I can just as easily say that if you don't like my comment, don't respond to it. So you're a hypocrite. You also bring up, both tersely and nonchalantly, several different problems, not just one. But let's take just one: the problem of evil. "Why would God allow evil?" you ask. If you were really interested in knowing the possible answers to that question, you would know that there is a body of literature on this topic going back literally thousands of years that you could try to acquaint yourself with, if only at first by consulting things like encyclopedias. Then, if you have more specific questions you could come here and raise them. Starting a thread by asking, "Does God exist? Can I see him? What about that problem of evil?" in rapid fire succession, and without clarifying or defining to any adequate degree of specificity what God is, what evil is, what the nature of experience is, etc, is dropping the reader in the middle of the ocean and telling him to swim for land.

Vague, stock questions based on equally vague, stock assumptions that are asking for stock answers make for really, really boring and pointless threads. You're telling us that it has "only recently" come to your attention that people believe in God? Please, spare us the faux curiosity. Assume your audience has some awareness of the problems associated with the topic of God and pick a specific problem that you have spent more than twelve minutes thinking about to discuss.

Thanks.

Not sure if this has been suggested, but there should be the ability to preview PMs before sending them.

Before the Big Bang, there was nothing — Ellie

Stop reading Lawrence Krauss and his ilk please.

I said, I'm not discussing politics any more with Thorongil. Doesn't mean I think you're correct about any of it, but I meant it. — Wayfarer

Yeah, that's fair and probably best for both of us. (Y)

you good physical condition doesn't make you immune to infectious diseases — Bitter Crank

Quite so. But I could also drop dead tomorrow for some random reason. What is the statistical likelihood that I will contract some serious disease and why should I care?

Did they have health insurance which covered you? — Bitter Crank

Naturally, but this only highlights my point: they both had jobs and were much older than I am now. I am not opposed to getting health insurance. Indeed, I want health insurance and would prefer to have it than not. By the time I hit 40 or so, it may become useful. But I also don't see why I should be throwing my money away for overpriced insurance right this moment. It's useless for me to complain, though, because I will be forced into doing so anyway very soon.

Do you mean that you didn't intend to insult me? Or are you unaware that you insult people when you tell them that you suspect they are ignorant? — Luke

Why would it be insulting that someone suspects you of being ignorant, on a philosophy forum no less? I often enjoy being proved ignorant. I did the same thing to @Wayfarer earlier, accusing him of being ignorant regarding the Bush tax cuts. He seems to have bowed out of that conversation, but I think I definitively proved him wrong. Despite that, I have a lot of respect for @Wayfarer and very much enjoy reading his comments - just not his political ones, as he more or less noted about me.

If you can't afford it, you are shit out of luck. — Bitter Crank

You appear to have a utopian standard by which you judge the efficacy of the free market as a solution to providing people with affordable health care. Will it make it so that no one is shit out of luck? No. Will it do a better job than a government mandate? On the whole, I think so, and that's all I'm committed to, so if you thought I was committed to people being shit out of luck, then you're wrong. There are never any final solutions in life, only trade-offs.

I suspect that you're an obnoxious individual with no sense of humour. But tell us again how insults aren't really necessary. — Luke

I do have a sense of humor. And I wasn't insulting you. Do you know what you're talking about?

Sooner or later, most people get seriously ill or have serious accidents — Bitter Crank

You don't say....

people who think they need no insurance are also likely to think they need do nothing to prevent disease or injury — Bitter Crank

Really? I probably do not need health insurance. I exercise daily, eat a vegetarian diet, do not drink (not even carbonated beverages), do not smoke, do not take drugs, sleep 8+ hours a night, have a perfect BMI, perfect blood pressure, etc. I can't actually remember the last time I had a cold. Anything more serious than that, such as the flu, I haven't had since I was a kid. I've never broken a bone. The only surgery I've had is to remove wisdom teeth, which I did in the 9th grade. Why should I be penalized into paying for health insurance? The most I would need is dental so I can continue my annual cleanings. That's it. And even then, out of pocket cost for those is not much at all. The cost of a computer game for me basically.

That's a response? It has been subject to literallly thousands of pages of newsprint, thousands of hours of media analysis. — Wayfarer

Surely you know the fallacious nature of this statement....

comprises winding back public benefits and providing generous tax cuts for the wealthy — Wayfarer

Sounds good to me. Why do you equate these things with being opposed to "improving the health care system," though? It's almost like you don't even acknowledge that people might disagree with you on how to do so while still having the same goal in mind. Wow! What was that word I used? Ah, yes, "uncharitable."

I provided a reference, which you ignored. — Wayfarer

I did a Google search and saw on the sidebar: "The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities is an American think tank that analyzes the impact of federal and state government budget policies from a progressive perspective."

Of course it does.

If you're really that interested, you can just look at the official statistics, published by the Obama administration no less. Go to page 411: https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/administration/eop/cea/economic-report-of-the-President/2012

How likely is it that 3/4 of the states would ratify? — Bitter Crank

Ratify what? The cloud cuckoo amendments you, un, and that article are soiling themselves over in fear or the ones they have explicitly said they would ratify?

Something to keep in mind: the US is a republic in which the states created the federal government, which was designed to be extremely limited, not the other way around.

The ACA did achieve these things — Bitter Crank

You cite two things. Great. Did you know that many Republicans are in favor of those things too? Did you know that they could have been addressed in separate bills, not in a 3,000 page document with 30,000+ pages of regulations?

it did extend health care to more people who otherwise didn't have it — Bitter Crank

Did all of those people need to have it? Why must health insurance be essentially forced on people?

Single payer with teeth. That's what we need. — Bitter Crank

Nope. We just need the free market in health care.

The GOP campaign against the Affordable Health Care Act was always a disgraceful piece of scare-mongering founded entirely on the unwillingness of the wealthy to provide public benefits — Wayfarer

Not really. You're generalizing here.

The ACA was derided as 'socialised medicine' for that reason alone, and subjected to the most egregious campaigns of lies, obstructionism and distortion. — Wayfarer

They predicted it would be a failure and do the opposite of what it intended, which, lo and behold, has come to pass. I really could give less of a crap about the supposed good intentions of the bill's drafters.

Ryan and his technocrats never had any intention of improving the healthcare system — Wayfarer

Nonsense. Once again you're uncharitably trying to be a mind reader. The fact is that the act has made things worse.

Incorrect. — Wayfarer

No, I'm correct. Tax revenues went up and deficits went down after the tax cuts. The deficits went up in 2008 and 2009 as a result of the bailouts. So, once again, explain to me how tax revenues went up and deficits went down after the Bush tax cuts and prior to the bailouts.

I'll take that as a no.

The scriptural history of the Hebrew capture of the "Promised Land" is a description of genocide. — Mongrel

That probably did not happen, as many Christians now realize and admit.

Why not? When I tackled you on Trump's obvious incompetence and possible malfeasance, you said 'oh I don't actually like Trump.' Yet you pop up on all these politics threads, singing from the right-wingers hymn sheets. — Wayfarer

Why do you assume that all conservatives must support everything a Republican does? Conservatism ≠ the Republican Party. What exactly do you think the "right-wing" is? There is a massive amount of intellectual diversity within the umbrella of "right wing politics." Either you don't know this or are attempting to straw-man the term.

I can read. — Wayfarer

So explain to me how tax revenues went up and not down after the Bush tax cuts, and how the budget deficit declined after them as well.

The country was taken far closer to bankruptcy by W's budget mismanagement than by healthcare. — Wayfarer

Debatable, but I'm not an apologist for Bush's domestic overspending.

If T has his way on further tax cuts the deficit will balloon even further — Wayfarer

You don't know that, and I doubt you know how deficits are created.

I'm the one asking for evidence of a corporate conspiracy, one that neither you nor the article have corroborated. You also assume that the Kochs's interest is that of "corporate interest" in general, which is apparently itself axiomatically bad in your view. It's not clear to me that it is. A balanced budget amendment and decreased federal power would in fact not be in the interest of giant corporations. See the recent bailout as evidence of that.

You are a vacuous bullshitter. — unenlightened

Why the continued insults? They're really not necessary.

it is fair to ask the critic to read them — Moliere

Sure. And I have, which means I feel justified in my judgment. If you asked me two years ago, I wouldn't have had much of an opinion, but I've had quite enough postmodernist claptrap crammed down my throat in graduate school since then to feel confident in my dismissal of it. Consider also that postmodernist texts are enormously unreadable, if not deliberately so (this is what initially raised my suspicions: what are they trying to hide in all this obscurity?). Roland Barthes, for example, quite literally argued against clarity in language and of having a natural prose style. Other postmodernists are less explicit about the degree to which they are poseurs pretending to sound profound and complex, but it's obvious to me now that that's what they're doing in many cases.

The basic point is this: they make seemingly wild and outrageous claims through the use of impenetrable jargon, which when pressed or upon further examination, turn out to be rather trivial claims that don't really need making. That, and they're all butthurt Marxists.

So, I'm not sure which religion has been more violent over time — Ciceronianus the White

Then you need to read more. As I said, I'm not getting into an anecdote battle.

public benefits programs — Wayfarer

Which are bankrupting the country and don't result in what they purport to do; quite the opposite in fact: they lead to abuse and dependency.

like affordable care — Wayfarer

Which was a piece of legislation designed to benefit giant corporate interests and has been a miserable failure, with rates increasing (more irony).

Exactly how they or others will change it if it succeeds is unknown. — unenlightened

But it's not. They're explicit about the amendment they want to add. The article suggesting that, once a convention is convened, more amendments (read: "scary corporatist ones") will be added is pure fear mongering and baseless speculation.

I'm calling you out for an unreasoning baseless propagandist, trying to blow smoke in the eyes of the readers. — unenlightened

More pot calling the kettle black.

Why does it bugger belief? — Moliere

>:O He didn't quite say that....

You're backpedaling on your own and the article's insinuations. What do you think the statements "in case you thought the constitution would protect you" or "Kochs to rewrite the constitution" mean and imply? Once you figure that out, compare it with the facts and you will see that both you and the article are the ones guilty of hyperbole.

The fact that the gospels don't preach violence or intolerance has had little or no effect on the conduct of Christians, who've been cheerfully killing and persecuting themselves and others for centuries, for religious reasons. — Ciceronianus the White

But this is massively misleading. Were there such Christians? Sure, but there were many more who did follow the example of Jesus and the principles found in the NT. Anecdote battles are pointless, though. We're talking about the overall historical trajectories of the religions in question and the societies they formed. On that score, Christianity clearly has the better record than Islam.

That merely establishes that Christians haven't honored their holy books, which doesn't say much for Christianity, the religion. — Ciceronianus the White

But they would simply point to original sin, a doctrine which is, interestingly, absent in Islam.

Vomit is an apt description of that article. No evidence was given that the constitution would be abandoned, amended beyond recognition, or be made to no longer protect the rights enshrined within it, just conspiratorial insinuations to that effect (as usually happens when leftist media outlets talk about the benighted Koch brothers; just as right wing outlets tend to don tin foil hats when talking about George Soros).

Baseless fear mongering.

Indeed.

I think a way of looking at it is that where Christian fundamentalists and the like failed to overcome their moderate Christian contemporaries and secular thinkers in Europe, the Muslim fundamentalists succeeded. — Chany

Right, but the question is whether, given the scriptural and theological bases of both religions, these developments were more or less inevitable. I think they were.

I didn't say "actualization", don't misquote me. I said "actuality". — Metaphysician Undercover

I never intended to misquote you.

You are simply trying to dismiss the dualist premise by saying that all actualities are necessarily activities, and therefore time dependent. The dualist doesn't believe that all actualities are time dependent, that's how we can talk about eternal things. — Metaphysician Undercover

No, I'm not. I'm talking about existing things. For them to exist, they have to become actualized, according to you, that is, they must become "informed," yes? If so, then how is that process not in time?

There is much that remains unknown to human beings, Why would you think that admitting so much is a "cop out"? — Metaphysician Undercover

Because you're still committed to the proposition in question, and would have me be as well. In the face of ignorance, explain to me why one ought not to withhold judgment entirely.

Would you prefer to pretend that human beings know all there is to know? — Metaphysician Undercover

The irony is that this is what it seems you're doing: pretending that there is an answer to the contradiction I raised, even though you haven't provided one.

If logic indicates that it is possible that there is something outside of time, why not accept this as a real possibility, instead of closing your mind to what logic indicates? — Metaphysician Undercover

This is a straw man. I'm talking about God's creating things. I am open to the possibility that something exists outside of time. I am skeptical of the idea that this something, if it is God, can create anything.

If you think that choosing presupposes time, then you do not understand the nature of immaterial existence. — Metaphysician Undercover

Oh, really? Then explain the following remarks you make:

"Prior to creation, God did not have to create."
"When an individual sees X as good, one acts on that."
"It is only after the act occurs that we can say that the individual saw X as good."
"It is the "seeing X as good" which causes the act."

We just need to take one look at Thomas Aquinas, who spent pretty much his whole life coming up with logical arguments for christianity. — Samuel Lacrampe

This was effectively my point. Aquinas was the one who basically created the formal distinction between preambles and articles of faith that I mentioned.

Arguments for the existence of God are logical, but do not give certainty — Samuel Lacrampe

Well, inasmuch as they are deductive arguments for the existence of God, then they must be certain. You needn't be convinced of them, of course.

The pomo bullies in this thread more or less prove the point I made on page one.

There was a brief period during the Abbasid Caliphate when I think faith and reason coexisted in the Islamic world, especially in Baghdad and Persia. Incidentally, this is also when Sufism, the mystical and ascetic branch of Islam, was at its height. Sometimes this is called the Islamic Golden Age, but note that the implication of this phrase is that subsequent ages were less than golden, which is true. Around the 13th century, the Mongols destroyed the material and governmental stability of the empire while the mullahs and clerical hardliners were largely successful in casting philosophers, scientists, and Sufis as heretics.

General comment: Read the NT all the way through. Then read the Quran all the way through. Then compare. Arguments to the effect that "Islam hasn't had enough time to develop" (which leads to a kind of soft bigotry of low expectations) or "you can find some verses in the Quran that sound alright" (which ignores the general flow of the book) are red herrings. Even opponents of Christianity, like Nietzsche, recognize its pacifistic, democratic tendencies, while Jesus' line about "rendering unto Caesar" is the kernel of the separation of church and state. It's hard to say those things about the Quran and Islam.

I felt much safer walking back streets in Pakistan, Iran and Turkey than I would in many neighbourhoods of the urban USA. — andrewk

Are you a Jew or a female?

What kind of corporations? That word covers quite a lot of entities. And why should we care if they deform democracy? The US is not and was never intended to be a democracy, for example.

That's not very nice. Corporations are people, too, y'know? — Luke

I suspect you don't know what you're talking about.

Or Roger Scruton's Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands.

Who are these postmodern 'thinkers'? — mcdoodle

Oh please. You have access to the Internet and Google.

The other is the actuality of existence — Metaphysician Undercover

The actualization of existence doesn't take place in time? What does "actualization" mean, then?

Human beings have not yet conceived of what it means to be prior to time, so speculations such as this are really irrelevant. — Metaphysician Undercover

This is a cop out. "We don't know what we're talking about, but please accept our propositions anyway." Why would I be convinced of that? It can't just be that the objections are irrelevant speculations. The propositions to which they are addressed must be irrelevant speculations, too.

He acts by choice — Metaphysician Undercover

You haven't addressed my objection at all. Choosing still takes place in and presupposes time. If God had to create because he is good and creating is good, then he had no choice. So too would his creation be co-eternal with him.

God's first act of creation would cause time to come into being. As such, there is no time before God moves and God's first "movement", so to speak, could easily have been creation or the causally and logically necessary steps in order to create our world. — Chany

The scare quotes are precisely the problem here. In what sense can an "act" or "movement" not be in time? Both words presuppose time.

I am a little confused by what you are saying here — Chany

If God has always been a creator, then there couldn't have been a time when he freely chose to create. Otherwise, how is it a choice? If you've always had brown hair, then you didn't freely choose to have brown hair.

Whether this means God is somehow logically compelled to do good or always just chooses to do good because of his nature is irrelevant. — Chany

Why is it irrelevant? If he cannot but do good, and it is good to create, then he cannot but create. That's fine, but then he isn't free and his creation must be co-eternal with him.

secondly because it appears to undermine materialism — Wayfarer

Are you speaking only about reincarnation here or do you include rebirth as well? The Buddhist would say that there is no non-physical soul that gets reborn, just the five aggregates reconstituting themselves, which is very close if not identical to a materialist view.