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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: The Philosopher who wrote (11597)	4/16/2001 7:07:25 PM
From: Win Smith	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 82486

To be a tiny bit rude, what's the difference between what motivated Mother Theresa and the martyrs and what motivated the followers of Jim Jones to drink their koolaid, or the followers of David Koresh to offer up their daughters to him as soon as they came of age? Or the followers of L. Ron Hubbard, who appear to have faith in the teachings of a guy who, before he started his religion, said starting a religion was the way to get really rich. Belief and faith are fine things, if they help people live better lives. That a lot of people believe in something doesn't make it true, though.

To: The Philosopher who wrote (11597)	4/16/2001 8:45:42 PM
From: Dayuhan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 82486

There have been many, many martyrs who gave their lives, sometimes under terrible torture, for their belief in God. Now, you can say they were deluded, or crazy, or whatever you want. But clearly they believed there was something there that gave them the willingness to suffer. People suffer for all sorts of causes, religious and secular, worthy and horrific. From this I can make no deductions about the merit or objective truth of these causes. I can conclude that people are often willing to suffer terribly for their beliefs. You can't measure the bond between a parent and child the way you can measure bonds of valence or grativy. Does that mean they don't exist? The only thing you have to "prove" the existence of bonds between parents and children are a) anecdotal evidence, and b) the evidence of the sacrifices parents do for "love" of their chilndren. These same things "prove" the existence of God. So in you world there is no love. There are no parent-child bonds. These things can't be proved by reason and evidence to exist, therefore they do not exist. We don't have to weigh something to understand it. We have thousands of years of recorded observations of human relationships upon which to base an understanding of how humans bond, how humans relate to one another, what effects the removal of basic human relationships have on emotional development. It is difficult to precisely understand or describe human relationships, but we are getting better at it as we observe more, record more, think more. We can do this because human relationships involve contact between two entities that we can observe. If we see a human claiming a relationship with an entity that we cannot observe, things get a bit stickier. We can observe that some people claim a personal relationship with God, presumably initiated by God. Others have received no such call. So we must assume that either there is a selective God who talks to some people and ignores others, or that some people want a God badly enough to construct a personal God with whom they can have a personal relationship. Which seems more likely to you?

To: The Philosopher who wrote (11597)	4/20/2001 2:28:36 PM
From: Lazarus_Long	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 82486

You can't measure the bond between a parent and child the way you can measure bonds of valence or grativy. Does that mean they don't exist? The only thing you have to "prove" the existence of bonds between parents and children are a) anecdotal evidence, and b) the evidence of the sacrifices parents do for "love" of their chilndren. These same things "prove" the existence of God. But you can prove the existence of the parent and the child and postulate an emotional bond between them based on their observable behavior. YOU CAN'T PROVE THE EXISTENCE OF GOD. And that's where your argument fails. There have been many, many martyrs who gave their lives, sometimes under terrible torture, for their belief in God. And there have been many martyrs who died for Communism, Nazism,and Islam. Does this mean those causes are right? The fact that people will die for a cause is not evidence of the correctness of that cause; it is evidence of their strong belief in it.