In the wake of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami, as well as nuclear emergency, natural "evil" has once more reared its head, and again - as usual- most orthodox believers are blinded and blind-sided. They have no answer for it, at least a rational, honest one, because such breakouts of natural evil disclose their God is of limited power, if any.
This, despite the claim that He's "infinite, omniscient, and omnipotent". As I noted in a previous blog:
http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2011/02/god-god-or-god-makes-no-difference.html
Though the limited brain is tempted to assign its imagined god ultimate ("omni-") attributes, this is a dangerous and delusional tack. The reason is that once these omni's are invoked together, contradictions usually result. Hence the paradox of an infinite and all-powerful (assumed) Being unable to do one small thing to stop an impending natural evil, like a tsunami. Actually, it isn't a paradox at all but a contradiction between the assigned infinite power (omnipotence) and infinite goodness (omni-benevolence) of the invented deity.
Any ultimate system with general properties commonly ascribed to God, including omnipresence, omnipotence and omniscience, would fit this category. And this is what forms the basis of the naturalist-atheist's syllogism:
1) If God is omniscient then He knows about all events (including natural evils like quakes and tsunamis) in advance.
2) If His response is inaction, despite the fact a tsunami is coming, then either: a) he can't have known about it in advance, or b) can't affect it anyway!
3) If 2(a) is true he can't be "all-knowing" (omniscient) and if 2(b) is the case, then he can't be all-powerful (omnipotent).
4) If He KNOWS the tsunami is coming to kill thousands but WON'T stop it, then He can't be all good but must be at least partially evil or complicit in natural evil.
If any of these is true, then WHY worship this "God"?
Further reinforcing the above set are The Godel Incompleteness Theorems which exclude the possibility that humans can ever arrive at the equivalent of a consistent and ultimate (all omni)entity, since there are limits on the information we can process- both in terms of quantity and rate of neural processing. If either one of these is eroded relative to an attribute employed in an axiomatic statement, one will get a contradiction. One is therefore fooling himself if he believes he's referring to anything substantive when he elects to bandy about the noun "God" and thinks it objectively refers to anything outside his own brain.
Some religionists in order to counter one or both points have tried to interject “free will” but this doesn’t work for the following reason: if one person’s (e.g. victim’s will) is not operative, then it is only a one-sided will, so what was done to help the person of passive will or incapacity of will? More importantly, how does a passive will (i.e. superior will imposed on it from outside) constitute "free will"? This I can't wait to see, though given how little the fundie babies have been able to reason thus far (like trying to solve the "Hell-God-infinite' paradox, or the fact that the Greek basis of Matthew 25:46 cannot refer to "eternal punishment") I'm not holding my breath. They've proven time and again that mustering even the most rudimentary reasoning skills is beyond them. Hell, they can't even provide the necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of their deity?
For example, when the two Petit girls, Hayley (17)and Michaela (11) were brutally assaulted, tortured and burned alive in their beds in Cheshire, Connecticut several years ago their "free will" was never in play. They were seized by two intruders, overpowered, and thereby subjected to the will of those intruders and then subjected to the most degrading sexual acts,after which they were tortured then had gasoline poured all over them before being set afire. WHERE was God in all this? On break? Sleeping? Not paying attention? Striking? The believers don't have one single answer that isn't a phony rationalization. Most of them, acknowledging they have nothing, even ignore the question!
IF then this God was all-powerful, WHY didn't He act on behalf of those two innocents? Why did HE allow them to be so debased, and horrifically set upon with such a cruel end? What "lesson" was served? What did his inaction teach us?
In the same way, there was no entry of human will in the tsunami that killed thousands in Japan. All the will in the world exercised at once, would not have spared those thousands - but an infinite and all-powerful God might have, IF he really wanted to. Or, more to the atheist's point: existed in the first place!
The bottom line is the believers are trying to play both ends against the middle: they want to claim the beneficence or presence of this all-powerful and infinite Being, and yet this Being chooses not to act when it's most needed! Either the believers must come up with solid reasons for the inaction of their so-called omnipotent entity, or else admit there's nothing there. It's all IN THEIR HEADS!
On the other hand, some believers - so backed up against the wall are they - resort to dastardly and despicable rationalizations to excuse the inaction, or justify it or allow the natural evil! We saw this after the Haiti earthquake a year ago when Pat Robertson blamed it on the Haitians' Voodoo practices. Robertson had no good reason to explain why his putative god couldn't act so put it all on the Haitians' Voodoo - thereby imputing this "God" of his had a righteous reason to exact revenge via the earthquake. He used the same mold of degenerate excuse after 9-11, asserting God was allowing the attack because of America's backsliding, secularism, preventing prayer in schools....whatever the bullshit excuse he could think of. In much the same way, some miscreants in "Christian blogs" are now insisting the Japanese brought the tsunami on themselves because of their Shinto and Buddhist practices - and failing to convert to Christianity.
It never occurs to these nitwits, that even if all Japanese had so converted and made them happy, the same tsunami would likely have struck.
The bottom line is that whatever the natural evil is, it occurs not because the people affected are believers in JC or not, or Shinto or Voodoo practitioners, but because this world operates on an unpredictable, dynamic plane and there is NO ONE minding the store! If indeed there was a God who made it all, He long ago left the universe behind to run on its own (as the Deists believe).
But the much easier explanation, which the pouty, mouthy baby believers will never get, is there is nothing there in the first place. Which explains why the Petit girls weren't helped in their hour of need, why the Haitians weren't in theirs, and why the Japanese aren't in theirs.
There's no magic here, no pseudo-scientific baloney or supernatural origin bullshit from pseudo-scientist flakes and cranks masquerading as real scientists, only hard facts.
The sooner the diaper- baby believer fundies get that into their hard heads, the sooner we can wean them from their bottles and sippy cups. Btw, for a spoof of Christian believers' idiocy, see:
This, despite the claim that He's "infinite, omniscient, and omnipotent". As I noted in a previous blog:
http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2011/02/god-god-or-god-makes-no-difference.html
Though the limited brain is tempted to assign its imagined god ultimate ("omni-") attributes, this is a dangerous and delusional tack. The reason is that once these omni's are invoked together, contradictions usually result. Hence the paradox of an infinite and all-powerful (assumed) Being unable to do one small thing to stop an impending natural evil, like a tsunami. Actually, it isn't a paradox at all but a contradiction between the assigned infinite power (omnipotence) and infinite goodness (omni-benevolence) of the invented deity.
Any ultimate system with general properties commonly ascribed to God, including omnipresence, omnipotence and omniscience, would fit this category. And this is what forms the basis of the naturalist-atheist's syllogism:
1) If God is omniscient then He knows about all events (including natural evils like quakes and tsunamis) in advance.
2) If His response is inaction, despite the fact a tsunami is coming, then either: a) he can't have known about it in advance, or b) can't affect it anyway!
3) If 2(a) is true he can't be "all-knowing" (omniscient) and if 2(b) is the case, then he can't be all-powerful (omnipotent).
4) If He KNOWS the tsunami is coming to kill thousands but WON'T stop it, then He can't be all good but must be at least partially evil or complicit in natural evil.
If any of these is true, then WHY worship this "God"?
Further reinforcing the above set are The Godel Incompleteness Theorems which exclude the possibility that humans can ever arrive at the equivalent of a consistent and ultimate (all omni)entity, since there are limits on the information we can process- both in terms of quantity and rate of neural processing. If either one of these is eroded relative to an attribute employed in an axiomatic statement, one will get a contradiction. One is therefore fooling himself if he believes he's referring to anything substantive when he elects to bandy about the noun "God" and thinks it objectively refers to anything outside his own brain.
Some religionists in order to counter one or both points have tried to interject “free will” but this doesn’t work for the following reason: if one person’s (e.g. victim’s will) is not operative, then it is only a one-sided will, so what was done to help the person of passive will or incapacity of will? More importantly, how does a passive will (i.e. superior will imposed on it from outside) constitute "free will"? This I can't wait to see, though given how little the fundie babies have been able to reason thus far (like trying to solve the "Hell-God-infinite' paradox, or the fact that the Greek basis of Matthew 25:46 cannot refer to "eternal punishment") I'm not holding my breath. They've proven time and again that mustering even the most rudimentary reasoning skills is beyond them. Hell, they can't even provide the necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of their deity?
For example, when the two Petit girls, Hayley (17)and Michaela (11) were brutally assaulted, tortured and burned alive in their beds in Cheshire, Connecticut several years ago their "free will" was never in play. They were seized by two intruders, overpowered, and thereby subjected to the will of those intruders and then subjected to the most degrading sexual acts,after which they were tortured then had gasoline poured all over them before being set afire. WHERE was God in all this? On break? Sleeping? Not paying attention? Striking? The believers don't have one single answer that isn't a phony rationalization. Most of them, acknowledging they have nothing, even ignore the question!
IF then this God was all-powerful, WHY didn't He act on behalf of those two innocents? Why did HE allow them to be so debased, and horrifically set upon with such a cruel end? What "lesson" was served? What did his inaction teach us?
In the same way, there was no entry of human will in the tsunami that killed thousands in Japan. All the will in the world exercised at once, would not have spared those thousands - but an infinite and all-powerful God might have, IF he really wanted to. Or, more to the atheist's point: existed in the first place!
The bottom line is the believers are trying to play both ends against the middle: they want to claim the beneficence or presence of this all-powerful and infinite Being, and yet this Being chooses not to act when it's most needed! Either the believers must come up with solid reasons for the inaction of their so-called omnipotent entity, or else admit there's nothing there. It's all IN THEIR HEADS!
On the other hand, some believers - so backed up against the wall are they - resort to dastardly and despicable rationalizations to excuse the inaction, or justify it or allow the natural evil! We saw this after the Haiti earthquake a year ago when Pat Robertson blamed it on the Haitians' Voodoo practices. Robertson had no good reason to explain why his putative god couldn't act so put it all on the Haitians' Voodoo - thereby imputing this "God" of his had a righteous reason to exact revenge via the earthquake. He used the same mold of degenerate excuse after 9-11, asserting God was allowing the attack because of America's backsliding, secularism, preventing prayer in schools....whatever the bullshit excuse he could think of. In much the same way, some miscreants in "Christian blogs" are now insisting the Japanese brought the tsunami on themselves because of their Shinto and Buddhist practices - and failing to convert to Christianity.
It never occurs to these nitwits, that even if all Japanese had so converted and made them happy, the same tsunami would likely have struck.
The bottom line is that whatever the natural evil is, it occurs not because the people affected are believers in JC or not, or Shinto or Voodoo practitioners, but because this world operates on an unpredictable, dynamic plane and there is NO ONE minding the store! If indeed there was a God who made it all, He long ago left the universe behind to run on its own (as the Deists believe).
But the much easier explanation, which the pouty, mouthy baby believers will never get, is there is nothing there in the first place. Which explains why the Petit girls weren't helped in their hour of need, why the Haitians weren't in theirs, and why the Japanese aren't in theirs.
There's no magic here, no pseudo-scientific baloney or supernatural origin bullshit from pseudo-scientist flakes and cranks masquerading as real scientists, only hard facts.
The sooner the diaper- baby believer fundies get that into their hard heads, the sooner we can wean them from their bottles and sippy cups. Btw, for a spoof of Christian believers' idiocy, see:
No comments:
Post a Comment