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Goodbye Jesus

Albert Einstein Supporting God


Freddy

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Do with this what you will. Rather simplistic....but is it effective? Freddy

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It could be effective for some people. Those who want to believe and those who don't think very much.

 

Actually I was sort of OK with it myself until the end where it is said that evil is "not having God in your heart" or some such nonsense.

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Guest ephymeris

I've seen this ad in the past and my biggest take from it was the contradictions christians show that they can't trust the wisdom and knowledge of men, they can only trust their blind, childlike faith in god, UNLESS someone really smart agrees with them. Then they can TOTALLY use that to justify their faith.

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How many times must Christians be reminded that Einstein was a scientific pantheist?

 

He was hated by many Christians of his day for his godlessness.

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Cold as absence of heat, and darkness in absence of light, is only possible if absence is possible in itself. If God is everything, then absence from God doesn't exist. That's the definition of being everywhere. God is supposedly existing and present even in the places of absence, so God cannot not-exist in any place. If God is good and his goodness permeates his being, then wherever he is good would also exist. So evil cannot exist if God is omnipresent. Unless we redefine God's character, of course. Or that God created the possibility of absence of his presence and good, which means that God intentionally created sin (as absence of his good).

 

Or in other words, if God didn't create evil, absence of good, then evil/absence is self-created or has existed from eternity--just like God. To say that some things came into existence without God creating them, only brings up new problems of theology. Can things come into existence by themselves, without God?

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Yeah this has been floating around as a chain email forever. So somebody got some actors together and filmed it. That doesn't make it true.

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Wait... the theists' professional PR team is paid by the theists to make a commercial inferring that we all should rely on their god by rhetorically proving that evil doesn't exist???

 

Isn't that a bit like an auto mechanic trying to drum up business with an ad campaign rhetorically proving that people don't have engine trouble?

 

And believing Christians don't immediately see a problem with that? What about all those different doctrines specifically predicated on the concept of evil, even to the point where it's anthropomorphically personalized in Satan, "the enemy of our souls?"

 

*twitch... twitch...*

 

And of course, they're careful (as always) to stop before they get to the implications of god's responsibilities. Whether evil is an objective, stand-alone thing, or just the absence of god, it still dodges the inevitable problem of why, if god has as much power, knowledge and wisdom as they claim, is he so thoroughly ineffective at dealing with evil?

 

One of the things which bothered me endlessly as a Christian was that every time I heard any version of, "Many are called, but few are chosen," or any assertion that most of the people who have lived or will live are Hell-bound, then it's obviously an admission that god has something like a ninety-seven percent failure rate at the one thing that's most important to him.

 

Again, I say:

 

*twitch... twitch...*

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Isn't that a bit like an auto mechanic trying to drum up business with an ad campaign rhetorically proving that people don't have engine trouble?

Of course they don't have engine troubles. The engine can't cause problems. Engine trouble is just lack of engine functioning. So it's really the customers fault the engine doesn't work.

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I'm not hungry....it's the absence of food that makes me that way. :-) Freddy

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....but is it effective?

 

Yup. You bet it is.

 

But its effectiveness ends as just another platitude somebody might say as they clap a fellow christian on the back with that sly grin that says, "Got god?"

 

Just another little feel-good moment for the walking dead.

 

:ugh:

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Cold as absence of heat, and darkness in absence of light, is only possible if absence is possible in itself. If God is everything, then absence from God doesn't exist. That's the definition of being everywhere. God is supposedly existing and present even in the places of absence, so God cannot not-exist in any place. If God is good and his goodness permeates his being, then wherever he is good would also exist. So evil cannot exist if God is omnipresent. Unless we redefine God's character, of course. Or that God created the possibility of absence of his presence and good, which means that God intentionally created sin (as absence of his good).

 

Or in other words, if God didn't create evil, absence of good, then evil/absence is self-created or has existed from eternity--just like God. To say that some things came into existence without God creating them, only brings up new problems of theology. Can things come into existence by themselves, without God?

 

Exactly right Hans. You can explain these things so well. Sometimes I know something is bogus but can't work out the whole darn reason in my head that well anymore. I guess that is what happens in your 50s. Yikes, old age! :Old:

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Exactly right Hans. You can explain these things so well.

:HaHa: I don't now about that. It's pure accident when I do.

 

Sometimes I know something is bogus but can't work out the whole darn reason in my head that well anymore. I guess that is what happens in your 50s. Yikes, old age!

I'm getting there too, in a few years. :( Us oldies. Perhaps we need a special department at Ex-C? :Old:

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Of course they don't have engine troubles. The engine can't cause problems. Engine trouble is just lack of engine functioning. So it's really the customers fault the engine doesn't work.

:grin: "Lack of engine functioning!"

 

Hans, are you sure you weren't working with President Reagan's spin team? One of my all-time favorite pieces of euphemistic jargon came from Gen. Alexander Haig, who, during the Iran/Contra scandal, on being questioned by a member of the press about his lying, said,

 

"That's not a lie! It's a terminological inexactitude!"

 

I was awestruck! It was truly a thing of beauty.

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Of course they don't have engine troubles. The engine can't cause problems. Engine trouble is just lack of engine functioning. So it's really the customers fault the engine doesn't work.

:grin: "Lack of engine functioning!"

 

Hans, are you sure you weren't working with President Reagan's spin team? One of my all-time favorite pieces of euphemistic jargon came from Gen. Alexander Haig, who, during the Iran/Contra scandal, on being questioned by a member of the press about his lying, said,

 

"That's not a lie! It's a terminological inexactitude!"

 

I was awestruck! It was truly a thing of beauty.

 

WOW!

 

Let's you and I and Hans and a few others get together with our car engines that never cause problems and only lack functioning, our terminological inexactitudes, and a few other fancy curlicues, and set up our own religion. We should get quite a following. The masses would never know we weren't speaking a Latin mass or performing some other holy ritual...just a thought for what it's worth.:shrug:

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One of the things which bothered me endlessly as a Christian was that every time I heard any version of, "Many are called, but few are chosen," or any assertion that most of the people who have lived or will live are Hell-bound, then it's obviously an admission that god has something like a ninety-seven percent failure rate at the one thing that's most important to him.

 

 

I used to bring this up during the cynical period of my deconversion. I would first get a Christian to agree to some kind of area that was at least "over 50 percent" of humankind were destined for Hell, then once I got that admission I would remark: "So Satan wins. It also shows that he's more powerful than God, obviously."

 

This would make them extremely mad; although the odd fundy would nod in agreement. There is an exacting relationship between extremist theism and the amount of people that they think will be saved. The more twisted and far out the theology is, the less people who are going to "make it". Every time.

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"That's not a lie! It's a terminological inexactitude!"

 

I was awestruck! It was truly a thing of beauty.

Terminological inexactitude? That's awesome! I'll use that sentence, somewhere in the future.

 

(I can barely make sense or spell... I had to rewrite above sentence five times, before I got it right. I had three 32 oz of bee r+ 22 oz + one scotch tonight... my dog! I'm wasted! Birthday party. That's the excuse. Tomorrow I'll read this and be embarrassed!)

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Let's you and I and Hans and a few others get together with our car engines that never cause problems and only lack functioning, our terminological inexactitudes, and a few other fancy curlicues, and set up our own religion. We should get quite a following. The masses would never know we weren't speaking a Latin mass or performing some other holy ritual...just a thought for what it's worth.:shrug:

:HaHa: I can see how we have a Latin mass over the dead car battery!!! So cool! Throw some holy water on it, or perhaps hole battery acid on it.

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The absence of marshmellows makes for pretty boring Smores.

 

Hey, didn't Einstein believe in some spin off of Spinoza's God? As far as I can tell Einstein just took a metaphysical naturalist position and then voila! of course the universe had to be omnipresent, omnibenevolent, omnipotent, omniscient, etc etc. Of course, what he probably also didn't tell the believers that-for whom he most likely constructed this lazy approach- was that by definition "God" also had to be omnimalicious, omni-impotent, omni-ignorant, and omni-absent as well -this is rather absurd obviously. In other words, I am guessing that Einstein's "God" was just a lazy spin off of Spinoza's God meant to provide cover for his actual atheism or agnosticism, so that he didn't have to deal with quite so much bullshit from the believers; if he had come out as an atheist or agnostic or something he would have been given far more shit. In other words, I posit that Einstein's pantheistic "God" was just intellectual junk constructed to keep the believer's at bay and retain some respectability from the Jewish community at large as well.

 

So then when asked if he believed in "God" he could reply "Why yes I do". The idea being that if anyone asked further and truly pressed him, then he would just assign all the values of "God" to the known universe and say "Doh, of course the universe is omnipotent, omnibenevolent, omniscient, etc, etc". Of course, this is garbage in a sense, and he would have known that. However, this would come in handy quite a bit on a day to day practical level.....

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:sing:

What would happen if I

put a face on causality?

Would it only prop up

the belief of the fundies?

 

I see nature’s grandeur,

consistent in all things.

No ego, no lies, only

our misunderstandings.

 

Einstein’s god makes

some sense to me.

It’s just a small step to

put a face on causality.

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Wait... the theists' professional PR team is paid by the theists to make a commercial inferring that we all should rely on their god by rhetorically proving that evil doesn't exist???

 

Isn't that a bit like an auto mechanic trying to drum up business with an ad campaign rhetorically proving that people don't have engine trouble?

 

And believing Christians don't immediately see a problem with that? What about all those different doctrines specifically predicated on the concept of evil, even to the point where it's anthropomorphically personalized in Satan, "the enemy of our souls?"

 

*twitch... twitch...*

 

And of course, they're careful (as always) to stop before they get to the implications of god's responsibilities. Whether evil is an objective, stand-alone thing, or just the absence of god, it still dodges the inevitable problem of why, if god has as much power, knowledge and wisdom as they claim, is he so thoroughly ineffective at dealing with evil?

 

One of the things which bothered me endlessly as a Christian was that every time I heard any version of, "Many are called, but few are chosen," or any assertion that most of the people who have lived or will live are Hell-bound, then it's obviously an admission that god has something like a ninety-seven percent failure rate at the one thing that's most important to him.

 

Again, I say:

 

*twitch... twitch...*

 

I think the problem is that when you come down to nitty gritty, to Christians, what God commands/does is not good because it fulfills any standard of morality based upon empathy and compassion, what God commands/does is good because God commanded/did it. This is why murdering every last man, woman, and child in a city can be considered a good act, and it's okay for God to predestine the majority to eternal torment, the fact is that the only standard of morality it really has to conform to is that God said it, after all questioning God would be being disobedient and by their moral system that's the worst thing you can do, heck it's what you go to hell for. Coincidentally, I think this is also the reason why atheists cannot be moral, we're being disobedient to God, which is the only moral standard so immediately we are evil.

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I think the problem is that when you come down to nitty gritty, to Christians, what God commands/does is not good because it fulfills any standard of morality based upon empathy and compassion, what God commands/does is good because God commanded/did it. This is why murdering every last man, woman, and child in a city can be considered a good act, and it's okay for God to predestine the majority to eternal torment, the fact is that the only standard of morality it really has to conform to is that God said it, after all questioning God would be being disobedient and by their moral system that's the worst thing you can do, heck it's what you go to hell for. Coincidentally, I think this is also the reason why atheists cannot be moral, we're being disobedient to God, which is the only moral standard so immediately we are evil.

Absolutely. I don't even want to try to count how many times I've heard exactly that position put forward in all seriousness by "scholars." Of course, it flies in the face of the fact that if Christian doctrine is true, their god clearly expects his followers to be morally accountable on a personal level. How could they be accountable, no matter how deeply sincerely they desire to be moral and pleasing to god, if the only thing they can hang their hat on is the mindless following of the old workplace joke of, "Rule One: The Boss is always right! Rule Two: When the Boss is wrong, see Rule One." Usually, the Christian response is, "Well, the Bible says that God's ways are higher than our ways."

 

Even when I was a Christian, I hated that response, because I felt that it defamed god, both directly and through reducing his "children" and creations to the status of mindless automata. A pocket calculator has more functionality than that. How can we be held morally accountable if we're not allowed to face and wrestle with moral issues? Also, it's a direct denial of the importance of the Bible itself: If all we need and are able to use is the Boss Rule and a set of do's and don'ts, then what the hell is that thick library of over sixty books, purportedly from the mind of god, intended to be used for? What's the point of it? If the Boss Rule is the true way of dealing with moral issues for the Christian, then the entire Bible could be effectively reduced to something that would comfortably fit on one sheet of paper.

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I think the problem is that when you come down to nitty gritty, to Christians, what God commands/does is not good because it fulfills any standard of morality based upon empathy and compassion, what God commands/does is good because God commanded/did it. This is why murdering every last man, woman, and child in a city can be considered a good act, and it's okay for God to predestine the majority to eternal torment, the fact is that the only standard of morality it really has to conform to is that God said it, after all questioning God would be being disobedient and by their moral system that's the worst thing you can do, heck it's what you go to hell for. Coincidentally, I think this is also the reason why atheists cannot be moral, we're being disobedient to God, which is the only moral standard so immediately we are evil.

Absolutely. I don't even want to try to count how many times I've heard exactly that position put forward in all seriousness by "scholars." Of course, it flies in the face of the fact that if Christian doctrine is true, their god clearly expects his followers to be morally accountable on a personal level. How could they be accountable, no matter how deeply sincerely they desire to be moral and pleasing to god, if the only thing they can hang their hat on is the mindless following of the old workplace joke of, "Rule One: The Boss is always right! Rule Two: When the Boss is wrong, see Rule One." Usually, the Christian response is, "Well, the Bible says that God's ways are higher than our ways."

 

Even when I was a Christian, I hated that response, because I felt that it defamed god, both directly and through reducing his "children" and creations to the status of mindless automata. A pocket calculator has more functionality than that. How can we be held morally accountable if we're not allowed to face and wrestle with moral issues? Also, it's a direct denial of the importance of the Bible itself: If all we need and are able to use is the Boss Rule and a set of do's and don'ts, then what the hell is that thick library of over sixty books, purportedly from the mind of god, intended to be used for? What's the point of it? If the Boss Rule is the true way of dealing with moral issues for the Christian, then the entire Bible could be effectively reduced to something that would comfortably fit on one sheet of paper.

 

Sorry I missed this. I remember also having a similar experience, thinking that ascribing all this stuff to the creator of the universe seemed defamatory. That we based upon Christian theology we are nothing more than glorified machines. As to the matter of why the Bible is so long. You forgot to take into account the fact that there is absolutely no way of talking to this boss. The purpose of the book is to tell you what the boss says.

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