01-06-2007, 04:20 AM
Quote:if i was a muslim trashing the bible.. i would pay attention to how both books use the same characters and start asking a lot of questions.. belief shaped reality.. but sometimes trying to get people to consider this is a bit :banghead:
i DO hope there is indeed a great day of judgement.. we need it..
Why do we need a day of judgement? From where I sit, it's an evolutionary pattern of self-interest that makes people act in ways that are not wholly altruistic. There are clear examples of this in nature, and we can test for it. We can build a case that supports the materialistic view that human beings are a mixture of instinct, self-awareness / self-interest, and sentience which leads to behaviors that can be defined as both "good" and "evil", but only as to how they relate to what interests human beings. If an alien race were to discover us, and they had no vested interest in our survival or demise as a species, they would not assess our actions as either good or evil just like we don't shake our heads at ant colonies and think, "How evil that those red ants have enslaved those black ants". We dismiss ants as irrelevant to any meaningful importance to human interests, and thus we don't codify their behavior in any ethical or moral manner.
Meanwhile, the theist insists on a morality and "good and evil" duality that comes from a specific being-- God -- who at the same time is ONLY goodness, and who is ONLY fair; and to rationalize the obvious self-conflicting nature of this belief they exempt God from the very moral criteria they insist we all must live by. Which makes God's moral criteria completely meaningless to us. If by mercy you mean God can do whatever he wants and torture us for eternity, one fails to see how or why one should implement a word like "mercy" or "all good" in the first place. since God is outside of these standards, good and evil are interchangeable according to his standards.
Which means you can "choose right" but still go to hell because God being untrustworthy is no different from him being trustworthy, and God being evil is the same as him being good, and God giving you a choice is no different from him denying you a choice, etc.
In other words, all Abrahamic theism has done, is succeeded in painting a nonsensical being that they subsequently fall down to worship.