Assignment thread -- God

[Blake]

You are correct; hence the mystery of faith. There is no way we could even begin to understand God's reasoning.(Is 55:8) God could explain everything He does to you and your only gurarantee is you will not understand a word.

Then he sucked at creating man.

Also correct is that God did not write the Bible. People did. In fact, the books of the Bible were written decades apart from each other. Even the gospels are men's accounts of the life of Jesus Christ. The fundamentalists have it all too wrong when it comes to the interpretation of the Bible.

(Is 55:8): "For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
neither are your ways my ways,"
declares the LORD.

so did Isaiah write the book by himself or did God tell him in a declaration what to write.

[Blake]

this

wow beefanus actually has some decent posts that make sense

keep it up, anus

nah, it still fails.

The message of the Bible is inconsistent.

[sabar]

Nothing would change with this revelation. The only people that would go nuts are the ones whose sanity is only held together by their faith. They are the extreme minority and would get put down quickly.

Also, living a life of pure evil would be against common sense. If you start murdering, raping, and stealing because of this then you quickly realize that everyone else can too. The problem? You'll get reborn into the chaotic world that you contributed towards. It is in everyone's best interest to stay civil. The only other alternative is human extinction so you are not reborn into chaos.

The religious would continue to worship or move on. A few will go nuts.

How many people really do good as opposed to just staying in line? I don't see a whole of a lot of people making a lifestyle out of sacrificing for the betterment of others, and among those who do, I don't necessarily see a whole lot of correlation with religious belief.

Easily the majority do good. Most people would not pull the trigger of a gun pointed at someone even if they were assured there would be no consequences. Most people won't leave a child drowning in a fountain even if no one will ever know if they didn't do it. Rational agents throw themselves on grenades to save people they barely know. Our altruism is instinctive towards our species. Humans are not individuals by nature; they are part of a society, a family, a community. We tend to act like a pack of dogs, not a lone cat. This feeling of family diminishes with higher tiers of organization (family, neighbor, community, city, state, world).

Religion is not needed to make a rational argument towards acting morally good. Many philosophers figured this out ages ago when religion was far more widespread than it is now. All the reincarnation revelation does is reinforce these points, because you are brought back into the world that you are destroying. If anyone would go nuts, it should be atheists who think there is nothing post death and hence your actions would have no consequences on you after you die. Yet, they act just as much in line as anyone else.

[JamStone]

Interesting take that has some merit and value, but I don't completely agree.

While I do think there would be some--maybe more than I initially had thought even--who would remain morally good and civil out of common decency, I think there would be a marked e in chaos and disregard for common decency, including significant rise in crimes like murder, rape, robbery, as well as selfish acts of indulgence like adultery and promiscuity/fornication.

I don't believe altruism is instinctive. I think it's a social construct born out of man's need for reason, just like religion. You take out certain givens from the notion of human life, and you take away some of the need for certain social constructs, at least to some degree. Some people, perhaps many, do good out of their sense of common decency, yet that sense is predicated on each person's notion of either religion or some other man-construct of rules and law, whether or not it's by its foundation related to faith.

I have to believe with what is assumed in the original post, that there would be enough people to take it towards the direction of anarchy to a greater degree than it is now to make it pretty significant. For tens of thousands of years, if not longer, there has been religion to guide man and it didn't prevent hundreds of civil wars, empire building, World Wars, massacres, nationwide to worldwide slavery, along with other atrocities we've seen in the history of man. You give individuals the notion that there is no notion of judgment or consequence at a higher level beyond prison, and then you give individuals reason to do things only once imaginable on larger scales by kings and empires and nations.

Would it be full blown chaos? Perhaps not. But, the world is already ed up the way it is... despite religion and perhaps in part because of it. There are millions of examples currently and in the history of the world proving what man is capable of if given reason, or scarier given no reason. That's with religion and faith and a widely regarded idea of afterlife already believed by the majority of the world. You change it and you change the mindset of millions, maybe more.

Altruism isn't an instinct. Humans are not born with a sense of common decency or a moral value system. Those are all social constructs. At base, we are animalistic, primordial, savage. Reason made man different and he had to invent religion in order to justify his reason. Change the notions of religion, you change his reason.