Moral Relativism

 The word for it is epistomology.  It is how we know what we know.  I've previously discussed the sliding scale of knowledge on the line of what we believe and placed the X and Y axes as perception and evidence.  Epistomology would focus on the latter.  How do we come to know what we know, those things that are not faith based or unsupported beliefs.  We come to them by observing the world around us and determining, through evidence of our senses, what is real.  The senses are, of course, fallible and they can be fooled.  Been there and done that.  As a quick note it is my opinion that the best way to a religious experience is magic mushrooms.  Just saying.  Apart from self induced or organically occurring hallucinations we do rely on our senses to tell us about the real world and , reliable or not, they are all we have.  Objectivists like to reference the objective real world as that thing that our senses are showing us. ...

 Heaven, eternal rest from toil and pain and just joy, joy, joy all of the time.  Woohoo.  Amiright? Well according to the Christian mythology at some point, right there in Heaven, Satan and about one third of the angels said, "Fuck this shit we are leaving.", or something to that effect.  It wasn't that easy to just bugger off out of Heaven because you don't dig it, according to the narrative, and there was a celestial war about this where God and his loyalists won the battle but a sort of cold war rages on between the Heavenly forces and the rebels and the latter are able to recruit people to their side and the Heavenly forces can do fuck all because free will bitches.  I mean they can send down God's kid to kick a few demons out of humans and make them go possess pigs and stuff but overall the rebels get to be victorious and keep people out of Heaven with a stunning level of success. "Many are called but few are chosen."  Mathew 22:14. Here is my ques...

I think you have to start with what logical thinking is and how we come by any thoughts on anything and everything.  I think the 3 sources are either through reading it somewhere, being told by someone else or first-hand experience.  First hand experience is the most compelling. If it is repetitive, the exact same results each time, we feel that confirms that our view of something is correct. We see the sun come up every morning in the east so we believe the sun will continue to do that every day until the Earth is destroyed. A twisted version of that would be the person who experiences that the Earth is flat.  They conclude it is flat because they never experience the curvature of it. Their firsthand experience compels them to believe the Earth is not a globe.  Now the ancient people who had no means to go up into space and see the globe were able to determine that the Earth was round through observation.  They noticed that smoke could be seen above the horizon...

 Let's talk about that Jesus guy.   Let's get the basic questions out of the way.  Did he exist?  I'm sure that there were men in the Hebrew province of the ancient Roman Empire circa 0AD named Jesus or Yeshua.  Are any of them the basis for the legend of the biblical Jesus?  Yeah, maybe.  It is more likely an amalgam of many legends and given a common, generic name.  Is there any corroborative evidence or archeological, anthropological support for the stories in the Bible?  No, there is not.  Some folks will claim that thousands of scholars say there is but there is not much consensus even among that lot as to who wrote what and how legitimate it is.  The setting was real.  Rome and Jerusalem and Bethlehem existed.   Now let's dissect the legend.  Let's start with the idea that humans are all sinful and need a redeemer.  As with most bronze/iron age concepts of human interaction with gods this redemption de...

God has existed for all eternity.  Let us see if we can apply any sort of reasoned thinking to this concept.  Let's use the Big Bang at 13.8 billion years ago as a fixed point for our purposes.  Prior to that moment let us assume we do not know what existed or did not.  Now let us take the mythology of the creation as expressed in the book of Genesis.  This book asserts that there was nothing and over this "brooded" the Creator.  It both posits that there was nothing and at the same time that there was The Creator, something.  Even if we were to interpret the nothing as the void it amounts to the same thing, a nothing over which something brooded which is self-contradictory.  Let's ignore the impossibility for now and take it on faith that this was the case.  Now going backward from the Big Bang we have God and nothing for eternity.  Just that...for eternity...backward.  Before the creation of angels, before begetting a son and proc...

In the Christian belief about the afterlife one of the most widely accepted is that a person will be made perfect.  The explanation for what this means is merely that you will have a body free of flaws and defects.  As for how and why this happens it is given that we will be made perfect like Jesus is because of His sacrifice.  I'd like to go a little bit deeper than the Sunday School narrative that all of your pain, weakness, deformity, frailty and sinful human desires will be removed and that will make you perfect and happy forever. Let us unpack the concept of perfection.  It is an ideal that cannot be achieved in this temporal existence.  It represents an unattainable state for anything or anyone in the known universe.  Now let's imagine a thing actually being perfect.  Better yet, let us imagine a being which is perfect and it is a short walk because it has been done for us and he is called God.  God is without flaw.  His love i...