Moral Relativism

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...

Yeah, yeah, copyright infringement.  Sue me Real quick, down and dirty, infinity is an abstract concept.  It cannot be proven.  You cannot go to where something doesn't end and demonstrate that it never ends.  The concept of something going forward for an infinite count or space requires the additional dimension of infinite time so it becomes self defeating in that if one is a fanciful construct then so is the other.  Eternity is a fanciful, abstract concept.  We can pretend we can conceive of something being eternal, even demonstrate it mathematically, but our existence in a temporal universe precludes ever showing one another that anything is, in fact, eternal.  Lastly, we can only abstractly describe nothing.  The absence of anything would preclude anyone or any thing observing it so whomever is describing the nothing is part of it or a something that defies the nothing, which is nonsense. So let's place our universe inside of eternity....

In a recent debate on morality my opponent took the position that without God we have no basis for morality.  My view was that even with God and the Bible, since that book of bronze age mythology is our only reference or connection to the mind of God, each individual cherry picks and invents their own morality. How does that relate to truth?  It is because people continue to assert objective things as foundational to how they function in reality/life and I will forever disagree.  Truth, morality and knowledge are abstract concepts.  I've addressed perfection and infinity before so let's have a go at the abstracts of truth and knowledge. Sye Ten Bruggencate, in a debate (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OL8LREmbDi0) went after Matt Dillahunty with the whole brain in a vat argument.  Basically, he tried to break it down that Matt couldn't know objective reality because he might be a brain in a vat.  Never once did Sye acknowledge that by the same token he ...

I have never witnessed a genuine miracle.  I don't think anyone has but we can debate whether anecdotal evidence to the contrary is truly viable evidence.  Has anyone really witnessed divine intervention or some supernatural event?  The Bible describes many such events but then so does every tale of mythology from every culture and every era.  I have met people in life making such claims but never for grandiose miracles like a man walking on water, a talking donkey, a guy with super human strength who loses it from a haircut but gets it back by petitioning the Lord in prayer.  There it is, to petition the Lord in prayer and have The Almighty grant this alteration to the natural order on your behalf.  Did that happen?  Does that happen?  By the rules of Christian dogma could that happen? Let's start with basic Christian theology.  God knows all and sees all.  God is perfect.  God has a plan.  God grants life and decides when, ...