Does God exist? (20 Viewers)

[KFunk]

Wind does not move flag. Mind moves.

 

[michaelnashid]

The one and only true god is Jesus christ..the son of the living God...born of the virgin saint mary....anyone who doesn't believe watch dis video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoLOS68z7_Q&feature=related
its the appearation of saint mary in egypt...watch carefully...
IF ANYONE LOVE U THIS MUCH...WOULD DEY DO THIS:
http://www.marianland.com/tan/passion_scourge.jpg

http://www.jcnot4me.com/images/Passion%20of%20The%20Christ.jpg

http://itsmypulp.files.wordpress.com/2007/04/passion-of-the-christ.jpg
HE'S WAITIIN FOR U
http://wwwministeriocantonuevocc.org/images/jesus-love-gg2.jpg

 

[ur_inner_child]

The one and only true god is Jesus christ..the son of the living God...born of the virgin saint mary....anyone who doesn't believe watch dis video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoLOS68z7_Q&feature=related
its the appearation of saint mary in egypt...watch carefully...
IF ANYONE LOVE U THIS MUCH...WOULD DEY DO THIS:
http://www.marianland.com/tan/passion_scourge.jpg

http://www.jcnot4me.com/images/Passion%20of%20The%20Christ.jpg

http://itsmypulp.files.wordpress.com/2007/04/passion-of-the-christ.jpg
HE'S WAITIIN FOR U
http://wwwministeriocantonuevocc.org/images/jesus-love-gg2.jpg

This means as little to me, as what a hindu person or a muslim person talking about their religion would mean to you.

 

[michaelnashid]

that was real evidence (video)..what more do u want...???

 

[KFunk]

I have to say, that video has to be one of the poorest examples of evidence for god that I have ever seen. Sure, there is a clear female form - but what reason do we have to believe that a) it is Mary and b) that it is a real apparition. For all I can tell it may as well have been generated in a studio - there is no building/person/reference object in sight. It's like using this photo to prove that the sasquatch (/bigfoot) exists:

http://www.geocities.com/tomkinson99/hoaxes/bigfoot.jpg

(Hopefully you are taking the piss...?)

 

[raff.d]

you can't prove that god is real or fake... the questions just keeps going round and round no matter how hard you think about it.. personally i hate religions.. so god doesn't exist in my world

actually you can.
im a catholic and if my dad knew that i viewed this movie id be dead meat. this movie i watched about jesus and god etc made me kind of question if i should really believe everything that is in the bible and such.

here is the website.

http://zeitgeistmovie.com/

if your a strong believer of god; i wouldnt view it.

i still believe in god even though i had viewed the movie.

has there ever been any real proof that god/jesus are real? excluding the bible.

 

[Iron]

Kfunk:
How about the jist, that because we have murdered God (lets assume), there can be no truth - no overarching meaning to hang all other meanings on. Rather there are merely ideas expressed through imperfect language.
Superman recognises this and does not waste time convincing people to abide by his will through shadowy effeminate appeals to nonsense truth. But he does recognise that his animal instincts of pride, cruelty, violence etc are natural (again, lets assume) and, as far as we can tell, the only meaning. If he's made of the right stuff -suffers enough and gets through it, suppresses all compassion and love, he will be as great as any man ever can be: think Alexander the Great, Napoleon, Hitler.

 

[KFunk]

Hey KFunk,
Interested in what you think about Nietzsche, both on God and in general (truth, will, etc etc)
I feel he must be fought.
Save us from this teutonic fiend!

I just thought of something which may (or may not) be of interest to you. There is a good book by the British philosopher Simon Blackburn, which is written for the lay-person whilst still maintaining rigour, called Truth: a guide for the perplexed. In it he devotes a chapter to Nietzsche's approach to truth and, ultimately, rejects what he says. It's been about one and a half years since I read the book so I can't recall his critique too well, but if you have a genuine interest in critiques of Nietzsche (which are quite relevant today since, as Blackburn puts it, he is "the patron saint of postmodernism") then Blackburn's is an accessible and good quality one.

 

[Iron]

I really doubt that anyone can protect us from Nietzsche. He must be stopped. Perhaps a mass coalition of the mediocre and weak will drown him out.

But will endeavour to devour!

 

[KFunk]

Kfunk:
How about the jist, that because we have murdered God (lets assume), there can be no truth - no overarching meaning to hang all other meanings on. Rather there are merely ideas expressed through imperfect language.
Superman recognises this and does not waste time convincing people to abide by his will through shadowy effeminate appeals to nonsense truth. But he does recognise that his animal instincts of pride, cruelty, violence etc are natural (again, lets assume) and, as far as we can tell, the only meaning. If he's made of the right stuff -suffers enough and gets through it, suppresses all compassion and love, he will be as great as any man ever can be: think Alexander the Great, Napoleon, Hitler.

Funnily enough I agree with a great deal of what Nietzche says on those counts, depending on the extremity of the interpretation. For example, I take the (Nietzschean, I suppose) nihilistic position that the world has no inherent meaning and that, instead, it is our own personal task to make life meaningful (i.e. what Nietzsche's Ubermensch does - they grasp life by the horns and fully accept this task). In some cases we may be aided by a biologically and socially inherited tendency to read meaning/value into our environment (we simply have to come to grips with the subjectivity of the process at the same time). I am less certain about issues relation to truth/metaphysics, though I think Nietzsche is right to be skeptical of many of the grand, sweeping, metaphysical systems of the past (think Plato's world of forms, or the divine reality/morality/truth of the Abrahamic religions).

Is Nietzsche's Ubermensche the best solution to this (supposed) predicament? I'm unsure what exactly the Ubermensche consists of (given the difficulty of pinning down Nietzsche's meaning) so it is hard to answer this. Nonetheless, I would tend to answer in the negative because I think it is a mistake to suppose that there is likely to be a single best answer. Rather, I think any 'solution' is more likely to take the form of a very broad scaffold which permits a great array of particular ways of living.

 

[KFunk]

I really doubt that anyone can protect us from Nietzsche. He must be stopped. Perhaps a mass coalition of the mediocre and weak will drown him out.

But will endeavour to devour!

A proletariat uprising involving a lot of Nietzsche related book/webserver burning might do the trick.

 

[Iron]

I try to be more absolute about him. He's either a genius or a loon. I want to think both, but shouldn’t.
I hate him and love him. I see him laughing at our confusion re his contradictions and propaganda style. He's the troll of the 19th c. First among all trolls.

But surely on some counts he must be confronted. We must assemble our rabble of half-starved militia and make a stand. We must say no, you shall not pass. Stand and fight! etc
For instance that the masses are everything wrong with the world - they're indifferent, irrelevant, weak, pathetic. A minority of aristocratic elites must impose their will upon them, maul them, demand their obedience, establish themselves as the new gods.
It's all born out of a very dark hatred and fear of humanity imo. It's corruptive, it's brilliant.

 

[KFunk]

Nietzsche - King of the Trolls. I like it.

 

[SashatheMan]

Does anyone know

 

[BradCube]

Does anyone know the site logicallyCritical?

listen to this episode! It's about Jesus.
The host has an amazing sense of whit and humour.
But at the same time, he makes interesting points!

http://www.logicallycritical.net/podcast/06 Jesus Empty Gesture.mp3

Interesting listen. Certainly made me laugh but I don't feel that his analogies were as accurate as he would have liked. ie a man's sacrifice for his own well being is very different to a mans sacrifice for another's well being. We also know that Jesus didn't have to die as the man eventually had to. He could have continued to live in "perfection" regardless.

I won't go into the other examples because they also have their own problems and I don't want to sound like I'm just whining for the sake of it. I would think most people could recognize the flaws in his analogies for themselves.

 

[Slidey]

Thirdly, and this is not so much of a rebuttal but just for interests sake. If these other parts of the universe are not observable in anyway, then how do we know that they exist? Surely knowing they exist means we have been able to observe them in some fashion.

Certainly. As I said I was making an assumption. Our observable universe is a sphere with us at the centre. Given that the distribution of galaxies at the centre is the same as the distribution at the edges, it's unlikely that the universe just stops because we can't see it anymore. If it does continue then given the current distribution of galaxies, it likely continues in this fashion, gradually getting 'thinner' until you reach the edge of the entire universe's expansion. Given this, an ultimate universe the size of 10 billion of our observable universes seem in about the right ballpark qualitatively (i.e. the ultimate universe dwarfs our observable universe).

And I agree that probability of life given a universe says nothing about the origin of the universe; that is something that is probably possible to know, but also probably rather hard to know (as in, probably beyond human capability, but not beyond the capability of science). In this regard I consider myself agnostic. I find it unlikely that a god is in charge (given, at this point, god really is just a fill-in name, as we've given all creedence to science, thus no direct creation of life, no controlling human lives, no prophecies, etc). It is just as plausible to claim the universe created itself at this point.

The problem for me is that you're trying to apply some sort of notion of 'probability' to ultimate reality (if our one universe is all there is). It is reality, I can't see how we can have the possibility of another ultimate reality... If we don't have multiple universes then I would say whatever laws govern our ultimate reality would probably have to be necessarily the way they are.

Nothing to do with multiple universes or alternate realities; re-read my post. Just the ultimate universe compared to the observable universe. I contend that if what we know so far about the universe is true, it woud be illogical for the unverse to simply exist only as far as we can see it. It would be a step backwards to something like "we don't know how life evolved, thus it was god".

You are awesome. I think the problem is, however, that the numbers ARE so inconceivable; therefore they are irrelevant. Or something.

Right on!

 

[youBROKEmyLIFE]

Nothing to do with multiple universes or alternate realities; re-read my post. Just the ultimate universe compared to the observable universe. I contend that if what we know so far about the universe is true, it woud be illogical for the unverse to simply exist only as far as we can see it. It would be a step backwards to something like "we don't know how life evolved, thus it was god".

My point wasn't to do with what you said, I agree with it all and afaik you were backing up a point I was making to bradcube. I was talking to sashatheman/kfunk about how I don't think the "random luck universe" hypothesis is equal to the others.

 

[KFunk]

I was talking to sashatheman/kfunk about how I don't think the "random luck universe" hypothesis is equal to the others.

My main point of disagreement was that you seemed to disregard the importance of the question "why does a unvierse exist which can support our existence?". Beyond thinking that it is a reasonable question to ask I don't have many commitments regarding whether we live in a random/necessary/one-of-many/etc universe. I largely leave that up to the physicists, though there are certainly some relevant arguments based on modal logic that can be brought to bear on these issues.

 

[youBROKEmyLIFE]

My main point of disagreement was that you seemed to disregard the importance of the question "why does a unvierse exist which can support our existence?"

I don't see it as such a mindfuck if it's not something that just randomly, luckily happened to be (i.e. somehow the universe is singular and probabalistic and it just so happened to be right for us). If we live in a deterministic universe or one of many, then it's not quite as amazing.

 

[KFunk]

I don't see it as such a mindfuck if it's not something that just randomly, luckily happened to be (i.e. somehow the universe is singular and probabalistic and it just so happened to be right for us). If we live in a deterministic universe or one of many, then it's not quite as amazing.

I think you're misunderstanding me - let's go back to the comment I made and I think you'll find that I'm saying much the same thing:

The big question, however, is why a universe came to exist which can support our existence. If all alternatives are instantiated (as in the MW interpretation?) then it is easy to say why our universe appeared ---> because all possible ones appear! On the other hand, if our best theory suggested that there is nothing beyond our universe and that this is the only variation of the universal constants that has ever occured (assuming, hypothetically, that other arrangements are at least possible, in a broad sense. If only this arrangement were possible then the issue would disappear) - such that they just happened to alight on the right values - then I would find this a bit of a mind-fuck.

In other words, I agree that there is no cause for amazement if either a) a life supporting universe is necessary (for some, as of yet, unknown reason) or b) the MW interpretation holds and all possible universes exist (or anything in between). What I said is that if other universes which don't support life are possible and it just so happens that only ours eventuated, then I think this is cause for amazement. As you can see, my amazement only really exists in a conditional form.