Monothiesm And The 3 Abrahamic Faiths

Posted the wrong there here you go God existing outside of time:

n the eminence of thy ever-present eternity, thou precedest all times past, and extendest beyond all future times, for they are still to come — and when they have come, they will be past. But "Thou art always the Selfsame and thy years shall have no end." Thy years neither go nor come; but ours both go and come in order that all separate moments may come to pass. All thy years stand together as one, since they are abiding. Nor do thy years past exclude the years to come because thy years do not pass away. All these years of ours shall be with thee, when all of them shall have ceased to be. Thy years are but a day, and thy day is not recurrent, but always today. Thy "today" yields not to tomorrow and does not follow yesterday. Thy "today" is eternity.[1]

— St. Augustine, Confessions, Book XI, Chapter XIII

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustine_of_Hippo

An hour and 4 minute video with no summary is a terrible way to have a discussion. BUT... because youtube allows 2X playback speed, I figured I'd listen while I did some work.

And after 30 minutes of chipmunk preacher... His homerun solution is...

God wills evil for his glory? I'll give it to apologists... They do an excellent job of keeping me faithless.

I don't mind the discussion, I just admittedly get a little overly-irritated at not being able to discuss such things on a deeper level because people can't seem to get past "God's bad because suffering exists", which quite frankly is taking an incredibly complex subject (the human condition) and passing judgment at an extremely shallow level.

It doesn't help that you have quite a number of religious sects that have incredibly stupid interpretations of the source material that make absolutely no logical sense and therefore cannot be reasoned with either. Even if you view religion as nothing more than flawed philosophy, there are amazing discussions to be had if people would just set aside bias and preconceived notions long enough to try.

How can you consider ISIS islamic when they had killed and attained more Muslim hostages over any other religious group.

Basically what I am trying to say, is that, I personally would not call them Islamic because they said they are Islamic.

There is a huge difference between Islam and what ISIS is doing. I find it very sad to see fellow muslims suffer in France because of ISIS's actions.

Hell, they even planned to attack English supporters in Marseille, which is a heavily muslim city.

That's nice and all but completely irrelevant. They call themselves Islamic and well over 99% of the worlds Muslim population calls them Islamic and thus they are "Islamic". Now you may argue if they are "true Islamic" but that just gets into a "no true Scotsman" fallacy and again is irrelevant.

ISIS is what happens when opportunistic religious fundamentalists take advantage of poor, hopeless and vulnerable people. It becomes a movement based on an idea founded in hate that is comfortable to those who lack hope or identity. They are then easily manipulated into expressing that hopelessness and hate in the form of extreme violence.

This might be prevented if people spent more time trying to understand the fundamental root cause of a problem rather then assigning blame to symptoms or trying to defend the "honorable name" of their chosen religion.

I wouldn't say it's irrelevant.
What I mean to say is that a fringe group cannot represent the entirety of the spectrum. Yes these are islamic people, but they should not be indicative of every islamic person.
I think it's important to point out that this is an extremism that isn't representative of all muslims.

Its not Islam that is common amongst all the crazies of the world, its human nature- we, human beings are the common factore in all these horrendous things going on.

I think most people have come a long way from thinking "ISIS = Islam". There are still some people out there who will knock out a sikh because he wears a turban and never realize what a moron they are, but those guys/girls exist everywhere.

On suffering in this world, lets not assign the blame to God. All the books and messages he's sent down to us all say to treat each other right, respect thy neighbour, do not steal, do not kill, do not sleep with another's wife, do not enslave one another...
Blaming God for suffering makes as much much less sense than blaming science for the nuclear bomb. There is no blame on anything or anyone but Man.

Now if you find me a religious book that says "Go out and kill people for the sake of killing, steal for the sake of stealing, rape their wives, enslave their children" I will tell you that book is NOT from God because there are several other books that all teach the opposite and are followed by billions of people.

Also just for the record, I am not Blazeoffurry and I don't know him/her.

I'm still waiting for some Arabic-to-English translated material you promised me years ago dude!
Get me Ibn Taymeyah and other classics translated copies next time you're in Dubai and I'll take you to see where the Dolphins and Orcas are that only the natives know!

Let's be honest here if we didn't have religion does anyone think violence and rape etc would stop... yea that's what I thought.

Evil is such a vague word but often misunderstood. I don't want to misunderstand, so please let me know what you consider evil.

For me there are different degrees of Good and Evil.
Who is more evil; the abusive pimp, the prostitute or the client?
Is a thief as evil as a crooked cop?
Is a cheating father as evil as a cheating politician?
Is an lion that eats a baby gazalle evil?
What about a beauty queen that kills endangered species for sport, and posts it all over instagram?

What is evil?
What is good?
Then lets get into this.

It most certainly is irrelevant.

If you were to walk up to a member of ISIS or other religious fundamentalist and try to explain "your not really Islamic, follow me and I'll show you how wrong you are" the result would be the same regardless. Your public execution aired over the internet as a recruitment video. It's about as useful as arguing that a tiger won't eat you when it's hungry if you just treat it nicely and tell it you really understand it. When it gets hungry, you die the same. It feels no remorse or regret over chomping down on you and ending your life in a very bloody and painful way.

This is because humans, generally speaking, can only be rational under certain extremely pleasant circumstances. Once you toss in some hopelessness, despair, hunger, poverty and other typically normal things that human changes and it's more base animal nature comes out. There is no rational discussion to be had, no convincing, no winning hearts and minds, once the hate has taken root it's impossible to remove in any way that doesn't involve death. No amount of whitewashed Disney Hollywood "Happy Ending" movies changes this fundamental fact of life. Irrational hate is like an incurable plague and must be treated like one, Europe is learning this lesson the hard way no matter how much it's governments tried to convince people otherwise.

The only solution is to prevent the hate from spreading and, if possible, prevent it from sprouting in the first place. The later is much more effective then the former though far more difficult. Law of unintended consequences always has one party hating another.

There only true "evil" in the world, irrational hate, everything after is simply a matter of perspective. People constantly try to convince themselves they are "good" by defining "evil" as something other then themselves. Self justification can be a powerful force to drive someone to commit truly vile acts. The only true "good" of the world is a purely selfless act, not merely an act that appears selfless but is intended to make someone feel better.

On good and evil:

Friedrich Nietzsche believed that we have to *** the value of our values since values are relative to one's goals and one's self. He emphasized the need to analyze our moral values and how much impact they may have on us. The problem with morality, according to Nietzsche, is that those who were considered “good” were the powerful nobles who had more education, and considered themselves better than anyone below their rank. Thus, what is considered good is relative. A “good man” is not questioned on whether or not there is a “bad”, such as temptations, lingering inside him and he is considered to be more important than a man who is considered “bad” who is considered useless to making the human race better because of the morals we have subjected ourselves to. But since what is considered good and bad is relative, the importance and value we place on them should also be relative. He proposed that morality itself could be a danger.[9] Nietzsche believed that morals should be constructed actively, making them relative to who we are and what we, as individuals, consider to be true, equal, good and bad, etc. instead of reacting to moral laws made by a certain group of individuals in power.[10]

I consider evil to be those things that in total reduce human well being and good those things that in total increases it. I will also say that since the situation matters so much, these are going to be slightly vague answers as well.

Abuse is bad so in my opinion I think the pimp is the worst of all. What two consenting adults do with their money or body is their business, though I do think that while prostitution should be legalized, it may need to be regulated in some way to prevent not only abuse but issues with infection. I'll also say that there may be some grey area here up for discussion but the world can be complex.

In both cases, I feel that why you do something is important. Are you stealing to feed your family or because you just wanted something that was not yours? Stealing is of course wrong either way but I think we all understand that trying to feed yourself or your family is a case where you might be given some leniency. In general the connotation of a crooked cop is going to be a bad one. Now if you were a cop who bends the rules to give, say someone who stole some bread, a break and uses it to teach them about a charity which may help them feed themselves then I'd be more okay with that. Strictly adhering to the book could be quite bad in many cases but we also have laws for a reason. If we don't follow them at least to the spirit of the law, that could lead to a world I'd rather not live in. There are proper ways to change laws if they end up being something we do not want. That said I overall feel that a person in a position of power who is abusing that power is generally worse off for us than a common thf.

Father or mother, if a person enters a relationship promising monogamy, then they should do their best to stick to their promises. Now that said there are people who's personalities are just not well suited for monogamy and we have a culture which instills a poor view on those who are not even if these people are forthright with their preferences. If you can't stay in such a relationship for whatever reason, that conversation should be had and I think honesty is usually the better thing to do. If you have what you feel is a problem, then perhaps seeking some help would be the best? As for the cheating politician. Are you saying cheating in the same way? On their own spouse? If so, I don't feel there is any difference. If you mean a politician cheating in some other way, say bribing others or any number of other issues that politicians may take part in, then I'd say the cheating politician is worse in general but again depends on in what way.

No. I think this is a pretty simple case but given that we are also just animals who have developed higher level thinking, this sort of question could lead to a number of other conversations about ethics of how we treat other animals ect.

I'm not a fan of hunting for sport or vanity. If you hunt to eat, then that's fine. If you hunt for needed supplies, I'm also okay with that provided we don't run the animals to extinction or be unnecessarily cruel in the process.

I'm also not completely unmoving on my views. Reason has changed my views over the years before and I'm open to changing them again given a good argument for it. But again, more specific situations would elicit a different response.

He was my fav -

You are misunderstanding my point. You don't have to explain to isis people that they are wrong. It's about the rest of the world which, I repeat, shouldn't consider the extremists and the fanatics as representative of the macrogroup "islamic" in which they fall into.
I guess if you want to dumb down the concept it's "all isis members are muslims, but not all muslims are fanatics". It is only in this vein that I was pointing out that it is relevant to make the distinction.
Like the Westbros church doesn't represent all christians.

The rest of your post has absolutely nothing to do with what I was debating so please limit your responses to the things that are pertinent when you address a specific person.

There is a difference between the westbros holding up signs and I don't know chopping people's heads off...

On yahoo. There's an article about a 4 yr old who got beheaded. Some *** up people over there

Fone, I have never seen you as serious as you are in this thread.

Congrats!

There is more to life than Simpsons references...but it's a good place to start there and branch out.

"All life begins with Nu and ends with Nu. This is the truth! This is my belief!...At least for now."

For a sec. Thought nu said ni