Underlying Philosophy

You really should get out of the habit of making stuff up. I like my evidence-based epistemology much better than whatever it is you're using instead. I'm wrong so much less often.

Well, you think you do. So does every other religious person. And yet you all seem to have different ideas about what God thinks.So even assuming that God exists, there can only be a handful of people, or one, or none, who are actually in agreement with God. The rest of them just think they are.So the chances are millions to one against you being one of the people who actually is in accord with God --- and if you were in that position, you wouldn't know it. And yet knowledge doesn't seem to be your strong suit; and the arrogance and carelessness with which you dispense misinformation does not leave me favorably impressed with your morality either.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Really? Do you have any evidence to back up the idea that Christians are more moral than anyone else? Or more peaceful? Or have more knowledge?It seems to me that you are making a "No True Scotsman" argument, where non-Christians might have similar morality, peacefulness, and knowledge but that it isn't "true", whatever that means. Here is an interesting thought experiment: Can God order or do something that is unjust? Ignore for a moment what you think God *would* order or do, and instead just consider what is possible:What if God commanded that you kill and eat babies; not even your own babies, that you went and forcefully stole other babies and ate them?What about commanding a standard of behavior and when people follow it successfully, punishing their souls for eternity anyway?Now if you think that God doing such things would be just, then I have to wonder why you place your moral compass in God. In addition I must also point out that you would be a completely immoral person; the postulated god might have morals, but you are completely devoid of the capacity to recognize morality.If you don't think God doing such things is just, then evidently you don't place your moral compass in God. God then would only be measured against an independent standard of morality. Where did that standard come from? God cannot have provided it, or even revealed it to us, because this option already shows you would reject his revelation if it was skewed from what you already knew was moral. We cannot be certain that we are communicating with other people, in the same sense that we cannot be certain that the world around us is not completely an illusion (like "The Matrix"). The concept of illusion about the world can to some extent be reduced however, by determining what things are consistent between two people's potential illusions. This is sort of what we mean when we talk about Objective Reality, the things that are the same regardless of the mind's involvement.True objective reality implies that even with nobody around to hear it, a tree falling in the forest would still make a sound. This is backed up by later finding the effects of the tree falling to be consistent with it making a sound; perhaps we even recorded that sound. Verifying the truth of objectivity is of course impossible since actually observing the event would make it cease to be objective.It is reasonable to conclude that reality continues on the same if we observe it or not, rather than that unobserved happenings are consistently fabricated to appear as though it does.

If you want to get picky, Marxists and Nazi's are polar opposites so I hardly see the point in mentioning it. You might recall that the Soviets fought against the Nazi's. So what does that tell you? A Darwinist??? Say it ain't so!!! Do you know why this is so utterly pointless? Because almost everyone is a darwinist, Sac, because of the scientific rigor associated with it. Only a handful of religious zealots still cling to the antiquated, mystical belief system of a 3,000 year-old story.What would you say if you knew FDR and Churchill were also Darwinists and yet still fought Hitler? It's not so much offensive as it is pointless. Hitler gave homage to Jesus Christ. Should I therefore say that because Hitler professed to be a Christian that now all Christians are bloodthirsty dictators because he was?One has nothing to do with the other and that some creationists still pull that lame canard out of their ass just makes them look that much more stupid.

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"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from mistaken conviction." — Blaise Pascal

From societal influence. Morals are relative to the circumstance, just how they are in the bible. Some say the 10 Commandments are God's absolute law, but Rahab's lies are evidence that it isn't the case. God even praised her for bearing false witness. It's the state of actuality. Philosophically that answer will change depending upon who you talk to. In what regards? You didn't answer that question at all. All you said was "God is real." That's not an answer that proves what is real.Please answer your own question

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"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from mistaken conviction." — Blaise Pascal

But Hitler, as I pointed out, wasn't. "Scientific rigor" wasn't one of the things he was big on.He did believe in the multiplication table, and the Holocaust shows us the tragic inevitable consequences of this belief ... oh, wait ...

I'm an engineer. I work in the real world. I do not have the luxury of imagining that I can redefine reality at will, but rather I am stuck with the bottom line: does it work or not? Sure, it would be nice if, upon failing an acceptance test or having to troubleshoot and solve a failure, I could just redefine reality so that those failures would become successes, but I do not have that luxury. I work in the real world. Oh, I understand what you're saying. It's just that you keep failing to understand the simple thing that we keep trying to tell you.Here's a glass containing a powerful toxin. I tell you that drinking it is bad for you. You just go on and on about "how to you know that it's 'bad' for me?" Because it'll kill you, if you're lucky! Or leave you in a severely debilitated state after having experienced horrific illness, if you're unlucky. What part of that do you refuse to understand?We've seen societies fall apart; don't you think that's "bad"? We've seen the suffering that certain acts inflict on people; don't you think that's "bad"? We've seen how growing distrust and suspicion adversely affects the ability of a society to function; don't you think that's "bad"? And we've seen the overall decline in quality of life and in life expectancy that follows; don't you think that's "bad"?Pull your head out of your cockpit and observe the real world. Immorality has a deleterious effect on society. We all depend on society and on each other for our own personal survival and for the survival of our families, so something that adversely affects society also adversely affects us. Our success as a species is largely due to our ability to form and function within societies, so what adversely affects society also adversely affects the ability of our species to survive -- though said adverse effects would need to be felt world-wide to pose a great enough threat to the species.That which endangers society or prevents society from functioning is bad for society. What part of that do you still refuse to understand? Haven't you visited those morality threads yet? Your question has been answered there many times and far better than I can answer it here. Why haven't you done your homework?Morality is very real, just as behavior is real. It is and has been part of every human society, throughout history and prehistory, the vast majority of which most definitely had nothing to do with YHWH. In effect, each society collectively decides what is right and what is wrong. Those rules that don't work or that cause even worse problems or are too impractical get dropped, while those rules that work are kept, especially if the need for those rules continue to be felt. Over time, those long-standing rules became codified and acquired mythologies to explain them and where they came from. In prehistoric societies (ie, ones with no writing), this would have happened much more quickly, within a few generations, because they would have used an oral tradition. An oral tradition is also more flexible, such that new changes can be incorporated within a single generation.For example, a fellow engineer was a problem teen, so his mother sent him to a boys' ranch. When he arrived, the ranch only had four rules. By the time he left a year or two later, it had 36 rules. Every time he did something stupid, but not against the rules, they had to add a new rule to keep that from happening again. It kind of worked like that.Now, could a society arbitrarily vote in a new rule? Sure, they could. But the real question then would be, would it work? If the new rule worked and the society benefited from it, then it would be kept. But if the new rule didn't work, then the trouble it would cause that society would motivate them to drop it, or else the society itself would become too weak and disorganized to survive and its members would either die off or be absorbed into stronger neighboring tribes. Same if they arbitrarily decided to drop an old rule that they actually needed. True story: a world-famous atheist visited a school in Sweden which has a state religion. He asked the schoolchildren what the purpose of life was: "To go to Heaven." When will that happen? "When we die." He didn't have the heart to ask the next question, which would be why they are still here. Wouldn't they all want to kill themselves immediately in order to go to Heaven? What are they waiting for?Please learn something about evolution so that you could at least say something intelligent about it. "Natural death" is a legal and medical term. It has no relevence to anything that we have been talking about. Why bring up such a red herring?Now I need to start securing.

Oh, clearly... You'd have to be a moron not to see the obvious connection between Hitler's beliefs on the multiplication table and his views on the Holocaust. Clearly he wanted to multiply the amount of Jews killed, and so right there the connection is made.

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"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from mistaken conviction." — Blaise Pascal

Parte Deux: No, I was definitely talking about the brain cramp that your philosophy was giving you that led you to dream up this in Message 207 (my emphasis added): As I correctly pointed out, such a person would be a psychopath or sociopath to view himself as being a "society of one" and since he presents a danger to society then society must deal with that danger by removing him (eg, to a cell, either padded or not, or by elimination).You keep tying yourself in philosophical knots. Pull your head out and observe the real world; that may help you to avoid coming up with such silly arguments. Except for the most abstract matters, philosophy should be informed by the real world. Otherwise, what good is it? In the real world, systems have operating ranges within which they function normally, but outside of which they malfunction and fail. The Germans rediscovered this in 1941 when Russian temperatures dropped below the operating range of their vehicles' lubricants, stopping them in their tracks 15 miles from Moscow. In North Dakota winters, gasoline engines will no longer start when the temperature drops below the flash-point of gasoline vapor; we needed to pour alcohol or spray ether into the carborator. In Siberia, arc welding will no longer work when temperatures drop down around or below -50F (in ND, I've only been down to a little below -40, which is where F and C meet). Your computer's circuitry components also have operating temperature ranges. When you exceed the upper limit of those ranges, before the components start to smoke (and burn up) the digital voltages will wander outside the specified limits for the logic levels and will start to operate in analog modes, causing the computer to "go crazy" in a kind of cybernetic epileptic fit.Now, engineers can be interested in learning what happens when a system exceeds the limits of its operating ranges, but not the customers. The customers only want their systems to work, which means that they need to operate those systems within the operating ranges given to them by the engineers.Your argument, which is so typical of such hypothetical situations presented by theists in this kind of discussion, is flawed. The flaw is that within the context of discussion of functioning societies you present an extreme hypothetical situation which lies far outside the operating range of a functioning society. We both know that far outside that operating range society will either cease to exist or else will malfunction badly, so what's the relevence of such a hypothetical situation? Yes, sociologists and psychologists could be interested in how the system falls apart under such extreme circumstances, but we are not interested in that because we are talking about the normal operation of a functioning society. I have just given you my objection: your extreme hypothetical situation is irrelevent to our discussion.As for the thinking of a cannibal, that is a question for psychologists and is also irrelevent to this discussion. If you are still morbidly interested, then research the airplane crash in the Andes after which the survivors kept themselves alive by eating those who died in the crash. The 1970's book in English was Alive, the 1976 Latin America film was Los Sobrevivientes de los Andes (I saw it in Mexico City), and there was a much later film in English which I did not see nor do I know its title. In this case, they were all Christians. From what I recall, they only ate those people they didn't personally know and they rationalized it in their minds as an extension of the Sacrament, the eating of the Flesh of Christ. Actually, I have caught creationists in deliberate lies, as well as Christians who turn their backs on the truth to knowingly support, or at least refuse to condemn, the telling of lies. True, most rank-and-file creationists and even many professional creationists (Kent Hovind comes immediately to mind) simply pass on the falsehoods they've heard believing them to be true, or at least avoiding to verify their veracity. And we can allow that many creationists who come up with new false claims do so out of incompetence rather than deliberate deception, though that's getting to be a stretch. Yet once they have learned that those claims are false and they persist in spreading those false claims, they are then lying even though they had technically not be lying before.But that doesn't really affect the question itself. The question can stand on its own. What does Christian doctrine have to say about the use of lies and deception in the service of God? Can it be condoned? Or must it always be condemned?Something to consider is that the effects of the telling of falsehoods are independent of lying. In order for one to lie, one must have the knowledge that what they are saying is false; it can be argued that someone telling a falsehood while believing it to be true would not be lying. Hence, the question of whether someone is lying would mainly be of interesting in judging that person's culpability and lack of character and how much he can be trusted in other matters.But, remember, I'm an engineer. Actions have consequences, regardless of what's going on in the mind of the person performing that act. What are the effects of the telling of a falsehood? Are those effects any different if the person doesn't know it to be false than if he does? No, the effects are exactly the same. For example, some shady character (again, Hovind comes to mind) comes up with a tax evasion scheme and, knowing that that scheme is highly illegal, deliberately lies to his followers by telling them that it is legal. His followers, believing that scheme to be legal, relay it on to their friends. They all then implement that scheme, including its originator, and they all get arrested for tax evasion. That falsehood had the same effect for all of them regardless of whether its propagator believed in its veracity or not. I'm an engineer, not a philosopher. I have real work to do in the real world and do not have the time to get sucked into useless philosophical mind games. You provide three "answers", stating that they are all premises, by which I assume that you are saying that they are axiomatic, that they cannot be proven and are to be accepted as true. However, they are also your conclusions. Looks like you're trying yourself into philosophical knots again. Knots of the worst kind: theological.Just because something is axiomatic doesn't mean that it doesn't get tested. The entire basis of arithmetic is axiomatic, but they get tested every time we perform arithmetic calculations by producing the correct answers. Plus, they do finally get proven, but for that you have to wait for the higher math of number theory. Just how are you testing your three axioms there?Or as I stated in Message 213, to which you have not yet replied:

Eusebius of Caesarea was made Bishop of Caesarea in Palestine about the year 314, and was one of the more renowned Church Fathers. Christian doctrine states unequivocally that deception in the service of God is a regular and expected matter of course.

Eusebius has gotten an undeservedly bad rep.If you look at P.E. 12:31, you'll see that what he's talking about is anthropomorphic imagery in the OT: To put this into its historical context, he was writing when Anthropomorphism was becoming popular --- the idea (considered a heresy by the orthodox) that references to God having a face, and hands, and being angry or repenting and so forth should be taken absolutely literally. Eusebius, who opposed Anthropomorphism, needed to argue that such statement were not literally true but were still a good idea.He was not advocating "lying for Jesus". Not only is he "one of the more renowned Church Fathers", he's not even considered a Church Father. Where?

How exactly is telling untruths as though they were true not lying? It seems to me that telling falsehoods, even if as a mode of instruction, is lying. Especially when you are attempting to modify their behavior based on falsehoods. It isn't as though analogies or parables were an unknown concept at the time. CHURCH FATHERS: Home
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EarlyChurch.org.uk: Eusebius of Caesarea [AD 260/265 — 339/340]
Eusebius of Caesarea - OrthodoxWikiNow I certainly realize that each theist is a religion unto themselves, but I don't see how you can realistically claim that he isn't considered a Church Father. I believe that I just pointed out the advocacy of someone influential in the establishment of Christian doctrine. On the other hand perhaps a quote from a book instructing the clergy in their behavior would be warranted...For further example, John Chrysostom, who was also an important Early Church Father.

Since there were a lot of comments regarding Hitler, I'll just respond to those in general.In short, I think we can conclude that Hitler was not a devout atheist, nor a proponent of Christianity. If you would like me to, I could post a number of quotes here from him that show how he was opposed to Christianity. And yet, he also has quotes which seem to show that he was a Christian.A lot of people think that Hitler was somewhat out of his mind (he certainly did go out of his mind near the end of his life), so we might expect to see some confusion from his statements and beliefs.The most probable reason however that Hitler had some Christian-related quotes is that he was brought up as a Catholic, a doctrine he later abandoned. So seeing that he had a religious background, we might expect to see some quotes that refer to a god. However, he never actually proclaimed himself to be an atheist, and he was, in fact, most probably not an atheist.However, I could name to you quite a large number of Christians who are proponents of the evolutionary hypothesis. They're called "theistic evolutionists", and unfortunately, there are quite a few of them around. So the fact that Hitler was not an atheist has no bearing on whether or not he believed in Darwinian evolution or not. Also, Hitler underwent some major changes in his ideology after he wrote Mein Kampf (which was written in 1925, 14 years before WWII started). He could have also undergone major changes in his ideology as a result of drugs that he took, and also just because people change their thinking sometimes.None of this to say though that he was a full-fledged Darwinist. Hitler was a bit confused in his thinking, and as a result, we will see conflicting statements from him.Also remember that he lured millions of Germans into following him, so he didn't always necessarily tell the truth.But I'm going to stop using Hitler as an example, just because it tends to make people a little bit touchy. I didn't want the Hitler example to turn into a huge discussion, so I will heretofore say nothing about Hitler.

Well, if they are in fact metaphors. If I were to say "I turn my back on you", this would not (except by accident) be literally true, but since you would not suppose that I had found your location, got out a map and compass, and pointed my back in your direction, it would not be deceitful to say it. Here Eusebius is quoting the pagan philosopher Plato. Plato thinks that he has proved something to be true. But, Plato adds, even if his proof is wrong, or if what he think is true isn't true, the social consequences of people believing it would still be beneficial. OK, some people consider him a Church Father. No-one would put him near the top of the list, since some people wouldn't even put him on the list. That's not really what On The Priesthood is about. It's certainly not what the passages you quoted were about. Have some context.As far as I can make out John's prose, the situation was this. His friend and mentor Basil was much attached to John. When they were both offered a chance to become bishops, Basil thought that either they both should accept, or neither should. John, meanwhile, thought that Basil would make an excellent bishop but that he (John) would make a bad bishop. So John let Basil accept his (Basil's) bishopric while privately having no intention of accepting the one that he (John) had been offered. Basil felt put out, and John is trying to justify his actions.He is, again, not "lying for Jesus" or recommending this practice --- he doesn't advocate falsehood in the service of apologetics.The instances he gives of deceit in a good cause are such things as generals deceiving the enemy. Do you as a non-Christian object to such shenanigans? Or, if you agree with him that the military should exercise guile of this sort, would you say that: "Atheist doctrine states unequivocally that deception is a regular and expected matter of course"?

However, the fact that he consistently talked smack about evolution and advocated creationism does have a bearing on the subject. This is a common creationist dodge when confronted with what Hitler actually said. Maybe, they suggest, even though everything he said on the subject was pro-creation and anti-evolution, he was secretly an evolutionist ... it doesn't seem much of a basis for a smear campaign, but then when did creationists ever need a basis for what they say?But the problem with this fantasy, besides the inability of creationists to actually read the minds of dead people, is that we have access to the Tischgesprache. These are notes of Hitler's private conversations, in his bunker, with his most intimate cronies, which were not published until after his death.This also disposes of your excuse that: The Tischgesprache records what he said during WWII. His opinions on creation and evolution were so consistent between Mein Kampf and the Tischgesprache that I would defy anyone to tell the difference between them. A better reason for not talking this sort of nonsense would be that it isn't true. Hitler was a staunch creationist both in public and private from at least 1925 up to the day that he blew his brains out.