Posts Made By: William Paolini

Darin Joeckel said:
Specifically, why do believers seek medical treatment when they are diagnosed with a life threatening disease? [snip]
Shouldn't your believing family and friends also be excited for your early ticket to heaven, [snip]

What a great question as it is something which comes into play for each of us virtually all the time, both inside and outside of the faith context. IMO, it's simply because of the following exists in each of us all the time: "A psychic struggle, often unconscious, resulting from the opposition or simultaneous functioning of mutually exclusive impulses, desires, or tendencies." That's the definition, then word it is defining is "Conflict."

So conflict is why. Sure, the prospect of going to heaven is a wonderful thing, and something one would think any believer would jump at once the opportunity arose. However, any desire to be off to heaven also naturally comes in conflict with the natural self. So then conflict arises as to the prospect of missing "life", having concern about "pain" that migh happen in the transition, "worry" about loved ones still needing you here, etc., etc. So in the midst of the obvious good stuff related about a prospect of trotting off toe heaven, are all the other things that would be left undone and other worries and concerns which breed conflict within our psychology. Basically, from the religious perspective, there will always be the conflict between the new self and the old self.

When you think about it, it is no different than internal conflicts a person may have related to even simple things like being offered a new job and better opportunity that would mean a geographic relocation. So yes...better job and better place. But wait, I have to leave my extended family behind as they all live here. But wait, the wife and kids will not be happy being uprooted from their jobs and schools and friends. And on and on...conflicts.

Now, in addition to the simple conflict reason, there is also the one of sin and faith. So you have a serious disease correct. OK..do you have it because God willed that it is your time to go, or perhaps it is a bad force in the world trying to drag you down (i.e., sin), or wait, is it a test from God that I must go through to become a better person? So now if one is unsure of the reason for the disease in the first place, would be a little foolish to just assume it's because it's time to go!

So while I think you are correct, in some cases it may be a matter of a person's confidence in their faith, I think this is a tiny tiny percentage of the cases. The way I look at it, life is like any journey...there are the fun parts, the easy parts, and the hard parts (i.e., disease and other hardships, life threatening or not). You "skip out" on the journey when you make a choice to end any part of it. The better walk is to do just that, stay in the game and walk as long as you are able as when you reach the end, it will be the end, not before.

I would imagine, like everything else, each person might have their own ideas as to why a test is done, but from my own understanding of it a primary reason is as follows:

1. Premise 1 - God is omniscient as a given item in your question.

2. Premise 2 – If God is omniscient then He has total knowledge, or are all knowing as is the popular phrase, as this is the definition of omniscient.

3. Premise 3 – God has a plan for a particular creation, in this case the person. Support for this premise can easily be found in scripture. So the assumption for your question is that we are talking about God as framed in the typical context of a Christian believer and not some other context.

4. Premise 4 – For typical plans, as related to development of human beings, instruction and evaluation are common elements. As support if you look at the educational system in the U.S., which is knowledge, skill, and outcomes plan for children, in order to take a typical human from point A to point B in a development plan, it requires instruction for knowledge and/or skills development and transfer, then evaluation or testing for validation.

5. Premise 5 – Instructional technique has many forms, which can include, lecture, demonstration, hands on exercises, and even the testing process can be used as an instruction method in addition to its normal role of evaluation. In the latter case, one can see as support for this contention something as simple as the video game. Generally, many video games are competitions or tests of the player against the computer. Instruction is given on basic principles only and the competition itself is used as the primary instructional method to develop the necessary or indented knowledge and skills. In this delivery process, no formal test or evaluation is ever given as it is a repeating cyclical process of testing which is used and once the passing conditions are achieved, then this verifies that knowledge and skill have been transferred so no separate validation step is needed.

6. Premise 6 – God, or anyone, is free to choose the instructional method of their liking to teach any individual.

7. Premise 7 – An omniscient being, since they have all knowledge, would know every and all instructional steps necessary for any person to move from point A to point B for any plan for that person.

8. Conclusion – Therefore, for those instances where the God’s plan is for the human to develop in understanding, knowledge, skills, or other, and if God has chosen as He is free to do, a repeating cyclical process of testing as the instructional method, then the point of such a test becomes evident as it is the process that was chosen to achieve an end result of moving the person in question along a develop plan which God has chosen for them.

So in a nutshell, testing a person (i.e., putting them thru a trial or tribulation or hardship) not only determines their level of knowledge, understanding, or skill related to the test, but it also instructs them and improves them and progresses them. With the test being properly designed and executed, it can be used as a method of instruction and not just evaluation. So this would be a valid reason why an omniscient being would put a person through a trial or tribulation as it would be a method to develop them according to a plan.

Taking this concept out of the religious and into the every day, there are numerous instances in my life, where it was easily realized that everything that could be taught in the classroom or with exercise, would never achieve the same end result as the actual experience would. So the teaching could get you close, but to really develop the skill or understanding one would need to go through the experience. As common example, you can prepare all you want for how to deal with the death of a loved one, but only after going through it are you better equipped. You can train all you want for combat and war, but it is the hardship of the trial of being in combat which makes you the best warrior. Etc., etc.

Small questions, complicated answers. Before getting into Salvation from my frame of reference, which is Catholic and quite different from other Christian churches interpretations, the excerpts below from a Washington D.C. Catholic University article should prove interesting:

What do you mean by Original Sin? The term "Original Sin" (peccatum originale) was coined by St. Augustine (353-430), and his framing of the question has tended to dominate in Western Latin Christianity. … The Catechism of the Catholic Church explains: "In order to discover the sacred authors’ intention, the reader must take into account the conditions of their time and culture, the literary genres in use at that time, and the modes of feeling, speaking and narrating then current". Applying this principle, Scripture scholars today are taking a new look at this story. We realize more clearly now that the story of Adam and Eve is rather something like a parable. The truth is in the message of sinfulness rather than in factual history. … Does this lessen the importance of the story? Quite the contrary! It does indeed speak about the origin of sin. At the origin of our broken, "death-filled" existence lies the human attempt to play God. We violate the limits of creaturehood, and consequences follow. … Primal stories such as these deal with basic structures of human existence in the world and before God. They are not windows down the tunnel of history; they are mirrors reflecting our own faces. When we violate our creaturehood, when we reject being image of God and try to play God, now, as then, we bring "death" (in the rich biblical sense) and brokenness into the world. Original Sin should be one of the easiest things to understand and appreciate. Look at the daily news! Its effects are all around us. We live in it up to our ears!

OK, so we have sin. Salvation in its simplest form is being saved from that sin. In the Catholic tradition this happens not at single juncture points but is ongoing. Baptism is the first process which gives one salvation from it, then there is Penance, etc. Biblically Christ says many times that while you may receive faith (implies be saved) that you may fall if you do not persevere (Luk 8:13; John 6:70). You are called. You are given the salvation. But when you fall it is of your choosing, your decision so to speak. So don’t go trying to deflect the responsibility that is yours and go to God as you need to seek and be given forgivness. As far as judgment, well it can be argued based on Mat 7:21 that not everyone will be judged, but only those who chose to sin and have a store of unforgiven evil deeds (because you chose not to go to your savior, Christ, and ask for forgiveness again). So salvation from the Catholic perspective is a continuous thing, hallmarked best probably by John 6:37 – "Everyone the Father gives me will come to me. I will never send away anyone who comes to me."

General Biases present in the presentation: male centric as images of people in authority were male, other photos of provocatively dressed females. This imagery choice demonstrates a male-centric view at work, and therefore unbalanced presentation can be reasonably expected – so the need to be more careful in the listening. The bias begins around 1:00 min into Part one when the non-believer is characterized as someone who only (by implication) presents valid and sound arguments. This of course we know to not be true as any person or group of people are just as likely to present unsound and invalid arguments than any other. And curiously, at the end of part 2 he goes on to do just that my providing non-scientific and invalid evidence to support a supposed hypothesis (more on that later). At approx 1:20 talks about “apologist” Mr Craig. On the outside nothing wrong with this as definition of an apologist is simply someone who argues in defense or justification of something. But the key point in him doing this, is that he similarly does not use that label for people on the other side of the debate. Given that this is a presentation in the open forum of the Internet, where the reading and understanding level is probably 6th grade, most people will hear the word “apologist” and not know what it means, and instead of looking it up will simple conclude that it means something relative to what it sounds like, someone who needs to apologize for their contentions, so a negative context. So again, a unwitting bias or lack of balance. Maybe small, but depends on the audience. And speaking of “audience” this is again an unwitting bias he presented as he implied that the only speakers who tailor what and how they go about persuading to the audience at hand, which he gave I felt a somewhat negative connation to in his speech tone, he again implied was something only religious do, when in fact all good debaters and persuaders do this as it is a powerful thing to understand in persuasion tactics.

At approx 1:41 he explains Craig’s contention that not argument but a more secure foundation is needed to come to understand God, which is the inner testimony of the Holy Spirit. His reaction to this is a condescending remark “Whatever that is.” Which was done in a tone of dismissal. I found this really curious as since this is a debate, not a scientific inquiry, a person presented a point which they felt had bearing on the topic, and the other party, our non-believer, dismisses it as irrelevant because they did not understand it. This is an obvious bias and probably a reaction of his due to an assault on his core beliefs as a non-believer. In any event, not valid for debate or scientific inquiry. When you do not understand something, then you can’t assess it’s pertinence or validity, so bad form all around.

At approx 2:40 into part 1 a subtle form of persuasion was used by the author to bias the slant against the religious…so again entry on unbalance in the presentation. When showing that Christians are not the only ones to use the argument that “argument is superfluous” (i.e., the inner testimony concept), he turns to what is America today is probably the strongest image of those who are not rational in our post 911 world, a Muslim speaker presenting at a gathering. Of course I am not saying that Islam and Muslims are bad in any way, but there is a strong negative perception here in the US due to the events of today, right or wrong, and the author of this video is trying to leverage that. So again, much unbalance in his presentation.

Part 2 presents an argument based on the statement in St Anselm of “Unless I believed, I should not understand.” He then goes on to outline how this is a begging of the question. But what we really have here is a misapplication of the meaning behind the statement, which again goes back to a Part 1 misunderstanding related to inner testimony of the Holy Spirit. God is not an understanding that one can arrive at via argument, and has never been characterized as such except on the periphery to try to give some understanding to those whose psyche at the moment only resides in the realm of argument. Again, a misapplication, just as said before, understandings of emotions are similar and can never be arrived as understandings through argument as experience is the only route to them. No argument can prove love as it were.

In the section of Part 2 where he discusses Jennifer Faust’s contention that the failure to persuade using argument in religious debates is as true for religion as it is for science, this I felt was right on the target because again, her definition of religious argument was one that is quite narrow and encompassed only those religious arguments which have an aim to establish or undermine religious belief. So in that context, it means arguments by the faithful trying to persuade the non-faithful, and also arguments by the non-faithful (often using science as a foundation btw) trying to persuade that there is no God. Then she gives examples of how many times, non-believers have core belief structures also so generally reject arguments on the other side due to that and that non-believers similarly have beg the question issues.

The most interesting thing for me in all of this, is how in his explanation of where he and Jennifer Faust parted ways at 7 minutes into Part 2. He presented a contention of his as a “hypothesis” (7:35 to 8:10min) to give his presentation the “appearance” of a coming scientific approach. Then, when it was time for him to provide the “evidence” in support of his hypothesis, it was completely, 100%, anecdotal (8:25 min)! The sole basis of his evidence was “his sense” and “his experiences” and that these things provide “preliminary support for his conclusion.” So nothing that would pass any serious scientific scrutiny!! Again, in the argument process, we see pseudo science and bad science by those tendering arguments and evidence, on either side, and in this case by the non-believer’s side. Finally he asks that maybe he is simply defending a core belief instead and goes on to ask viewers for their thoughts.

Overall, a good topical presentation, but it had lots of issues as it was not balanced, was incorrect as it used non-valid and bad science for some conclusions, and leveraged some quite overt biases and prejudices. I have not read the Faust article he mentions yet, but sounds to me like it is probably more true overall, and that core belief structures within non-theists and theists alike will tend to make any debate on religion that is aimed at convincing for God or convincing that there is no God unsuccessful. I actually think this contention is rather interesting as it does provide a good tactic for debate and argument in that if the goal is to bring down the core belief, whatever that is in science or religion, then attacking the core is an approach that is not going to be successful, and instead you should attack the periphery until the core must fall – so basically choose your battles tactically well.

Thanks for the link…it was an interesting listen

Robert Provin said:

William Paolini said:

So my question is, why do atheists spend so much time concerned with what non-atheist groups are doing?

1. Remove religion from our government.
2. Remove religion from our public schools.
3. Remove religion from science.
Then we will not be concerned at all with what non-atheists are doing. You can observe your myths all you want, and we won't care!

Robert

Should we also remove history from public schools as most of that is conjecture at best, and a lot of myth in there too. Probably should strongly caveat a lot of science in school as being not the truth of something but just a best probability -- something not conveyed most of the time.

Also, can't agree with all your "removes" until there is some qualification of what that means. Let's not forget that the US is a democracy where the majority rules as long as we stay within the confines of the established laws. And when you look at how this speration of church and state is framed, it's not many tiems what is implied in statements like your list.

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof..."

To me it's a non-issue as I've not heard of any burning debates within the membership of the Catholic church for ordaining women. Sure there are those advocating it, but a buring issue? I think not. There are those however who are ordaining females as priests in Catholic church. This is of course wrong as it is against current Catholic canon so it the same as taking the law into your own hands. Best to either work it thru the system until you get results or form your own branch of modified catholisism. If there's lots of grass roots support, then your new catholic church will flourish. Go for it. Now people outside the church would like to make it a burning issue I'm sure, but they have different agendas...and inappropriate ones.

As far as if it is appropriate to how they classed it in comparison to, well certainly not a lot of political savvy for sure but bottom line, there is no correlation to crime type and punishment type anyplace, not even in the US criminal justice system. So certainly also a non-issue as this is typical in secular world too.

What I personally think is poor in this new press release is that there is an internal investigation first before they decide if anything criminal happened to refer it outside to civil authorities. This I think is just not right. If any allegation comes to light for any form of sex abuse, it should be church policy that it immediately gets referred to civil authority. Period.

Daniel Unger said:

If my wife finds out that im about to buy a $500+ televue ethos,
she'll be pissed,
may i throw her a Timothy 2:11-12 ?

Given your attentiveness and concern with her feelings, I am sure she would appreciate you throwing her a Timothy, or a Tom, or a Richard, or a Harry!

Not sure how the link you provided is saying what they are saying given the actual research results. Unless I'm missing something does not seem to line up.

Your link says: "Divorce rates among conservative Christians were significantly higher than for other faith groups, and much higher than Atheists and Agnostics experience."

Hoever, the actual Barna Group study says that out of the 3792 adults surveyed, that the divorce percentage on average was 33%, for A/As was 30%, and then it ranged from 26% to 38% depending on the religious group. Interestingly, probably the strongest religious group, evangelical christians, had the lowest divorce numbers at 26%.

So based on the actual study results, I would tend to say that the strongest christan groups have the lowest divorce rate. The study does state though that any percentage within 3 points of each other is within the sampling error...so a tight race between groups.

What the study did not state was what age the survey population was. Seems this would be critical as can't evaluate a divorce rate if talking to predominently people in their 40's or younger.

http://www.barna.org/barna-update/article/15-familykids/42-new-marriage-and-divorce-statistics-released

So bottom line, I think the conclusions in your link are a bit suspect.

Indeed. Seems a lot happened between 5pm yesterday (the last time I was on), and today at 2pm!

The "new landscape" as you put it is actually kind of an interesting experience. Many people unsure what is ok, what is not, feeling like the forum space is a bit new again and need to walk lightly for a while until it becomes more familiar. Kind of exciting in a way Change is interesting...it causes lots of growth.

Isn't it amazing? Seems every day some new facet of humanity comes to light demonstrating just how awful we can be. It seems to me that it's rather self evident that humans are like water, always seeking the lowest depth they can go to. It's why IMO that if people are left to their own devices that nothing good will come and why we need both civil systems like governments to promote and enforce order and theistic systems like religions to promote and enforce morals and attainment of higer ideals. Also why IMO that systems like secular humanism are not a real replacement for a theistic system because they don't really answer the mail related to discrete and quantifiable moral values.