If God is so merciful, then why did Jesus have to be sacrificed?

[Greta]

Greta wrote:

It's no secret that the most important thing for theists and non-believers alike is that we survive to adulthood, and then try to enjoy the ride as much as possible, make ourselves vaguely useful and avoid doing more harm than is necessary.

I wish there were more like you Greta, who can express what ordinary kindly men and women actually do.

This is because I share those same ordinary life goals. Most people I know and meet appear similarly inclined - just hoping to have a nice life, an aim tempered by the need to compromise.

By contrast, Immanuel's approach strikes me as a "life hack" - do x [some seemingly meaningless thing] and then you gain y [benefit]. In this case, the "hack" is believing that a particular tome largely written around 2,000 years ago in the Middle East is absolute truth while all other doctrines and ideas developed in different places and times are wrong.

Christians claim to have worked out this "life hack" (or afterlife hack) and want to share it. So do Muslims but they usually only want to share the "good news" with each other. Buddhists have their own hack, and share it freely but not pushily. Ditto Taoists and their life hacks.

That leaves us with what is common to those creeds and also to secularists - survive, try to enjoy the ride as much as possible, make ourselves vaguely useful and avoid doing more harm than is necessary. The same basic goals but different paths. Or one might say, different blinkers.

[Greta]

"Oowa oowa,...'

Interesting. You picked this OP to discuss, even though you don't believe in any of it, and now you can't make sense of any of it.

Actually, the Bible talks about your situation. It says, "...For the word of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing..." (1 Cor. 1;18).

You must be one of "those who are perishing." That adds up.

Oowa oowa is from a Larson cartoon :)

Have you read Angela's Ashes? Frank McCourt goes into detail about the terror felt by young people in poverty-stricken Catholic Ireland about the threat of hellfire. The poor fellow as a teen had a clumsy first tryst with a girl he liked and was distraught afterwards, convinced that he was doomed to Hades to be tortures for all eternity.

Again, it seems to me that the priorities you attribute to God are man's priorities or, rather, a minority of men's priorities.

[Dontaskme]

Greta wrote:

It's no secret that the most important thing for theists and non-believers alike is that we survive to adulthood, and then try to enjoy the ride as much as possible, make ourselves vaguely useful and avoid doing more harm than is necessary.

I wish there were more like you Greta, who can express what ordinary kindly men and women actually do.

This is because I share those same ordinary life goals. Most people I know and meet appear similarly inclined - just hoping to have a nice life, an aim tempered by the need to compromise.

By contrast, Immanuel's approach strikes me as a "life hack" - do x [some seemingly meaningless thing] and then you gain y [benefit]. In this case, the "hack" is believing that a particular tome largely written around 2,000 years ago in the Middle East is absolute truth while all other doctrines and ideas developed in different places and times are wrong.

Christians claim to have worked out this "life hack" (or afterlife hack) and want to share it. So do Muslims but they usually only want to share the "good news" with each other. Buddhists have their own hack, and share it freely but not pushily. Ditto Taoists and their life hacks.

That leaves us with what is common to those creeds and also to secularists - survive, try to enjoy the ride as much as possible, make ourselves vaguely useful and avoid doing more harm than is necessary. The same basic goals but different paths. Or one might say, different blinkers.

Thanks Greta.

The only goal or purpose to life is just to live it without questioning it with endless what's, who's, why's, how's, or when's... that can never be answered by the mind which is a dualistic appearance of ''No thing'' aka Non-dual reality...but the mind hates to hear ''No thing, for what can it do with that? ... In it's aching ''not knowing'' it makes-up as many different metaphysical and esoteric stories it can muster about what this aching unknowing could be or should be. And just to remind...all stories are weaved out of the same same same appearing different that's all...The thing is, all human story is fictional ...humans developed the capacity for language which has no more significance than the sound generated from a bell or a violin. When two surfaces rub together, a friction appears. The 3rd element needed is AIR ..without air, no sound or image can appear.

Air is just another word for Breath which is just another word for Space which is just another word for Emptiness which is just another word for Silence which is just another word for Stillness which is just another word for Pure Awareness which is just another words for Presence and so on, and so on...all these concepts I've boldly underlined are the source of everything appearing as and through the prism of the mind which are transmuted into images and sound and sense...giving rise to the illusion of duality.

The sound of a bell or a dog barking are generated as sound waves in much the same way as the sounds that come out of the human vocal cords heard as words, yet we take those words to mean ''literal things'' existing outside of our awareness, when in fact they are appearing in the same instantaneous moment, neither inside nor out...just here ..

Words like heaven and hell, or deity... as if these things actually existed is pure fantasy and nonsense..appearing to be the trap of the human condition until it is seen through as illusion.

But hey, let them have their beliefs if that's what gets them through their life... human habits are hard to die...looks like the cuddly teddy bear is here to stay

[Greta]

The only goal or purpose to life is just to live it without questioning it with endless what's, who's, why's, how's, or when's...

... unless one enjoys the endless whats, whos, whys, hows, or whens :)

... let them have their beliefs if that's what gets them through their life...

Sure. On a personal level, enjoyment balanced by ethics are most important.

[Walker]

In it's aching ''not knowing'' it makes-up as many different metaphysical and esoteric stories it can muster about what this aching unknowing could be or should be. And just to remind...all stories are weaved out of the same same same appearing different that's all...

But hey, let them have their beliefs if that's what gets them through their life... human habits are hard to die...looks like the cuddly teddy bear is here to stay

To apply your own view to the present moment:

“Them” is your dualistic story. Your "teddy bear," to phrase it in your lingo. Your, "belief."

[Immanuel Can]

Have you read Angela's Ashes?

I know of it.

Frank McCourt goes into detail about the terror felt by young people in poverty-stricken Catholic Ireland about the threat of hellfire. The poor fellow as a teen had a clumsy first tryst with a girl he liked and was distraught afterwards, convinced that he was doomed to Hades to be tortures for all eternity.

I'm not a Catholic. Fortunately for us all, neither is Jesus Christ.

I can tell you all kinds of horror stories about Catholicism, or Islam, or even Hinduism and Buddhism. But I don't have to, because they're in the paper every day. Less often remarked are the horror stories of secularism and Atheism. The missing 148 million bodies in the last century come to mind in that connection. The horrors here are not minor.

The truth is that human beings are not trustworthy with ideologies -- of any kind. Religious ideologies are, by most generous measurement, responsible for about 7% of the war dead. All the rest go to other causes; and among those causes, none is more prominent than secular ideology. It's killed more human beings than any other single force in human history. But I think that says as much about what human beings naturally are, don't you?

Again, it seems to me that the priorities you attribute to God are man's priorities or, rather, a minority of men's priorities

.
Well, how would we know what "God's priorities" were? I can think of no way unless He told us.

[Dontaskme]

In it's aching ''not knowing'' it makes-up as many different metaphysical and esoteric stories it can muster about what this aching unknowing could be or should be. And just to remind...all stories are weaved out of the same same same appearing different that's all...

But hey, let them have their beliefs if that's what gets them through their life... human habits are hard to die...looks like the cuddly teddy bear is here to stay

To apply your own view to the present moment:

“Them” is your dualistic story. Your "teddy bear," to phrase it in your lingo. Your, "belief."

It's only story arising in awareness. Take no notice of the little wizard behind the curtain. It's all just a game IT (consciousness) plays with itself, no big deal.
To be or not to be that is the question?

''I searched for God and found only myself. I searched for myself and found only God.''

Beliefs we are absolutely sure about..have you got any?

From belief to clarity.

[bobevenson]

It's said it was done for the salvation of mankind. Wasn't there a better way?

Well, as it says in "The Ouzo Prophecy," "I can offer you salvation in a game called Ouzo."

[thedoc]

It's said it was done for the salvation of mankind. Wasn't there a better way?

Well, as it says in "The Ouzo Prophecy," "I can offer you salvation in a game called Ouzo."

How many games have you sold?

[Greta]

Religious ideologies are, by most generous measurement, responsible for about 7% of the war dead. All the rest go to other causes; and among those causes, none is more prominent than secular ideology. It's killed more human beings than any other single force in human history. But I think that says as much about what human beings naturally are, don't you?

Amusingly shameless imaginary "statistics" - pure religious propaganda. Cults of personality, which seem to be posited by you as identical to reason and humanist ethics, deify the leader and are thus act as religious structures.

"Secular ideology" does not yet exist on a societal scale, at least not a modern one. We are still waiting for modern secularism and reason to find its way into power. China is so rife with ancient superstitions that they might as well be religious. Even in Australia, with some tiny proportion of believers in the general population, our polity is dominated and controlled by theists and theism, maintaining their control over Parliament with old by theist networks.

So, when Australia's devoutly religious politicians sent us to war in Iraq, that was a religious war. To quote GWB in 2005:

"I'm driven with a mission from God. God would tell me, 'George, go and fight those terrorists in Afghanistan.' And I did, and then God would tell me, 'George go and end the tyranny in Iraq,' and I did."

[Harbal]

"Secular ideology" does not yet exist on a societal scale,

I wonder what "secular ideology" is exactly. Presumably, anyone who isn't religious is secular. Do all these non religious -secular- people have one "ideology" in common, ie. "secular ideology"?

[Immanuel Can]

Amusingly shameless imaginary "statistics" - pure religious propaganda.

False. The three volume secular source,Encyclopedia of War, actually. It also contains all the precise head counts, added up. But you don't even need to read it to know it's true. Name one war in the 20th Century that was a "religious" war. WW? WW2? Vietnam? Cambodia? The Russian Revolution? The Chinese Revolution? Angola? Korea? Iraq? The Six-Day War? The Cuban Revolution? etc.

You would be hard-pressed to find even one 20th Century war in which religion played any plausible causal role, except occasionally Islam, perhaps. And you must know that more people died from war in that century than in all recorded history before combined.

I know that's not what the Atheist set tells you. Guys like Dawkins want you to believe that Atheism is inherently benign and tolerant. But in no place where it has become the regnant ideology has it created anything but human rights disasters. If you don't know it, you can look it up.

"Secular ideology" does not yet exist on a societal scale, at least not a modern one.

Oh. Russia was religious, then? Or no: you meant good ol' religious China, did you? Or Pol Pot's Cambodia was? How about Albania? Romania?

China is so rife with ancient superstitions that they might as well be religious.

They'll be interested to know your view.

[vegetariantaxidermy]

They'll be interested to know your view.

It's not her 'view'. It happens to be true. Do you know the difference between a fact and an agenda-driven opinion?
Btw. Scientologists are 'atheist'. Or haven't you decided what an 'atheist' is yet? Perhaps one day you will finally understand that it doesn't mean anything.

[Greta]

False. The three volume secular source,Encyclopedia of War, actually. It also contains all the precise head counts, added up. But you don't even need to read it to know it's true. Name one war in the 20th Century that was a "religious" war. WW? WW2? Vietnam? Cambodia? The Russian Revolution? The Chinese Revolution? Angola? Korea? Iraq? The Six-Day War? The Cuban Revolution? etc.

The Iraq invasion. GWB said that God told him to invade.

Cults of personality are not secular. The leaders are deified.

Old and tired argument. Here's my obligatory link: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/tippling/2 ... y-redux-2/

We can agree on one thing - that cults of personality are dangerous. They tend towards destructiveness because they ignore both secular ethics and religious morality.

[Immanuel Can]

We can agree on one thing - that cults of personality are dangerous. They tend towards destructiveness because they ignore both secular ethics and religious morality.

Oh, absolutely. When human beings set out to "fix the world" their own way, then history shows us that they soon find a reason to kill a lot of people in order to do it. There is nothing more deadly than human ideology set loose.

One caveat in our agreement, however. Secularism itself has no ethics. Now, that's not to say that many secular people don't arbitrarily choose to behave ethically, because they're nice folks and because they have vestiges of some other morality in their minds. But secularism itself, by definition, offers them no basis for any morality at all. Secularism itself is morally agnostic.

So secular regimes don't have to "ignore secular ethics." There's actually nothing substantial there to ignore.

Now, I imagine that will irritate you, and you'll probably start telling me about all the wonderful secular people you know. But as you see, I don't dispute that secular persons are sometimes nice. What I'm pointing out is that when they are nice, they have no moral system that tells they they are obliged to be nice. So you've got to know they're just doing it for the heckuvit, or because of something they have arbitrarily chosen to value, or for some other reason of their own; there are lots of motives they can have, good and bad. But it's never because secularism itself makes them do it.

You can check that. If you were to suppose otherwise, then I would say you should be able to give me just one ethical precept -- any one -- that is justified solely on secularism. (You won't find one.)

And it's this complete moral vacuity of secularism, coupled with the inherent badness that it releases in humanity, that makes secular regimes so extraordinarily deadly -- deadly statistically far beyond anything the "religious" world has ever produced. (Again, check the stats!)