I beg to differ slightly to what Bencard says here:
just because laws are constantly violated doesn’t mean they are unnecessary, rape, sexual assault, incest, etc. will always be committed – so is murder,robbery, etc., but the laws punishing them are by no means “futile”.
Whilst laws against sexual assault are definitely necessary, there is something to be said about laws that infringe unreasonably on an individual’s unique moral sensibilities.
So I thought I’d take a stab at exploring what I think is an anomalous assertion that a correlation exists between permissiveness and moral degeneration. I believe, to the contrary, that more permissive societies tend to be more sustainably ethical and routinely see their ethical frameworks progressively evolve.
Therefore the REAL correlation I see is that societies that apply the most repressive controls over thought are the ones that remain the most backward and stagnant while the ones that encourage free thought and allow the knowledge marketplace a reasonable degree of self-regulation (memetic Darwinism) are the most progressive. I therefore join Cocoy in asserting that Villar’s Senate anti-”obscenity” Bill 2464 is a step backward towards medieval primitivism.
The minute you grant a person or entity the authority to make pronouncements and edicts about what is “moral” outside of what can be captured and debated within a coherent ehtical framework, you get as Cocoy asserted the equivalent of a Taliban in your society. An inclination towards Talibanism seems to have its roots in our perverse fear of seeing our own kids lose their innocence — a fear that the Book of Genesis plays on. It seems the Eve’s key role in the Original Sin and the naked female form that came to symbolise it has become the strawman of choice upon which the power of organised religion has been built and the primitive moralism it spawned in the minds of people like Villar.
It Was after all through the fault of Eve and the Serpent that “Man” got kicked out of Paradise — thus setting men down the path of a chronic inability to take personal accountability for “moral” depravity.
But then as Cocoy says:
I hope to have the wisdom to trust that what I and my wife have taught [our children-to-be] to be adequate tools to get them some footing in life.
As to kids, I have two myself. But I’d like to think that parenting is a progressive phasing out of one’s self from your kids’ lives as you replace your direct presence and influence with a proper set of tools to help them think their way independently through life and evaluate the myriad of stuff that they will come across in their own lives. At some point they become ADULT individuals and presumably have an individual right and, presumably, a good head on their shoulders to help them do the right thing.
So i believe that a Talibanesque law such as what Villar proposes does not solve the underlying issue in a primitive society such as the Philippines — a need to develop an ethic of thinking and an ethic of parenting that encourages thinking.
Ultimately those kinds of moronic bills are manifestations of the Medieval mindset that organised religion has so effectively ingrained into the very fabric of the Pinoy mind.
I wrote way back here that;
The Catholic Church has reduced Filipinos to a guilt-ravaged people and the chaos that continues to engulf the country is a manifestation of an entire people’s struggle to come to terms with this guilt. It is a guilt that Filipinos cannot understand because it emanates from a conscience that was nurtured by negative re-enforcement — behavioural queues burnt into the psyche by fear of punishment and anticipation of reward rather than simple appreciation of personal fulfilment. One side of us clings to religious sacraments as a validation of our continued compliance to the black and white rules of our formal Catholic training and the other side gropes around for an alternate code ethics to deal with the real world of grey areas and a constant information deluge from other cultures. Spiritually, the Filipino is like a computer that is shoddily programmed to deal with situations that are not applicable to its environment. Anyone who’s used such a computer is familiar with the annoying if not disastrous results.
I once came up with a theory of how the Gay Gene somehow managed to survive natural selection considering that left to its devices, it drives behaviour that does not favour procreation (note that this by no means should be construed as some kind of anti-homosexual sentiment on my part). It seems that the Gay Gene survived because of social pressures (in their extreme forms embodied by the various Moral Gestapos such as the Taliban and the Inquisition, etc.) that forced homosexuals underground throughout history and therefore conform to social “norms” which included marrying the opposite sex and having kids through which the gene was propagated.
How’s that for irony? It may have been through the tyranny of moralism that the Gay Gene propagated itself.
Or take continued lack of a divorce law in the Philippines. Annulment has now become a substitute for divorce in the Philippines. Anyone with the money and the time can — through creative lawyering — make a sound case for annulment. It’s become a cottage industry. Annulments have been turned into shrinkwrapped productised legal packages that sell like hotcakes. It just becomes a perverse joke the way dogmatic stupor replaces thinking in a society.
To take a logical leap, I believe the utter stupidity of this approach is related to corruption which I consider NOT to be a root cause but more of a symptom of a mass of underlying ill-thought-out complex of idiotic controls and mis-appropriated authorities that stifle any motivation to think and take personal initiative to do the right thing;
[...] And as more control measures are applied, the more the atmosphere of mistrust thickens. More control measures mean slower processes and more human intervention in these processes breeding more opportunity for corruption.
(Click here to read the full article)
Applying the same principle, any further top-down control on “morality” will simply breed even more misguided behaviour just as more controls simply provide more opportunity for corruption. Draconian controls over “morality” merely shift power to the Moral Police (the spectre of Talibanism) just as draconian controls over processes shift power to bureaucrats. And both paths converge to the two things that pretty much define Pinoy society today: CORRUPTION and ABUSE OF POWER.
When we apply the right approaches to thinking the issues become clearer, and the solutions become more obvious.
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Right on! Cudenah said it bettah muhself!
Benign0, your explanation for the survival of the ‘Gay Gene’ does not take into account the persistence of homosexual behavior among primates.
cvj, it could then be that religion — an enduring social mechanism for keeping deviant behaviour in check — may ultimately have origins that pre-date the devlelopment of human intelligence.
benigno, i’m not exactly advocating a “talibanesque” law. you can harbor the most depraved, heinous, perverted thoughts in your mind but as long as you keep it there and don’t act it out, you only have your God and your conscience to deal with.
left to his own devices, man (at least, after the biblical fall) cannot be expected to always exercise his free will in a manner most beneficial to himself. that’s why he needed the divine Ten Commandments and the human edicts such as the hammurabi law, etc. to keep his ‘bestial instincts’ in check.
hmmm, that’s an interesting conjecture Benign0.
benign0,
Are Fear and Ignorance older than human intelligence? Yes they are, being situated lower and deeper in the human brain than are the higher cognitive states. Religion, being their fairest daughter was perhaps our first step from out the shadow of the caves and trees, whilst looking out upon the endless reaches of the cosmos.
Science itself, evolved out of Religion, when she in turn met Reason and Observation. But just as alchemy preceded chemistry, and astrology came before astronomy, we have no reason to look romantically upon, or wish to return to being the Common Ancestor of apes and men, nor for example to accept Creationism over Darwinian evolution.
We must live in the light of the stars, or return to the caves and jungles of superstition.
Bencard, I think the way to qualify your assertion further is to say that man, left to his own individual devices… “cannot be expected to always exercise his free will in a manner most beneficial to himself”.
That’s because I believe man as a social and collective organism necessarily and naturally develops “morality” (in various forms and levels of sophistication across cultures). Even animals with a fraction of our intelligence (such as ants, bees, and termites) form highly cohesive social structures.
My point being that man is not a functionally solitary creature. Our nature as a species extends to the way we interact with other individuals (the social contract that we are part of). In fact, it’s been argued that the evolution of our advanced intelligence was driven more by the challenges of navigating our increasingly complex social structures than by basic survival pressures imposed by the wilderness.
Ours just happens to be an advanced, larger scale, and far more complex social contract. But you can see primitive forms of social contracts among non-human animals as well.
So while we have been indoctrinated into believing that “morality” has its ultimate origins in deities, the evidence seems to exhibit something a bit closer to a natural process than what our favourite dogma would have us believe.
You might wanna re-think your belief system.
It was eventually proven that man evolved from primates (and not created in “God’s image”). So we need to similarly keep an open mind about our beliefs on the ultimate origins of “morality”.
djb, benigno: nothing but nothing in everything you both said would have any value if MAN did not have FREE WILL (which both of your failed to take into account like the proverbial elephant in the room).
it’s incorrect to analogize man from lower beings which only have instinct to guide them by. free will is an integral part of human nature which even GOD would not second-guess. free-will gave adam and eve the choice whether to remain in “paradise” or go with the ways of the world.
morality, ethics, religion, science, social interactions, as well as all other aspects of human behaviour are products of the human free-will. thus, he can choose to “do good and avoid evil” and enjoy or suffer the consequence, as the case may be.
thanks but no thanks, benigno, but i don’t think i have to change my “belief system” to conform with yours. and that is my free-will working.
Bencard, as DJB points out, the brain is like an onion. The aspects of our mind that tie us back to our primate and pre-primate origins STILL EXIST. As our brain evoved, layers of new capability (our frontal lobe where our most advanced thinking resides being the most recent addition) were simply added on top of them without actually eliminating the older parts.
The higher cognitive functions that DJB refers to are locked in constant battle to suppress the behaviours driven by the lower-level thought processes that reside in these older components.
Having said that, those thought processes residing in the more ancient parts of our brains still serve us well. They drive our sexual urges (ensuring that propagating our genes is a paramount priority over the fertile periods of our lives), and take over our higher intellectual faculties whenever we are faced with a fight-or-flight situation. Modern culture is a creation of our more advanced thinking faculties and therefore much of it starts to come into conflict with the lower-level functions of the brain which evolved at a time when advanced culture and civilisation still did not exist. Therefore we rely on our more advanced thinking faculties to temper the impulses driven by the more primitive parts of our minds.
That “free will” you mention is an aspect of consciousness which seems to be unique (though this is still debatable in the scientific community) to human beings. It stems from our ability to be aware of our own thinking processes (i.e. an ability to step “out” of ourselves and regard/evaluate our own thinking as a simulated outsider).
So I’d argue that morality, ethics, and social interactions were things that existed (in primitive forms) even in pre-human minds.
Science, on the other hand, is a field of knowledge that only a modern, self-aware human mind could grasp.
The above propositions can be verified/falsified (for example, using fMRI) by measuring which part of the brain (i.e. the newly evolved portions, e.g. the neocortex, or the older limbic layers) is active during worship and during scientific activities.
it’s universally accepted that since the dawn of civilization ( and for those who believe in creationism according to biblical account) a normal man, as a specie, always had, and now still has, free will. if you can point to me any other living organism on earth who has that, i will gladly adopt your and djb’s way of thinking.
an essential element of a criminal act, among other things, is that it be done WILFULLY. without free will, there can be no responsibility. thus, if you are clinically insane and while in that condition you kill a man, i don’t think you can be held responsible for that act.
Bencard, I think that’s exactly what I said; i.e. :
So I am not disputing that “free will” — a concept that makes sense only within the context of human consciousness and intelligence — has existed since the “dawn of civilisation” (whenever that may have been exactly).
In fact I am really specific about what I assert as evident here …
… though to be fair, I might make a slight technical modification (without changing the original essence of the above two), thus:
(1) The origins of morality, ethics, and social interactions potentially pre-date human intelligence; BUT,
(2) The origins of science (even in its primitive forms, say, in alchemy) can only have existed after human intelligence as we know it evolved.
An ant colony for example exhibits primitive (sub-intelligent) ethics and “social interaction” as evident in their (a) ability to productively exist as a collective, (b) lack of inclination to kill and eat one another, and (c) a clear, albeit instinctive, understanding of their individual roles within their collective.
“Free will” obviously has no part in that thing coming together in the ant world, but that is precisely the point I make. There iS EVIDENCE that what can be perceived to be ethical and social-interative behaviour can POTENTIALLY evolve in the absence of human-level intelligence and “free will”.
bencard,
I think the dichotomy between Man and Beast along the lines of free will and instinct is a false one, or at best a matter of degree. Altruism, social interaction and morality have clear adaptive value in the evolutionary sense (“survival of the fittest”) and may readily be observed in many nature films (National Geographic). The uniqueness of free will in homo sapiens, or even “intelligence” are products of human vanity. Studies of primates prove that animals have distinct personalities (with “evil” or “selfish” gorillas as well as “kind” and “protective” ones. Although one might controvert the conclusion by saying it’s all instinct with them, that doesn’t hold water if by instinct you mean “preprogrammed behaviour”. But it cannot explain such wildly different “moral” behaviors.
Homo sapiens clearly evolved from lower creatures. If there is such a thing as free will in men, at least the possibility of it exists for other creatures.
God was created by Man in Man’s image, not the other way around.
It would be a very strange God that spent 2 billion years of life on earth designing, creating and then annihilating (through periodic mass extinctions every 26 million years) of quadrillions of “dumb” life forms, spread out over millions of individual species that we see evidence of in the fossil record, and only 200,000 years ago (the approximate age of homo sapiens) hit upon the idea of “free will”.
The false dichotomy you value so much is really our justification for EATING other animals. It follows the entirely wicked Catholic doctrine that only homo sapiens have “immortal souls” while the others do not, in order to prepare men for either an eternity of beatific vision in heaven or eternal punishment AFTER you re dead.
BTW, at least the Islamos provide for eternal,promiscuous sex in Paradise. The catholic conception of eternal worship and praise for the one true God, as Christopher Hitchens once sapulled it, can already be glimpsed in places like North Korea!
Yeah, i can’t imagine a heaven without sex.
cvj,
And no pets or animals. That means no big macs. No biodiversity. just us and the angels but no incubi or succubi. grim!
DJB, i wonder why the Christian heaven is more boring than the Muslim version? My hunch is that it’s because the Muslim version of hell does not last forever so it cannot rely on eternal torment as a stick with which to keep believers in line so they have to sell the upside of going to heaven. By contrast, the Christian hell is supposed to be forever so a vivid depiction of its torments makes selling the Christian heaven unecessary.
cvj,
The way Hitchens puts it is like this. It appears that “hell” does not make its appearance in the Christian Bible until Jesus Christ meek and mild in the New Testament. Not even in the Old Testament, which contains all the warrants for annihilating the enemies of Israel, raping and enslaving their women, and various other privileges for the chosen people that led to modern Israel’s taking over Palestine, do we find the entirely wicked concept of eternal punishment after death in Christianity. He observes that the Koran and hadith are really quite brazen plagiarisms of these Judeo Christian texts. He opines that maybe the Prophet Muhammad’s codifiers did not want to appropriate New Testament theology since he was supposed to supplant Jesus Christ. I think they needed to inspire the same kind of Old Testament militancy in the 7th and 8th Century against their perceived enemies on this side of the grave, as in “smite off the heads of the infidels”.
But why the carrot of 76 vestal virgins in the Koran and the stick of hell in the Bible? It’s an interesting question.
Those concepts (heaven and hell) are just legacies of an era when the majority of people’s minds were still so infantile as to be responsive only to really fearsomely simplified constructs. It’s kind of like how spanking as a punishment works on kids. The punishment has to evolve as a child’s ethical framework becomes more complex as he/she grows up, matures, is educated, and is exposed to more ideas and knowledge.
No surprise therefore why increasing knowledge and intelligence amongst their flocks is organised religion’s greatest enemy as it puts a strain on their efforts to prop up their thousand-year-old written charters.
Unfortunately for organised religion, the old concepts reward/punishment constructs stuck (the perils of setting things in writing!) and the complexity (or, more appropriately, the convolusion) of dogma had to be developed around these concepts.
djb, the other thing i can think of is that a heaven full of sex would resemble ancient Rome (i.e. the environment of the first Christians) too much so you cannot convert someone to Christianity and say that heaven is like the pagan world he lived in. by contrast, the world in which Muhammad lived in was more conservative so sex in the afterlife can be a reasonable carrot. (btw, i read somewhere that the vestal virgins promised in the Koran are just mis-translation and actually mean grapes or raisins.)
benign0, i agree that heaven and hell do sound childish unlike reincarnation which is a more reasonable concept.
cvj, sex is absent in heaven because it is HEAVEN – wherein earthly emotions and desires have no place. how can it be “boring” when the very idea of boring is repugnant to the transcendental concept of heaven. now, if you are talking about the human or animal version of “heaven” as a place where everything that can gratify your body’s desire is available, then maybe you’re right.
djb, have you ever heard of the word “gehenna”? that is exactly the “hell” in the old testament repeatedly mentioned in the books of joshua 15:8, et seq. and jeremiah 7:31-32, et seq. and also mentioned repeatedly by Jesus Christ in the new testament. in any event, it appears that every major religion of the world, ancient and modern, from the crudest neanderthal animal worship to present-day abrahamic (christianity, judaism, and islam), indian (hinduism, buddhism, etc.), oriental taotic (confucianism, taoism, etc.), among others, has, in varying degrees, a concept of heaven, purgation and damnation.
benigno, as i said a few comments back, albert einstein, stephen hawking and carl sagan, believed (except for terminology) in a universal power or force much, much bigger than anything a human being (yes, even benigno) can possibly imagine. i would rather join their company in that belief. and that goes for heaven and hell concepts, a.k.a., reward and punishment, in the context of eternity.
Bencard, I believe our original discussion was about the origins of “free will”, ethics, “morality”, and “social interaction”. Exploring those things does not necessarily touch on the existence or non-existence of deities.
But then if you wanna simply side-step that original scope and play the basta-God-exists or who-are-you-to-question God’s-existence cards, that’s fine. I can respect your desire to end the discussion on that blanket pronouncement. ;)
Regarding ‘free will’. Free will is based on conscious decisions, but scientists have discovered a half second delay between the body’s action/reaction and a person’s conscious perception of it. That means that free will acts more to veto actions that have been previously decided upon by the body a half-second ago.
yeah, you’re right benigno. those were the original scope of our argument. but then you brought up your dismissive rejection of heaven and hell as nothing but “infantile” concepts, to which poor cvj readily agreed.
you cannot dismiss eternal reward/punishment without also brushing aside the concept of God.
btw, benigno, i’m not side-stepping anything, and i’m not using my faith in God to end all discussions on the issues you raised in this post. if you have anything else, why let’s have it, man.
cvj, man has both instinct and free-will. his “action/reaction” is first driven by instinct (not dependent on reason) before a conscious application of free-will is made. thus, your “half-second” gap.
bencard, i think we more or less agreed on the operation of the half-second gap. However, just to clarify, i don’t think it covers ‘instinct’ alone in the sense of animal-responses but includes other patterns of expertise and knowledge that have been formed in the brain. A trained athlete, a trained police, an experienced lawyer can bypass this half-second gap once the relevant neural patterns (formed by their respective training and experience) are activated. That’s why some older people (not all) are said to have ‘wisdom’ because of the abundance of this patterns accumulated over a lifetime.
Bencard, you can actually have a concept of “God” without having a heaven or hell. Some people introduce the concept of a “higher power” in order to resolve the conundrum of infinite regression when talking about ultimate origins (e.g. what “caused” the ‘Big Bang’, what caused the cause of the Big Bang, …. N, where N is that “higher power”), and then postulate that such a god, after creating all the natural laws that govern nature after said Big Bang is set off then stands back and leaves His “creation” to its own devices to progress within the framework of these laws that He created.
We can argue that such a ‘perfect’ being would have perfect intelligence and therefore be able to create perfect physical laws, so perfect as to not require continuous intervention from said being.
Presumably God existed for an infinite period before the Universe much less man was “created”. So there was actually a time when there was no need for a Heaven or a Hell because there was nothing in the universe that required punishment nor reward (certainly not God being himself too perfect for reward or punishment) — a time that God presumably existed (being too perfect to depend on man for his own existence, I might add).
So you might want to re-think this assertion of yours:
With all due respect, that is.
In which case, that ‘God’ functions more as a ‘Placeholder’ (pardon the shameless plug).
shameless it is, cvj.
there is no point to any further discussion on this matter, benigno. suit yourself. we are just going in circles. but the whole problem is that i’m talking about infinite Being which you and your second mate, cvj, can only comprehend, and talk about, in finite terms (if you guys know what i mean).
Since no monotheist believes in more than one god, that makes monotheists unbelievers in almost ALL gods (save one). How different then is monotheism from atheism? Not very. Atheists just happen to be unbelievers in one more god than monotheists.
Slight clarification, Bencard:
You don’t see any point in discussing it further, but I do. That said, I’ll respect your inability to see said point.
And as to your saying that we are just “going in circles”, I beg to differ. We haven’t even jumped off Square One and you are already closing the door on further inquiry (so we haven’t completed even one such “circle” much less “circles“).
I am just taking you up on what you said here:
Interesting too that you say I try to comprehend God using finite terms, yet it is precisely God’s infiniteness that I use as an argument against your assertion that eliminating the concept of Heaven and Hell necessarily implies eliminating the concept of God.
Funny. From what I’ve seen so far, those who are willing to subject all their beliefs — including their religious beliefs — to debate seem to be the ones who comprehend more than those who play the basta ganun card.
It’s no wonder organised religion increasingly struggles for relevance as people’s thinking faculties increase in sharpness. Those who have the brains to defend their beliefs (and religion) choose to take flight when faced with compelling arguments.
Ironic, isn’t it? :D
Since we’re discussing heaven and hell, how about the concepts of purgatory and limbo?
In catechism class, I learned that purgatory was a place just about as bad as hell, but that your stay there was finite and temporary even if your sentence, given all those venial sins in your heart at the point of death, might be a couple of million years of its cleansing fires.
Fair enough a foundation for several centuries of simoniac enterprise by the Spanish Taliban, whose remnants may yet be glimpsed at places like the large outdoor market for religious goods surrounding the famous Shrine of Our Lady of Manaoag in Pangasinan. There one can still purchase a TRANSFERRABLE plenary indulgence by the mere expedient of buying a 50 peso printed prayer card containing a full act of contrition, reciting it on behalf of some dead relative known to have led life on the edge of eternal damnation, let us say.
But did anybody know there were not one but TWO limbos. Yup, one for those souls, like the holy men of the old testament, who were placed in Limbo Number One, until Jesus Christ descended to the Dead and three days later raised them all up to heaven.
But in Limbo Number Two, still in a state of eternal suspended animation, were said to be all the babies who died before they could be baptized into the Catholic faith.
Recently Limbo was consigned to well, doctrinal limbo by the Roman Curia. Perhaps because they really didn’t know what to do with all those dead babies piling up in Limbo Number Two. (Belief in Limbo is now optional under official Church dogma, if not downright disreputable.
But I have a problem, where were Moses, Josuah and Isaiah, et al, for all those thousands of years before Jesu showed up?
o.k., benigno. one more time (i hope). how can you claim to comprehend the infiniteness of God and at the same time assert (at 10:41 am) “So there was a actually a time when there was no need for a Heaven or a Hell because there was nothing in the world that required punishment nor reward…”.
first, how can you presume to know that our world (earth) is the only place subject to His infinite power?
second, how can you presume to know that we (man) are the only beings that ever existed or exist in all of infinity?
third, how can you postulate that God, in all His infiniteness, is subject to time and space that your puny mind can comprehend?
and, finally, how can you presume “to have the brains” to comprehend the whys and the wherefores of God’s being or that of His dominion?
you can have all the arrogance and presumptuousness that you can muster in debating things within the realm of human thought, but never of the all-encompassing nature of God.
djb, again, talking about purgatory and limbo, you are likewise talking in finite terms. you assume that both terms refer to a physical place (as opposed to spiritual or incorporeal), and that the souls in limbo and purgatory, e.g., moses, joshua, etc.) are subject to our (human) concept of time and space. i think you are suffering from the same problem benigno and cvj, and every human being including myself, are inextricably shackled to – the inability to think beyond the finiteness of this world we live in.
Moses and Elijah showed up beside Jesus during his transfiguration so maybe they were already in heaven prior to being summoned.
cvj, i believe they (moses, elijah, and all others languishing in limbo) were redeemed by Jesus Christ’s death on the cross, as was promised.
Bencard, the Transfiguration happened before the Crucifixion (and Resurrection) so does that mean that:
(1) Elijah and Moses got a temporary pass out of limbo for that occasion?; or
(2) It was just a peek into the future, i.e. like a movie trailer?
Bencard, even if we aren’t alone in the universe, presumably God created everything that ever lived and will ever live. So it follows that there was a time before he created us and them that the universe was empty except for him. So same banana. It follows that there was a time (an infinite amount of it in fact because God, supposedly has no beginning) that Heaven and Hell was not needed for punishment.
You are right I merely attempt to comprehend the logical loopholes that are within our comprehension. So I find it bizarre that you’d think of me as arrogant. Or could it be that you merely exhibit that Pinoy inclination of dismissing people who challenge conventional thought as “mayabang” (click here for reference). ;)
Benign0,
I think with Bencard’s thirty plus years in the sates, he already knows what that kind of arrogance as explained by Michael Tan, as compared to Asian modesty.
OK, you said you find it bizarre.
So if you reach thirty years in Australia,don’t find it bizarre that you still have inherent pinoy inclinations running through your veins.
Oh, you never disowned your being Filipino,then I take it back.
I said once that you include yourself everytime you say pinoy.
benigno, since you insist on defining heaven and hell in terms of time and place, answer these (if you can):
1. when were the angels (as in st. michael, the arcangel, et al.) created?
2. when were lucifer and his forces of rebel angels created?
3. when was hell created?
4. when were lucifer and his followers cast in hell?
5. isn’t it possible for hell to exist even if it was empty?
btw, about arrogance. tell me if this sweeping statement doesn’t evince arrogance (if not unwarranted cockiness): “those who have brains to defend their beliefs (and religion) choose to take flight when faced with compelling arguments.”
Bencard, maybe you can instead ask Gloria Macapagal Arroyo those questions. She may have more more reliable sources.
cvj, this is adult discussion. no childish smart-mouth shenanigans, please. if you are trying to be funny, it ain’t working, man.
Bencard,
Firstly, whilst I discuss heaven and hell in terms of time and place, I don’t make any form of assertion that they are necessarily limited to time and place.
Second, you were the one who asserted that…
… which we can also argue is a bit presumptious on your part to think that God cannot exist without the concept of “eternal reward/punishment”, considering that his Almightiness being the creator of everything would have been the creator of these concepts as well. :D
So, thirdly, I suggest before you start conscripting the angels of heaven including certain “fallen” ones who party all day and night for all “eternity” amongst our departed friends into your line of reasoning, I suggest you first have a re-think of a few assertions you made earlier.
Fourth, when we finally get to your angels and demons, it would help to first get a bit of reasoning around the issue of their existence as it is a bit of a minor but often taken for granted convenience for most to just simply introduce concepts out of thin air.
By the way, what is it about what I say here…
… that “evinces” arrogance? Elaborate please. ;)
benigno, don’t insult your reader’s intelligence by simply denying you limited God to time and place when any idiot could see that that was the import of your entire position. btw, aren’t you using my own argument to wiggle out of your’s? and oh, excuse me, i didn’t know you never heard of concepts of angels and demons. i assure you, it didn’t come out of thin air.
back to arrogance. it’s simple really, when someone ignores your comment because it is nonsensical (as your preceding one), even though you have self-judged it to be “compelling”, is it “taking flight”? nothing but arrogance can make someone think it’s so
enough of this charade already. you can call it “taking flight” but i refuse to discuss this matter with you any further.
Suit yourself, Bencard.
Have a nice flight. :D
I disagree.
Laws are not made for ‘good’ people, they are made to restrict and moderate acts of ‘evil’ people. People who want to do whatever they like for their own gain. It literally means everyone since an individual decides for one’s own survival and pleasure.
So whether there is a law or not, these actions such as rape, murder, robbery and all kinds of ‘unlawful’ things will still occur.
It’s only that the law hurts the ego of people. Who wants to be put-down anyway? Who wants to be caught redhanded? Nobody. That is why we despise laws. Remember in real life, it’s not really a matter of logic or well-put words it is the actions that get as caught by the “law”.
Same is true with this bill is it not?
This is how war starts out.