Will Theists Accept A God That is Inferior to Another's?

Muslim Woman : "I would like to correct you Christopher that I read the Quran and all Muslim scholar would agree with me that Islam gives women a lot of rights…

youtu.be/Dbx-MYjy6PI

Stephen Fry’s marvellous speech on the Catholic religion

youtu.be/5G4QoEhFPTI

I have seen some perfect heartrending sunsets.
Bolts of lightning.
Rainbows.
Waves that came crashing to the shore.
I have walked in fog knowing that I was walking within a cloud.
The soft gentle rain, the hard-driven rain, et cetera.
Have you ever seen the awesome feet of a little duckling. Perfection.

Perfection can only exist I think within the individual human mind and heart.

I hit a perfect state of calm for the first time in my life a few years ago and went out into a lightning storm, the worst I’d ever seen. The news claimed there to be 5,140-ish lightning bolts, but how they were able to count, I don’t know. During my perfect calm, I sat down in the midst of the lightning making the earth shake and the storm abated/dissipated almost instantly.

with my hands pressed against each other, sitting in meditative position, back straight, you could say I calmed a storm with my hands.

But don’t mind me, Surreptitious, if I seem to be staring you down.

True, but not the right to be equal to men.

Islam and women. Yuk

Quran (5:6) - “And if ye are unclean, purify yourselves. And if ye are sick or on a journey, or one of you cometh from the closet, or ye have had contact with women, and ye find not water, then go to clean, high ground and rub your faces and your hands with some of it” Men are to rub dirt on their hands, if there is no water to purify them, following casual contact with a woman (such as shaking hands).

Quran (24:31) - Women are to lower their gaze around men, so they do not look them in the eye. (To be fair, men are told to do the same thing in the prior verse).

Quran (2:223) - “Your wives are as a tilth unto you; so approach your tilth when or how ye will…” A man has dominion over his wives’ bodies as he does his land. This verse is overtly sexual. There is some dispute as to whether it is referring to the practice of anal intercourse. If this is what Muhammad meant, then it would appear to contradict what he said in Muslim (8:3365).

Quran (4:3) - (Wife-to-husband ratio) “Marry women of your choice, Two or three or four” Inequality by numbers.

Quran (53:27) - “Those who believe not in the Hereafter, name the angels with female names.” Angels are sublime beings, and would therefore be male.

Quran (4:24) and Quran (33:50) - A man is permitted to take women as sex slaves outside of marriage. Note that the verse distinguishes wives from captives (those whom they right hand possesses).

thereligionofpeace.com/pa…orth-less.aspx

Sahih Bukhari (62:81) - "The Prophet said: “‘The stipulations most entitled to be abided by are those with which you are given the right to enjoy the (women’s) private parts (i.e. the stipulations of the marriage contract).’” In other words, the most important thing a woman brings to marriage is between her legs.

Sahih Muslim (4:1039) - "A’isha said [to Muhammad]: ‘You have made us equal to the dogs and the asses’"These are the words of Muhammad’s favorite wife, complaining of the role assigned to women under Islam.Ishaq 593 - "As for Ali, he said, ‘Women are plentiful, and you can easily change one for another.’"Ali was raised as a son by Muhammad. He was also the 4th caliph. This comment was made in Muhammad’s presence without a word of rebuke from him.

Ishaq 593 - “From the captives of Hunayn, Allah’s Messenger gave [his son-in-law] Ali a slave girl called Baytab and he gave [future Caliph] Uthman a slave girl called Zaynab and [future Caliph] Umar another.” - Even in this world, Muhammad treated women like party favors, handing out enslaved women to his cronies for sex.Tabari VIII:117 - The fate of more captured farm wives, whom the Muslims distributed amongst themselves as sex slaves: “Dihyah had asked the Messenger for Safiyah when the Prophet chose her for himself… the Apostle traded for Safiyah by giving Dihyah her two cousins. The women of Khaybar were distributed among the Muslims.”

Quran (2:228) - “and the men are a degree above them [women]”

Quran (4:11) - (Inheritance) “The male shall have the equal of the portion of two females” (see also verse 4:176). In Islam, sexism is mathematically established.
Quran (2:282) - (Court testimony) “And call to witness, from among your men, two witnesses. And if two men be not found then a man and two women.” Muslim apologists offer creative explanations to explain why Allah felt that a man’s testimony in court should be valued twice as highly as a woman’s, but studies consistently show that women are actually less likely to tell lies than men, meaning that they make more reliable witnesses.

Quran (2:228) - “and the men are a degree above them [women]”

Islam also denies men the right to be apostates as it has a policy, in some sects, of killing apostates.

Regards
DL

Indeed, and if he had included Islam in his talk, he would say the same and more.

Islam, in some sects, are throwing gays like him off of high buildings and beheading them.

Good old religious homophobia.

Both Christianity and Islam, slave holding ideologies, have basically developed into intolerant, homophobic and misogynous religions. Both religions have grown themselves by the sword instead of good deeds and continue with their immoral ways in spite of secular law showing them the moral ways.

Jesus said we would know his people by their works and deeds. That means Jesus would not recognize Christians and Muslims as his people, and neither do I. Jesus would call Christianity and Islam abominations.

Gnostic Christians did in the past, and I am proudly continuing that tradition and honest irrefutable evaluation based on morality.

topdocumentaryfilms.com/theft-values/

youtube.com/watch?v=ZxoxPapPxXk

Regards
DL

All things are perfect in this sense:

Things aren’t anything more or less than what they are.

All things perfectly are what they are.

Planet earth is not a perfect sphere, nor is it perfectly blue, but however rough its shape and color is, it perfectly is that rough shape and color.

We have these ideas like shape and color, sphere and tetrahedron, blue and red.

It may be that nothing in the observable universe can perfectly match these ideas, but I don’t see why it’s impossible, in our universe or beyond.

God doesn’t have to be perfect either.

Was Zeus perfect…was Mars?

Jehovah is normally thought of as perfect, but not everyone thinks of him that way, and in the bible, Jehovah arguably has moments of impotence, imminence, ignorance and malevolence.

Some people claimed to have experienced God directly, some call them mystics and prophets, others call them charlatans and schizophrenics.

Are their experiences hallucinations or lies?

The same can be asked of all paranormal experiences and states of consciousness, indeed of all experience.

Nonetheless for these people and the ones who believe them, God or the Gods are very real.

I have stated there are two categories of perfection, i.e. Relative and Absolute Perfection.

Relative perfection is perfection that is relative to some defined criteria or conditions.
A perfect score of 300 pins in a ten-pin bowling competition is only perfect within the rules set up by the World or Local Tenpin Bowling Association.
All perfections attributed to empirical elements are relative perfections.

There are many lesser gods who are not claimed to be perfect gods, e,g, Zeus, Neptune, Hanuman the monkey God, etc.

God per se ultimately must be absolutely perfect, i.e. a perfection that is totally unconditional i.e. inherent to God itself.

Those theists who are very casual with their God generally are ignorant what their God is expected to be, i.e. absolutely perfect. When they are informed of such a gap, they will naturally and readily insist their God is absolutely perfect.

A lesser inferior God is logically vulnerable to be dominated by a God which is more and absolutely superior. In such a case there would be doubts in the minds of those who accept an inferior God that their God will not be able to deliver the promised eternal life in Paradise since and capable of all possibilities, as such is monopolized by the absolutely perfect God.

Logically, given such an awareness, all theists will end up with an absolutely perfect God who will not be dominated by any other God.
So God per se must be an absolutely perfect God and no other.

Greatest I am wrote:

You can’t put a price on how much damage the Catholic Church’s sex abuse scandals have done to the victims. But you sure as hell can count how much the Church has paid out as a result of those lawsuits.

Nearly 4 billion.

Plus all the air fare that the Vatican pays to move the pedophile priests they want to protect to fresh stomping grounds.

Bastards.

Regards
DL

If you have a religion based on forgiveness, then you are going to have a problem of what to do with repeat offenders. That’s not restricted to pedophilia.

Presumably you would have to just forgive the first offense. And you’re going to get criticized for that in itself when it comes to pedophilia. Right?

To forgive or not to forgive. That is the question.

Forgiveness is to the victim to give. Not us and certainly not to a mythical God.

Regards
DL

So what was Jesus doing when he let the adulterous woman go in John 8:1-11? Why doesn’t Jesus condemn her if she broke the law? Why ought she not be punished?

Forgive and remove from the priesthood.
Forgive and let them be judged in court.
Forgive and do not simply transfer them to a new setting where they have access to children, parents do not know they are a threat and they are in an authority position.
Forgive them and make sure they get treatment and no longer have contact with children.

Forgiveness is not tied to inaction or any specific action.

A mild form of punishment. And the pedophile is released into the general community where he can offend again.

A washing of the hands and probably a punishment by the secular legal system.

That’s what happened in a lot of the cases. It does seem to be the most consistent with the concept of forgiveness.

This is fairly similar to “let them be judged in court” because that might be the court ordered punishment.

Did you get my point or not?

I see no problem at all with turning priests over to secular courts after defrocking them. However, My point was that pretty much any action is available while forgiving them. YOu seemed in your earlier post to be saying that to forgive precluded certain actions.

That doesn’t seem to be consistent with the spirit of forgiveness.

“I forgive you but I’m going to turn you over to someone who does not forgive you and who will almost certainly punish you.”

Seems like just “passing the buck” and feeling good about it.

Well, yes.

A long time ago, I started a thread which asked what Jesus would do if the adulterous woman did not stop the adultery. What if she was brought to him over and over?

If he keeps letting her go, then he is accepting/condoning her behavior.

It appears that eventually he would have to condemn her and punish her in some way.

But that’s contrary to the concepts of “judge not lest ye be judged” and “forgive your brother 70 times 7” which Jesus is promoting.

It appears to be a problem with Christian ethics.

I never did get an answer in the thread.

But that’s my point about objectivism. Whether rooted in religion or reason or ideology or deontology or nature, there have been hundreds and hundreds of arguments – hopelessly conflicting and contradictory arguments in many respects – embracing what you have just said.

The only difference then being that they are predicated on their own argument/analysis/assessment, and not yours.

You either grasp [as I do here and now] the psychological element that seems embedded in this or you don’t.

Here I can just imagine all the “serious philosophers” trying to pin down precisely what Kant meant by God, by “transcendental idealism”. Technically.

But, sans God, mere mortals of your ilk [who are anything but omniscient and omnipotent] still manage to insist that they and they alone have accumulated just enough knowledge to grasp what those “absolute moral laws” will be.

If only in the future.

Only [with me] that is almost never explored existentially pertaining to particular contexts and particular conflicting behaviors.

Again, I’ll let the “Kant scholars” sort all this out such that the definitive argument/analysis/assessment is finally subscribed to by all of them.

Has this in fact already been accomplished? Has there come to be one optimal understanding of the man and his ideas?

In any event, with an omniscient/omnipotent God, one would seem either obligated to tell the truth to the murderer and disclose the location of the woman [if lying is always wrong], or, instead, in this, that or some other context, it might be okay to lie.

And the actual contexts of course could number in the thousands.

So, in a No God world, you tell me: what would you say to the murderer?

And in what particular context? Would your answer change with the changing contexts?

In other words, there have been folks here who have argued for a universal morality, and those who insist that an objective morality does exist…but only pertaining to each and every particular context.

Why on earth would anyone want to grasp what a square circle is when by definition they describe two different shapes? Do you often confuse the two? I suspect though that this may well be another “technical” discussion that is way over my head.

On the other hand, existence itself can either be wholly understood or it cannot. And, either way, how succinctly would any mere mortal be able to fit their own moral narrtive into whatever may or may not be All There Is.

Indeed, from my perspective, the only way in which you are able to fit it all in is by stuffing it all inside your own particular intellectual contraption.

In other words, sometime in the future human interactions [in the is/ought world] will finally be revealed as wholly in sync with your own “progressive” assumptions here and now.

Only you won’t at least broach that future by situating your “progressive morality” in the present.

What would the argument sound like pertaining to a particular conflicting good? And how are you not entangled in my own dilemma in describing this?

Thus:

Once again, you had the opportunity to flesh this exchange out substantively by bringing these abstractions down to earth. From my frame of mind then you really do need to ask yourself why you refuse to.

This seems somewhat analagous to Satyr’s “genes ever and always trump memes” dogma. There is a “natural” way to behave that, going all the way back to the caves, trumps any and all renditions of culture.

Perhaps you should take up your own narrative here with him over at KT. See what he gets wrong according to you or what you get wrong according to him. My point though revolves around the assumption what while both of you believe that only one of you can be right, it is always going to be one or the other. And certainly not the multitudes who embrace their own entirely different narrative.

You would both insist [to each other]:

My point in other words.

Then I note this:

And how do you respond? By, once again, doing the same thing:

Another “world of words” defining and defending itself up in the scholastic clouds.

In my own opinion of course. After all, who am I to actually demonstrate that my own intellectual contraption here isn’t just another “philosophical” rendition.

All I can do here is to situate my own value judgments [in a No God world] in an “assessment” that does in fact come down to earth.

This one:

1] I was raised in the belly of the working class beast. My family/community were very conservative. Abortion was a sin.
2] I was drafted into the Army and while on my “tour of duty” in Vietnam I happened upon politically radical folks who reconfigured my thinking about abortion. And God and lots of other things.
3] after I left the Army, I enrolled in college and became further involved in left wing politics. It was all the rage back then. I became a feminist. I married a feminist. I wholeheartedly embraced a woman’s right to choose.
4] then came the calamity with Mary and John. I loved them both but their engagement was foundering on the rocks that was Mary’s choice to abort their unborn baby.
5] back and forth we all went. I supported Mary but I could understand the points that John was making. I could understand the arguments being made on both sides. John was right from his side and Mary was right from hers.
6] I read William Barrett’s Irrational Man and came upon his conjectures regarding “rival goods”.
7] Then, over time, I abandoned an objectivist frame of mind that revolved around Marxism/feminism. Instead, I became more and more embedded in existentialism. And then as more years passed I became an advocate for moral nihilism.

Will you or will you not provide me with a similar trajectory? Such that I might more clearly understand the existential evolution of your own thinking here.

Your ‘objectivism’ is a straw man in this case.

I agree within the history of mankind, there have been and there are thousands and hundred of arguments – hopelessly conflicting and contradictory arguments in many respects – many are true within their respective perspectives.
Note Kant’s antinomy - ‘the equally rational but contradictory results of thoughts.’

The point is when one venture to explore knowledge there is a necessity to embrace its divergence. But the problem with the direction of divergence is it is forcing one into an infinite regression and thus inducing frustration, e.g. 2->4->8->16->32->64->128->256-512-1024-2048-4096-> …68,719,476,736 … and the forms goes on infinitely. I had the same problem when I started and worried where it this going to end, which one will realize it is an impossibility.
Then I turned inward to the convergence of all knowledge, i.e. its substance or essence. But this also face a problem of infinite regression on the opposite side, thus another cause of worry due to conflicting goods and evil. This is where theists resolve their worry with a final cause, i.e. God.

The solution to the above dilemma is complementarity [I used this very often].
To enable complementarity has has to explore as far as possible in each opposite direction and understand how they interact in affecting oneself and the collective.
What is most critical is to develop the base critical requirement, i.e. a state of equanimity so that one is not shaken easily by conflicts one is sensitive to.
As I had stated understanding the theory [knowing] is one thing but it has to be complemented with doing and acting [actual rewiring of the brain].

From what I gather you are very low in term of the venture and understanding of the necessary knowledge and not much in terms of doing, acting and practicing the necessary to promote a state of complementariness within your psyche.

It is not easy is exploring as much knowledge as possible and also doing/practicing what is learned. Such take a lot of time and brain power in reflecting then practicing what is learned.

Not everyone have the capacity or the time to do such necessary extensive researching and practicing the necessary. The alternative to this requirement in the event of limitation is thus to anchor oneself with the cultivation of equanimity to deal with conflicting goods or evils.
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=193778
Here you are rejecting this suggestion outright.

The cultivation of equanimity takes time.
If one do not have the time, then one has to understand its usefulness and force it upon oneself logically, rationally and psycho-analytically and hope it works.
E.g. in NLP -neurolinguistic programming can induce happiness from outward to inward as a short-cut by consciously reproducing the genuine smile [“Duchenne smile,”] of happiness.

If the above is not possible due to various reason, then the drug option [prozac, other tranquilizers, weeds, etc.] is the only way and bearing in mind its inevitable side effects.

The above issue is very complex, wide and deep thus a lot of coverage, time and effort are needed.
Since I have gone through the necessary generic phases, personally I would have no issue resolving the above if I am in those conditions.

I would recommend the solution is to adopt the approaches I have listed above, i.e. explore as much necessary knowledge as possible [e.g. all you need to know of the “I” its existential elements] with the complementarity of divergence-convergence in mind and mindful there are no definite answers in philosophy. In addition one must engage in the necessary practices, i.e. action and doing.

Then depending on whether you are faced with constraints or not, take the relevant optimal path and as a last resort, take the necessary drugs or just give up if there are no other options.