Free choice to be infected with aids at birth? Or free choice to get cancer as a child?
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Free choice to be infected with aids at birth? Or free choice to get cancer as a child?
Surely free will relates to something I do as a person? What kind of person would deliberately infect a new-born baby with aids or give a child cancer, certainly not a loving God. If you are asking why would God allow this to happen, well that’s a different question and as I said in an earlier reply that’s one of the first questions I will have when I get to heaven.
For now I reconcile myself to the fact that human beings are incredibly complicated biological machines. If they were non-biological machines of similar complexity then it would be amazing if they never went wrong and didn’t need repairing from time to time, or sadly, reach the stage of being beyond repair.
The Yanks are not stupid enough to sacrifice their weapons as they know their number one enemy is their government.
Well kids do get home cancer and die young so clearly god is not loving or omnipresent or all powerful as he allows this to happen
They say his son turned water into wine and fed the 5000 with loaves of bread and fish so surely his father can save young children , stop Hitler and Stalin etc ?
Sapiens : A Brief History of Humankind is also a good book, as it goes right back to the very beggining of human development, and it explains how humans are more likely to believe in fairytales than the cold hard truth. Rulers and politians have been using this knowledge against us for thousands of years.
While we may like to think we are smart because we can now see religion for what it is, the reality is they have developed a whole new bag of tricks which can be used to manipulate us and keep us in line. With the advent of TV, radio and the mass media, religion soon became superfluous to requirements as far more effective methods of control came in being. Religion was also expensive to run, and the clergy wanted a slice of the pie too. They still control huge assets which was payment for keeping the population under surveillance and teaching them how to think and behave, but as an organisation they are pretty much finished.
BTW who do you think it was that first put these ideas into our heads that religion was a load of old tosh?
It's interesting to note that many nonbelievers on here associate the concept of 'God' with the Abrahamist one, which is perhaps understandable due to the statistics at this point in history. For my part, all gods have the same status.
It is also not without irony that Abrahamism is a wonderful example of schism upon schism and deep enmity between those endless schisms. It seems that the Abrahamism god not only has done nothing for 2,000 years but he can't keep his flock from fracturing and setting themselves against each other.
Awesome book. Hitchens could've made a speech claiming that the grass is blue and the sky is green and I think he might almost sway my views on that. You might say that his political views weren't always popular, but regardless of that he was a great speaker and an intellectual powerhouse. I've spent countless hours watching YouTube videos of him and wishing we still had him here today.
I just had a quick peruse of this review from the guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/books/20...al-noah-harari
that actually looks very interesting Bales Thank you mate
thats going on my Christmas list
your question has kind of stumped me with it being so philosophical
but for me personally it was
my earliest possible memory would be when I was 6 years of age
I had a cream coloured Labrador dog named Sandy.
One winter on a walk over the woods in the snow he ran across the ice on the river the ice broke and he went under and got trapped
firemen even waded in on with a rope attached to them to bring him out gave him the kiss the life
as I prayed for Sandy to be alright , he wasn't he died
then I got slightly older 8 or 9 maybe
and I possibly just did not buy it and religious people always came across as untrustworthy cruel hypocrites I don't think it was an individual or a group of of people generally , something instinctively felt it was a form of control "do this or you will be hurt"
my fathers side of the family my Grandfathers funeral service was last year was a humanist service
my mothers parents they was in a church with mass (optional)
Maybe media,tv ect has had an impact or maybe as you get a bit older you read more literature, get information I don't know,
Wasn't karl Marx that quoted something about religion being the opium to the people (I'm not sure on the exact quote)
what about you mate ?
I always find it ironic that some people who have survived a catastrophic event thank 'God' without bearing in mind that the same deity must have therefore decided that those who perished in the same event were not worthy of sparing.
This is a great book, it was sent to me to help cure me of all those silly conspiracy theories but it actually had the opposite effect, imo Sagan was very awake and it was pretty obvious to me that he could see a future for this planet that he didn't like..
Carl Sagan - The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
http://www.metaphysicspirit.com/book...ed%20World.pdf
If you don't have time to read the whole thing there are some greats quotes from it..
https://www.goodreads.com/work/quote...he-dark?page=2
“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”
I think the answer is in the above mentioned book. You can make people believe absolutely anything if you know how. It worked for around 2,000 years regarding religion, but I'm guessing that with the advent TV, radio & media, religion was allowed or even encouraged to die, as it had already served it's purpose. There is also the socialist/communist subversive element which included the destruction of religion as a core doctrine, but by this time the Tavistock Institute and others like Edward Bernays had already worked out how to replace it.
Once you know the rules of the game the role of slogans, repeat messaging, news by ommision, nudge units, propaganda, misinformation/disinformation, conformation bias, bogeymen, etc, becomes very clear. We are like putty in the hand for those who have agendas and big ideas to implement :biggrin:
Another potentially interesting thread descends into the same old stuff by the same 2 posters.
While we do not really have Religious threads as they always end up the same way, this one appears to have run without incident :thumbup:
if anyone has / is taking offense at anything that has been written, then please PM me :wave:
Carl Sagan is trending on Twitter.