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Kirata -> RE: Hawking: God Did Not Create Universe (9/22/2010 11:03:24 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: GotSteelquote:
ORIGINAL: Kirata
I've made it before.
If you go back and look, after the post you're quoting I explained my position again and you ended up agreeing with me.
The topic of that thread was Islamophobia, not the existence of God, and in that context you said...
What I'm trying to get across is that while the Qur'an certainly has passages that aren't remotely compatible with tolerance or secular freedom the Bible also has equivalent passages. Just as Christianity has gone through reformation and evolution to become tolerant(ish) and compatible(ish) with Western freedoms, Islam can not only do the same, it is and has already been doing so.
And yes, I agreed with you that both the Bible and the Qur'an have objectionable parts, and that one might hope for a more enlightened approach to the text than a literal reading of its message in all particulars.
So why then, in religion threads, do you post snippets from the Bible and argue from a literal reading of the text? It is a diversion, a diversion that embodies the least enlightened possible approach to the religious literature of any tradition, and one that is regularly employed by fundamentalist hucksters to render discussion moot and thinking un-necessary.
quote:
ORIGINAL: GotSteel
I was trying to make the point to Icarys that how he defines the term god was relevant to the discussion. It certainly isn't something that he should be leaving up to me.
The "definition" of Deity isn't up to Icarys, either. And my impression is that your only purpose for soliciting such a "definition" is to subject it to reason and find it wanting. Now you may care to argue the value of reason, which I certainly wouldn't dispute, but the issue is whether or not it is the right tool in this context, or whether taking that approach would constitute a category mistake.
For example, define "blue". You can't. Yes of course, you can refer to a range of electromagnetic wavelengths, but they aren't "blue". You can talk about retinal cells and neurons, but if you dissect the eye and the brain there's no "blue" there. "Blue" is an experience, and like all experiences it is private. There isn't even any way to convey the experience of "blue" in words. No matter how hard you tried to describe blue to someone, you'd never really be able to define it in a way that somebody who never experienced blue would know what it was like.
Or take another example. Think of a framus. I'm going to do an MRI study and see what parts of your brain light up. I can't tell when you're thinking of a framus, so you have to tell me. But after I finish the study, I will be able to test someone new and tell them when they're thinking of a framus. "You're thinking of a framus," I say! "No, I'm not," they say. "Yes you are, I have this little picture of your brain right here that tells me so." But they say, "I don't care what your stupid picture says, I'm not thinking of a fucking framus!" Now what? I have no way to know. Experience is private.
God is private. Some people experience God in their life and in the world. You can argue that "blue" at least correlates with something in the objective world. But they will tell you that God does too, that God correlates with All That Is. You may carefully study the universe and report that you did not find "God" anywhere. But of course, if you carefully examine the electromagnetic spectrum you won't find "blue" anywhere either, just frequencies and amplitudes, and you might well start to think that these people who talk about "blue" are either crazy or just plain lying.
So as it seems to me, the real question here, at least if you want to be open minded enough to refrain from consigning half the world to a loony bin out of hand, would be ask, okay, let's say you're telling the truth, is there some way that I can experience this what-ever-it-is that you call "God" too?
Now of course, you may not care to ask that question. You may not even consider it a valid question. But understand that there are no other questions about Divinity that are answerable in any satisfactory way.
K.
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