, well I needed to know why my loved one was taken from me and I am to live the rest of my life without someone whom I love dearly and can never forget. Nor will my heart heal from this for as long as I live. Now, sir I would like to know why” His reply was slow as if looking it up in a book or something. ” Are you experiencing any pains? headache, nausea, diarrhea, suicidal thoughts, or homicidal thoughts?” he said, and “no on all counts” was my reply. “Then what seems to be the problem?” he said. ” Are you serious? get me to someone who can answer my question!”. The line went dead and my heart dropped… Then there was a ringing on the line that started just as I was about to hang it up…
To be continued…
I’ve spent many years in this debate.
I have spent many many years trying to define the good parts of what makes “Christ’s army” such a wonderful thing.
What I’ve found is that most people that consider themselves Christian are in fact complete dickholes.
They’ll preach to anybody and instead of being benevolent they’ll still speed and break rules and flip people off while driving as well as shooting people, murdering and raping people incapable of protecting themselves… joining gangs… watching Glen Beck…
These people are the biggest dichotomy of today’s life, they claim to love everyone as God’s children or Jesus’ sheep, when in fact they’re so angry that they have such a retarded life of stupid retardation that they think they need to take over the world with Christiandom such that they can experience the wonderful world of the US of A in the same way we do.
This includes racism (Obama is hated by retards for example) and complicated hatred towards things that escape ignorance (Such as the Health Care bill).
This country is in need of many changes and upgrades and new ideas in such a way that it disgusts me that this country is so set on destroying the constitution in such a matter as calling the creators of this wonderful country a bunch of undereducated individuals that couldn’t think 200 years in the future…
We are all flawed, the only people that don’t believe that we are all flawed are those retards that are still Christian.
For fuck’s sake.
We live in a logical and mature society, why is there still a God argument.
I have no problem with people believing in God, I have a problem telling me that there is a God that hates me because I don’t believe there is a God.
What doesn’t make any sense is why there is hate towards me from Humans that have never met me but have apparently met God… even though I believe that if there is a God that God invented everything, therefore he invented hate and war and rape and incest and love and giving and cuddles and puppies.
What I want to understand is why with God people cannot love and without God so many do love.
Let’s discuss, when people of God’s Army decide that something is right or wrong without any reason than a book that can’t make up its mind, they fight and fight and fight for the misinterpretation of Humans over the ages and the bias of religious idiots.
Whereas those of us that don’t believe in a God we believe in right and wrong, we believe that we will be held accountable for all the things we do right and wrong.
Why is this different?
Christians believe that as long as they repent and get forgiveness from another idiot that believes what they believe they don’t have to atone for the things they believe is wrong.
Those of us that don’t believe in God believe that tomorrow we might have to deal with our consequences.
So again… what’s the difference?
Christians believe they can get away with anything, and those of us that don’t believe in God don’t.
So what does that mean to the retards that are going to comment on this shit?
That means that those of you that believe in God that you can still speed and flip people off while you’re driving, and those of us that don’t believe in God won’t speed and won’t be idiots in traffic with you.
Just want you to know, those of us that aren’t angry all the time, we’re probably not Christian.
Love,
Fester.
There are many people in the world who claim to have proof of god’s existence, the proof comes in many forms and is usually quite different from evidence and is usually in the form of a random occurrence or a personal experience or personal interpretation of an event. Opposed to all those kinds of proofs Descartes’ proofs are much better and more well thought out than most. Some people claim that if something is complex and that person is unable to see a way that it could have evolved they automatically claim that it is irreducibly complex (and therefore god exists) unfortunately for them this is usually an argument from either personal incredulity or ignorance. There are people who claim that there are proofs of other worlds in the electromagnetic spectrum and since there are anomalies in random places it is proof of spiritual influence of some kind, but this is unfounded and only plausible to people who are not acquainted with how electromagnetic fields can be produced. Some say that they have had personal revelation, but I fear that most of them are liars, opportunists or people who have a certain form of epilepsy that causes experiences similar to out of body experiences or near death experiences. In none of these does Descartes make his case and his proofs are harder to disprove than the others though he falls very short of finding evidence for God.
The cause of the dilemma – does god exist or not? The dilemma is caused by many issues of the human condition that have been proven and evidenced in history, anthropology, psychology, and other sciences. It is as simple as asking the question “why do people believe in god?”. People are probably inclined to believe in god or at least were inclined as such because of the lack of knowledge of natural phenomena and it’s causes. The original belief of early humans was likely that of animism. Animism is a belief that everything has a spirit and a consciousness. Because in early humans it was probably easier to get along with this belief and had some advantages because things were understood to be another being, perhaps even on an equal footing with ones-self. After this it became something a little less animistic and it is the belief that all things have a god behind them that is the cause of them. Perhaps all things is a bit of an overstatement but not by much, many times in ancient history there are gods for almost everything. This polytheism was the common belief for a long time after the neolithic revolution in which men began to live not as wandering vagabonds but as food growers and animal raisers. It was only but recently – about 2000 years ago – that monotheism became popular and with it came large organized religions, the majority that we have today are monotheistic and this is the god that Descartes is trying to prove in both “meditations on first philosophy” and in his “Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason and Seeking for Truth in the Sciences” though the former will be the focus of this text.
Almost in the beginning of the fourth meditation Descartes states “That it is impossible that god should ever deceive me.” (Meditations on First Philosophy 510) This belief perhaps was not proven wrong then and some would say even now it is still true. Though the proof for god is non existent at least in the form of tangible evidence. Every piece of evidence that is found supports a universe where not random chance nor a designing god is the reigning power but something even simpler and more majestic in every way I can imagine. When he states that “it is impossible that God should ever deceive me.” (Meditations on First Philosophy 510) it seems that in order for a god that cannot lie, in order for him to exist in a world where evidence for him to exist he would have to have planted evidence contrary to his existence for all of the things that we now find. Such as the tree ring dating system which is accurate to the year proves that the world is at least 13,000 years old so young earth creation would be impossible. The fact that the only evidence for the beginning of the universe points to a big bang and not to a designer.
Descartes also tries to give God all the credit for the judgment that is inherently in him. Judgment in itself is in no way proof of a God or a designer. The faculty to judge things is not inherently human nor is it in any way perfect in any thing that we now know to exist. The ability to judge is something that would have been weighted high on the scale of values of things that were naturally selected for. Things without the ability to judge or without the power to use it would die off quickly for either being too ineffective in hunting for food because they couldn’t judge many things such as distance, speed, direction or intent. All of these things are part of the ability to judge.
There was not a valid alternative to belief in a god or gods. So his understanding of how natural things are can probably be understood, and it is because of the fact that he was probably raised in religion his whole life so as to make his belief in god a part of his subconscious and as such probably superseded all his other preconceptions. This is probably why when, try as he might, he attempts to remove all of his preconceptions but fails in this one because it is so inherent in his nature because of it being a part of his life from during his primary enculturation in which most of a person’s understanding of the culture in which they live is learned. For him it included the belief in god and in such a way as to be imperceptible to him. He then tries to assert that “he surely did not give me the kind of faculty which would ever enable me to go wrong[...]” (Meditations on First Philosophy 510.2) And in this he does a fairly good job in proving that if one removes all assumptions and attempts to try to find only those things which can be known without doubt. Though in this he is mistaken in the fact that he can imagine himself without his body and that there must surely be a self separate from the body. There is indeed the mental perception of having an consciousness outside that of the body and is perhaps hard to overcome even with the evidence to the contrary. If the body was separate from the intelligence behind it it would certainly not be damaged along with the body though this is inevitably the case that when the brain is damaged it can limit speech, mobility, understanding, and many other things which would be considered part of the soul and yet the ability to use them are damaged when certain parts of the brain are impaired.
In his third meditation he says “The mere fact that God created me is a very strong basis for believing that I am somehow made in his image and likeness.” (Meditations on First Philosophy 509.2) But how can this be? He claims that he is made in Gods image simply because God made him. The idea sounds poetic and pleasing yet there is something very wrong with it. God also made the hideous angler fish and every disease and every planet and moon by his thinking and they cannot all be in Gods image for the simple fact that they do not all look alike, nor do they even have the same scale. If he were a dog would he think that he was made in God’s image even though religious men claim that right for their own? Yet he made the dog as well as man by his thinking and they do not share in likeness.
Descartes also states “that I exist and have within me an idea of a most perfect being, that is, God, provides a very clear proof that God indeed exists.” (Meditations on First Philosophy 509.2) This is total fallacy! I cannot imagine how one could think that just because they have an idea of something perfect that it is proof of the existence of the thing. Perhaps my imagined perfect thing is not the same, could it be that it exists because I can have a clear idea of it?
Perhaps this was taken a little out of context, perhaps he means that he can imagine only two constants so far, his mind and God. Though his mind he would consider his spirit because his body may not even exist and God he believes to be the body of perfection that every thing that is good is embodied in is this one being called God. But even that must not be so, if everything that was good was placed in a being, as well as unlimited power, knowledge and intelligence could that being possibly be in existence because with benevolence comes the necessity to do good and not just know good. If there was one who was in existence who knew the best thing for the human race, or the entire world for that matter would not such a being be pressed to help out? In all that we have here, in all that we have done to one another and to the other creatures and even to the earth, could he not be good enough to help? We are fighting wars against people who think killing infidels is how you get straight to heaven, men and women are dying fighting a group of people who would use handicapped people to blow innocent people up. The most atrocious wars ever fought were fought in the name of God and in his name millions have died. No Rene Descartes does not prove God, he only proves that he can only imagine a world where God exists also known as the argument from ignorance.
There are a lot of people that can be right all the time despite having no idea about what they are talking about and pulling “facts” out of their asses. You see, being right is more about attitude and speaking the right way than it is about the truth. After reading this series you will be able to be right all the time just like Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Kent Hovind, Kirk Cameron, Sean Hannity, Ray Comfort, Ann Coulter and other assholes.
You Prove it
Their ideas always need proof, but your ideas need to be proven wrong. See right there is best way to always be right and save you time from thinking or paying attention. The goal here is to make them do all the work by both proving themselves right and making them prove you wrong. If they fail to prove themselves right, then they are wrong. If they don’t prove you wrong, then you are right. Its that simple.
Their Invalid Source
No matter where they get their source from, remember to always tell them how biased the data is because of the source. Remember the double standard tactic, only your data can be trusted. Unless their data helps you out, or at least appears to. But never work with their whole data source, just the parts that help you, even if you have to take it out of context.
Showing Emotion
In this case, and every case you want to be seen in, yell a lot. Anger and sadness are the only good emotions. Showing emotion is easy, even if you don’t really care. All you have to do is yell. Just yell all the time and it will show how much you care. Also you can attempt to cry, even if you don’t succeed in producing tears, showing that you are sad because of what they are implying shows the audience that you are serious. Being calm and reasonable only shows how little you care and how dishonest you are, so yell and cry.
Everything Leads to Nuclear War
If your opponent is saying that something is not bad, you need to make up… show how easily the not so bad thing can lead to much worse things. By “show” I don’t mean with facts and data, mere speculation will work just fine. For instance: gay marriage will make being gay more accepted, children will soon be fine with being gay, the children will grow up to be gay then eventually everyone will be gay and no one will be reproducing and the human race will end. It doesn’t matter that there is no data or evidence of any kind to support this wild speculation, but all you have to do is say with confidence and fearful, irrational, ignorant and hate filled people will believe you (which is a majority of the human race).
Hey there kids, it’s time again for some enlightenment in the form of juxtaposition. Today we’re going to talk about the argument from ignorance entitled irreducible complexity and how science disproves it.
The argument about irreducible complexity is simple, an organ like an eye for example couldn’t be of any use if it were half of an eye so the eye is irreducibly complex because if you make it any less of an eye it would not function. Similarly if you took a brick bridge that used only stone and no mortar at all it would require that all the stones in the pile rely on the others, remove one and the whole thing collapses ergo irreducibly complex. In the way that an organ that has one purpose, and couldn’t serve that purpose well if it were any less than it is, it must be irreducibly complex.
The scientific refute of irreducible complexity is obviously more scientific, logical and straight forward without obvious logical fallacies. Irreducible complexity is an easy claim to make because of the fact that it requires little or no research to make a statement that something is irreducibly complex. Science however has to research and painstakingly work to fight the false allegation that anything is irreducibly complex. Using the scientific method we have found that things like our brains which may be considered irreducibly complex because of the functions that it accomplishes but it has been changing along with homo sapien evolution. It is more logical of an argument because it is based on study and theory (not theory in the mainstream sense which is closer to hypothesis but actu
al theory) and is peer reviewed. The peer review process for any scientific theory is a harsh one, a scientist wants to state a claim on something. so first he goes out and tests a hypothesis refines it into a theory and then he’s done right? wrong! he then needs to write on the study he had done and send it to peers. the peers then tear apart his theory, his hypothesis and probably his pride and then after a long process of rewriting and deleting parts of his life (or so it seems) then he can publish in a peer reviewed journal. And that’s for non controversial theories. Anyway i don’t point this out to prove that science is hard, though it is, i point it out simply to show that things need to be reviewed in science. However in non scientific fields it is not required to do anything but shoot your mouth off! The bacterial flagella motor is one of the common things that a ID (Intelligent design is the main belief behind irreducible complexity) believers will put forth, however if you do a google search on the bacterial flagella motor or if you read “the god delusion” by Richard Dawkins it will clear that one up real good, and will definitely be worth your while even if you’re a believer.
Wings, eyeballs and brains.
There have been irreducible complexity purveyors who believe that things such as wings would not be useful at all if they were anything less of a wing… this is SILLY TALK simply because penguins have wings that they use under the water as well as some other birds do in the air, it could be considered less of a wing than that of the other flying birds but it is perhaps more useful for a bird in this area of the world because flying has no evolutionary advantage for penguins. There are also the ‘flying squirrels’ who have well less of a wing than say a bat. but still the wings do their job for gliding, though the squirrels can’t flap their wings and fly long distances the gliding that they can accomplish is well enough for their species to accomplish whatever tasks are required by them. 
Eyeballs, this is another one of those things that the woo guys over in the magical world of irreducible complexity like to put out there that humans have the most advanced eyes of all creatures and that they are irreducibly complex because if you cut an eyeball in half it wouldn’t work. Well let me just throw out there that humans don’t have the most advanced eyes and if a God made us and wanted us to be the best at everything wouldn’t he have given us the best of everything? like eyes? well i guess that’s another mark on the evolution side because the Mantis Shrimp has THE most advanced eyes of all the animal kingdom, it can move both eyes separately and can see three kinds of polarized light. We need glasses to see polarized light, these guys are born with it we should complain to god for better eyes, or perhaps you’re playing with yourself too much — you’ll go blind you know! And now to confront the irreducible complexity. C’mon, seriously you think that an eyeball that couldn’t see as good as our current eyeball would be as bad as not having an eyeball at all? well why don’t we ask the animal kingdom, there are animals out there like moles who have horrible eyesight but still have eyes, though their eyes are not as good as ours, and they can’t really see anything above blurred shapes and light and dark. I would consider that a lot less than a human eye, so irreducibly complex? i don’t think so!
Brains, this is an easy one. Our brains are not irreducibly complex because we have proof that our brains evolved along with us. look at prehistoric hominids, they have much smaller brain holes in their heads and yet still functioned enough to reproduce and even evolve into us eventually.
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.
The waves beside them danced, but they
Out-did the sparkling leaves in glee;
A poet could not be but gay,
In such a jocund company!
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:
For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.