Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Fri Aug 10, 2018 2:45 pm
Veritas Aequitas wrote: ↑Fri Aug 10, 2018 8:00 am
whether God is immanent and/or transcendent, the idea of God is illusory and an impossibility to be real.
Well, you've got no argument to show that that is so. In fact, if what you are writing above is true, then by implication you are conceding that God exists. For unreal things cannot possess real
qualities of being, whether we speak of immanence or transcendence.
Note I have presented my arguments in this thread.
If a hallucinating schizo insist X is 'real', does it imply the hallucinated-X is real?
I have shown the idea of God results in an illusory God. [re the argument from Kant].
It is the same for the ordinary theist who insist God is 'real' when God is illusory. As such there is no room for any implication God is real.
In addition, there has never been any proofs - since the idea of God emerged within human consciousness - to justify God is real.
We have to be careful with out own human nature. It's human nature to hold onto a bad explanation once we think it explains something to us, and not to relinquish it easily. In a way, this is good: for a person who changes her mind without trouble probably never had an idea worth holding. But at some point, when an old argument has manifested its faults, it is time to change. It's then that human nature makes us resist the change, even though it's right.
But I suspect you know that, too.
Point here is theists had been holding on to a bad argument for thousands of years and has resisted change driven by a necessary inherent human nature of resistance. But most theist are unable to change even their external environment and circumstances has changed.
What I have introduced is a new very recent justified argument to counter the old argument.
Islam is an example of a religion and a God that is inherently evil.
I can't argue with that. I've read the entire Koran (it's really a mess of a book, as anyone can see) and I've looked at biographies of Mohammed, even some composed by people who want to encourage Islam. And I think that the life of their "prophet" speaks for itself, in terms of moral awfulness. Add to that what the most earnest Muslims are doing today, and I think you've got a good argument for your case. There's a deep moral evil in Islam.
Agree.
Christianity and Islam believe in the same type of monotheistic God which I have proven God is illusory and not real. Because it is illusory as driven fundamentally by primal psychological motives, there is a tendency for the idea of God to be abused towards evil. This is VERY glaring in Islam but there are also subtle elements of evil [in terms of negatives] from Christianity and its rigid theism [illusory].
For example the Christianity's rigid grasp to the idea of creationism is a hindrance to intellectual progress within humanity. It is putting brakes on the existing trend of the exponential expansion of knowledge. Christianity also has many other hardcore resistance to change for the better.
Thus humanity should strive to prevent genocides and other identified evil acts.
We don't need a god for the above.
Here's your problem: absent a God, how do we rationally justify any account of "good"? There's no agreement among people and cultures on what is ultimate "good," whether we think of "human flourishing," "promoting life," "increasing power," "educating minds," "being positive" (whatever that means) or whatever. No feature of a secular reality directs us more to one kind of "good" or away from any kind of "evil" more than another.
Unless you can try to suggest one, maybe. Hume thought that would obviously be impossible, and Nietzsche thought it would be a delusion, either way.
That is why I am suggesting humanity must strive to increase the Morality Quotient [
MQ] of the average human to imbue them with the
capacity [theory and practical] to be grounded on the idea of absolute "good".
This is like making a person understand in theory on how to run 100 meters in 9.8 seconds and ensuring they are able to do that in practice consistently.
How?
I am optimistic it [establishing the theoretical absolute good, increasing the MQ] is possible given the current positive trends.
I have suggested the reference to Kantian Morality plus all other relevant faculties of knowledge.
So the secular position (which is methodologically agnostic, if not outright Atheistic) has no information on the answers to these questions.
Why not?
Because there's no "ought" rationally derivable from a mere "is" claim.
For example, it may be the case that, say, orphans are starving in Syria. That's a fact. Fine. But what's the "ought" that goes along with that observation, from a secular perspective? Is it "...therefore, we ought to save them," or "therefore, we ought to be glad we're not Syrians"? Is it, "...therefore, we ought to invade Syria and save those people," or "...therefore, we ought to mind our own business"? Is it "...therefore, we owe them money," or "...therefore, we don't owe them anything"? Is it "...therefore, we ought to show compassion," or is it "...therefore, we should be glad that world overpopulation is being counteracted somewhat by orphan starvation"?
How would we know which it was, if it were anything? No feature in secular reality points out to us any moral direction from the bald fact that orphans are starving.
Note my explanation above of how to establish what is absolutely 'good' and thus 'evil' as a
Guide.
In the case of your Syria example, the solution would be this;
- What is absolute good [as justified and established from "is" to "ought"] is,
-there ought to be no war
-there ought to be no killing of another human
-there ought to be no hunger
-there ought to be no evil of any type.
If we compare the Syria conditions, there are is the reality [is] of wars, killings, hunger.
The establishment of a fixed ought [as a guide] when compared the current 'is' conditions enable humanity to compute a gap between what is "ought" and "is." This is what I would call the "
Moral Gap."
In the present conditions we will do the best of our ability to alleviate and mitigate sufferings and strive to stop the war and its related evil acts.
What is critical here is the presence of the Moral Gap, say between no wars and presence of wars.
In the presence of the Moral Gap, humanity must find ways to prevent wars from ever happening again.
Without the Moral Gap staring at us, people will be indifferent without a central focus to do anything holistically.
The Moral Gap [re wars or whatever evil] will enable humanity to be focused and determine.
Enforcement never works effectively but this Moral Gap and human determination will eventually drive humanity to seek preventive solutions [fool proof] within the neurons and their connectivity in the brain, e.g. and analogically how to get the average or most humans to run 100 meters in 9.8 seconds i.e. increasing the MQ to >300% within the next 50, 75 or ASAP.
I am optimistic of the above based on the positive trend of the exponential expansion of knowledge and technology.