i don't agree with this personally.
Faith: A life or death question
- Thread starter Tiassa
- Start date
i don't agree with this personally.
isn't this cult-like behavior really? i mean, i find it extremely hard to believe that the death of this child was due to any revelation received from god by the child's parents or anyone else for that matter. i really don't see the difference between something like this and people drinking a vial of poison and committing suicide, because they think they're going to fly away on a comet.
That is a determination of a myriad of different beliefs...
But that is the standard for Christianty....to pick up your torture stake and follow Christ example.
Cultism Is the Beginner’s Level of Human Existence
Beyond the Cultic Tendency in Religion and Spirituality, and in Secular Society
I don't agree with everything he says, but I think he makes a good point in how humans are at first cultists and how this can lead to a lot of suffering for many people.
It also seems inevitable that a person goes through this stage of cultism.
Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
Of course. But Christians (and all Abrahamists, although the Jews have a strange twist on it) believe that the dead live on (or will do so a few billion years from now, in the Jewish version) in a parallel supernatural universe ("Heaven" as they call it), rather than being sent back to this universe in a new body with a mind-wipe.
Interestingly, despite the certainty of eternal life, both Abrahamists and Hindus strongly disapprove of killing (except when they don't, which is a topic for another, much longer thread). But letting someone die, as in this case, is simply not the same thing. They're leaving the choice up to God.
Sure, if you pull the trigger God can simply make the gun misfire or better yet stop the bullet in mid-trajectory and turn it into a snow-white dove, but they never think about that possibility.
He's not saying, "sacrifice your child." He's saying, "Trust me, with my powerful mojo I will save your child from death at the last second. It will look like a 'miracle' to you lower lifeforms, a demonstration of my power, a reminder that you had better not piss me off."
And of course when he in fact does not do that, it's merely an even stronger reminder that he can punish any of us, for any reason, at his whim. With a giant "Just Kidding" sign flaming in the sky because, after all, the child is still alive in Heaven.
I'm always surprised when you Christian folk take no comfort in the certainty that this innocent child is still alive and living with God now. Do you actually, deep down inside, not believe your own mythology??? Children are without sin so there is zero chance that this kid is in Hell. So what, exactly, is the problem? Mortal life is transient, you'll all be up there soon enough, having a joyful reunion with him. Right???
Or is that too much of an Islamic point of view, that what happens during our brief time on Earth doesn't matter so long as we honor God? I know the Jews don't feel that way about it at all.
Food is a much deeper instinct than medicine. People recover from illnesses, even ones that look dire like influenza, every day without medicine. No one recovers from starvation without food. For a parent to expect his child to survive without food is patent faith in a miracle. To expect him to survive without medicine was standard practice in the Early Stone Age and even today it's nothing more than shrugging one's shoulders in bewilderment over the inscrutably complicated world that "The Lord" has built for his own entertainment and our tribulation.
That's fairly unusual these days. Jesuits in general are some of the most unflinchingly rational Christians. I think most atheists would be comfortable sending their children to a Jesuit university.
Parents are 100% responsible for their children. Or at least they were until the government decided that a slow-moving, non-reactive, omphaloskeptic bureaucracy guided by rules that were crafted by people who retired forty years ago could do a better job of it. As I pointed out in my previous post, all children are at the mercy of their parents' decisions, past and present, implicit and explicit. Many of those decisions have an enormous impact on their life expectancy. This is no different.
Someone else for whom the parent has total, unconditional responsibility. That responsibility includes discretion in following God's rules.
My fellow atheist, you are having a difficult time coping with the Abrahamist concept of eternal life. You need to get a handle on that before you'll understand what's going on here. These people have established themselves as the most faithful of God's servants, by committing the fate of their child, the thing they love most on Earth, into his hands. They will surely be richly rewarded in Heaven for their faith. And more importantly, it doesn't really matter because this mortal life is so utterly temporary! What matters more is securing a place in Heaven. Wouldn't it be tempting to wish for a child's early death, before he has a chance to sin, so his ascendence to Heaven will be 100% certain, instead of allowing him to grow up, make his own decisions, and take a chance on blowing it and ending up in eternal Hellfire? What loving parent who looks forward to a family reunion in Heaven wouldn't agonize over that???
Yes of course you and I know that this is pure bullshit. But these people take it seriously. They trust their irrational faith. That makes them contemptible morons in our eyes, but they still have the right to citizenship, and in America that includes Freedom of Religion. We have to tread cautiously when we enter this arena looking for ways to make America better. The curtailment of religious freedom for the public good, and especially for the good of the children of the woo-woo cultists like Christian scientists, does not often end well.
It would be so nice if you could present us with evidence of that experience that we could peer-review. Revelation counts for nothing in science. You could have been dreaming, you could have hallucinated, you could be psychotic, or you could be lying. Your god seems determined to reveal himself to his faithful only in ways that provide no evidence to support the claim of the experience to others.
You seem like a sane, sincere person who is not trolling, but you must understand why we can put absolutely zero value on such an extraordinary assertion that is presented with absolutely zero evidence. It would be a violation of the Rule of Laplace, a cornerstone of the scientific method. People must provide at least some wisp of evidence before anyone is obliged to treat their assertions with respect.
All people? Not in my family! I was taught to be rational about the same time I was taught to do multiplication. I didn't know what the word "religion" meant until I was seven.
never heard of mukti?
(perhaps you need a stronger muzzle?)
meh
In contrast to the disapproval of killing by a gross materialist (except when they don't) it fits in a thimble ....
But letting someone die, as in this case, is simply not the same thing. They're leaving the choice up to God.
Given that mortality has had a 100% success rate since time immemorial, religious principles and the worship of god certainly bring more to the table than postponing the rotting of your molars ....
needless to say, you don't have to be atheist to understand that some conceptions of god (or even the nature of the living entity and its relationship to this world) are simply untenable.
If even a dumb ass gross materialist can recover from an illness (even without standard medical assistance) what is the big whoop-dee-doo all about?
actually deep down you have the wrong understanding
You are working out of the premise that the final last word about self hood is this thing that popped out from between a women's legs in a pool of vile liquid... so yeah,trying to incorporate eternal values (like living in heaven) in a temporary vessel is certainly idiotic
needless to say, there are more comprehensive theistic arguments than the cheap paraphernalia that depicts heaven as a place where jesus does the rounds to make sure everyone in this immaculate council park has enough lemonade.
That only causes a problem when one underestimates the broadness of god's identity
i don't think he's saying that to these people either. my point is, i don't think he's saying jack shit to these people, they've just signed on some dotted line and "this is what we do now according to our indoctrination". and this is why i think that...
god's never lied to me. i haven't always interpreted a message correctly, but the message itself has never been a lie. if someone receives revelation that turns out to be a lie, or causes them to hurt people, even themselves, then i think they need to question where their revelation's really coming from. more than that, they need to go take a good look in the mirror and figure out what they're doing wrong.
then why have sex and create the child in the first place if that's the sentiment? why not sacrifice it as soon as it comes out of the womb? children aren't without sin btw. it's bestowed upon the child remember.
generally it doesn't work like that, and that doesn't bother me; i don't think it's supposed to. i can witness the evidence that's provided to me, but i can't recreate that for you or anyone else. i can tell you about it, but you don't have to believe me, and i'm satisfied with that. there is some evidence that corroborates a very strange experience i had several years ago, but it's not really mine to present. i certainly don't think it's futile though, so i guess we'll see what happens with it. :shrug:
Yazata
Valued Senior Member
Or at least they aren't trying to be intentionally cruel. There's still an element of unintentional cruelty to it.
It's not unlike radical Islamists killing large numbers of innocents in Moscow airports, London underground cars and American office towers. It's God's will that Muslims engage in jihad, the devout will be rewarded in heaven for dying in the name of Islam, and those who die at their hands are infidels whose deaths send the world a necessary message.
I agree with you about the 'slippery slope' and feel conflicted by it too. On one hand, I'm a big believer in personal liberty and autonomy. But I also think that Hobbes was probably on to something when he said that life in the state of nature is nasty, brutish and short.
Aristotle was on to something too, with his doctrine of the mean. (Similar ideas can be found in Buddhism and Confucianism.) Oftentimes, the optimum state both for individuals and states is somewhere in the middle between competing extremes. Too much bravery is foolhardiness, too little is cowardice. The same thing is true of liberty. Too much liberty is anarchy, too little is totalitarianism. We need to find an optimum balance, and that sort of compromise and equivocation is unlikely to please political or religious purists on either side.
(This, btw, is why despite my own strong libertarian instincts, I can't embrace a doctrinaire libertarian philosophy.)
So I'm inclined to think that people should have religious liberty, even if their religions seem utterly asinine to my eyes. When I see those shrill angry Muslim women with those scarves wrapped so tightly around their heads that it looks like their faces will pop, I can and do form very negative opinions about them, but I also think that they should have a right to believe and behave as they choose, so long as other people are free to do the same thing and nobody gets hurt.
But that's the thing, what happens when one person's religious liberty starts interfering with another person's freedom and autonomy? What happens if people advocate enforcing their chosen religious law on the community as a whole? What happens when critical satirical opinion is silenced with hysterical death threats? What about honor killings and the death sentence for apostacy?
That's the context in which I see this 'parents refusing medical treatment for their children' issue. On one hand, we have the parents' religious liberty. Allied with that, we have parents' rights to raise their own children as they see fit. But arrayed against it, we have the human rights of the children themselves.
In a place, where once again and as usual, the purists on both sides aren't going to be satisfied.
I used to work for a California district attorney's office doing investigative and paralegal work in similar kinds of cases. Sometimes it is necessary that Child Protective Services intervene to protect children from their own parents. In some cases (typically when kids' lives are judged to be in danger) children are removed and placed into foster care. But the courts really do try to keep children united with their parents. But many parents are themselves criminals, drug addicts and may suffer from active psychoses. It's tough. Oftentimes there isn't any magic-bullet solution that can possibly fix everything and make it right. The government can intevene nanny- (or police-) state fashion in managing even the smallest details of childrens' disfunctional living situations, or the state can stand back at a distance honoring parental rights and autonomies, knowing full well that the situation is extremely dangerous to children who conceivably might not even survive.
Part of cultism is to have no awareness one is a cultist; instead, one is quite convinced that one is doing the right thing, and is rational and such ...
Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
Living in the United States during the Religious Redneck Retard Revival that began around 1980, one can't help becoming familiar with many of the terms of Christianity. And living almost anywhere on this planet since the Islamist movement crawled out from under their rock, one can't help becoming familiar with many of the terms of Islam. But since the Hindus have, as yet, not tried to influence our politics and, to my knowledge, have never tried to bomb us, I confess to remaining largely ignorant of their religion and its terminology.
You really want to trade insults with someone with the vocabulary and other language skills of a professional writer?
Well no, of course I'm the last person to say that God exists, much less that he is actually talking to them. I'm just trying to show the other non-religionists how this situation appears to the parents so they can understand it better.
Excuse me, but in an earlier post you implied that God had somehow communicated with you. Since God is a metaphor rather than a real creature, you're both delusional. The only difference between the two of you is that their delusion caused the death of their son, while yours (as far as I can tell from this narrow acquaintance we have on the internet) is at worst merely benign, and at best it may have the salutary effects that religion often has on its followers, such as a more upbeat mood that makes you happier, more productive, and in some cases even strengthens the immune system. (The well-documented placebo effect.)
Sorry, the convolutions of Abrahamist philosophy are truly astounding. How can, for example, a baby whose brain is not even fully formed yet be held responsible for the sins of his ancestors? This attitude is taken to a ludicrous extreme by the Jews, who believe they are all responsible for their distant ancestors' breaking of the Covenant something like 3,000 years ago, in the course of an event (the Exile in Egypt) whose historical authenticity is now regarded with extreme skepticism by anthropologists, and this is the reason God has been punishing them for all of those 3,000 years with plagues, occupations, the destruction of the Temple more than once, the Diaspora, the thousand years of antisemitism that virtually defined European Christendom, the Holocaust in which it culminated, and most recently the generous gift to them by the English of someone else's homeland.
Surely you've seen the t-shirts that are popular among metalheads, showing one of a number of scenes of deadly violence, with the slogan, "Kill 'em all and let God sort 'em out."
Life was hard on children until the quite recent invention of vaccines and antibiotics. But the life expectancy of an adult who had managed to survive childhood was in the low 50s at the end of the Paleolithic Era. The spread of agriculture steadily reduced it, as people slowly transitioned from the meat-based diet that the metabolism of the world's apex predatory species is suited for, to an increasingly grain-based diet, which has adequate protein but few of the vitamins and minerals we get from the flesh of our prey. By Roman times, life expectancy had dropped into the low 20s for all but the wealthy who could eat more meat.
This is why, even though I call myself a libertarian and faithfully vote the Libertarian Party's slate, I don't have much to say to the hard-core anarcho-libertarians. Their slogan seems to be, "The solution to bad government is no government." My version is simply, "The solution to too fucking much government is less government." Most libertarians are like us: they would happily live under a government that actually respects the U.S. Constitution, not the monstrosity we have been living under during this endless Roosevetian era, which has quietly adopted every plank in the entire 1929 American Communist Party platform.
I basically agree. Although I would not recommend that anyone walk around the United States with their face concealed. Perhaps the Europeans can harken back to their tradition of knights in shining armor, but for us anyone hiding behind a mask (if it's not Halloween, a hundred-year cold wave, or a ski vacation) is an outlaw and can be shot on sight by any of our well-armed citizens. as a public service.
Libertarianism embraces the concept of community. People are free to form communities in which they can live among others who share the the same values and engage in the same behavior, so long as it doesn't violate a few basic proscriptions such as murder or slavery. At some point the community grows so large that the "shared values" become onerous, and we have to decide at what point it no longer has the power to turn preferences, fetishes and tics into laws. When a person who chooses to leave the fold can't get a job in the city any more and has to move 100 miles away to find one, this has gone too far. (Or when a gay kid can't join the Boy Scouts anywhere in the country of his birth, a great handicap to scholastic and professional networking.)
As I said, the basic laws of civilization must be respected. The most fundamental one, upon which civilization is based, is that you don't get to kill somebody just because you don't like him, are angry at him, or disagree with his choices. The reason for this is that if the citizens have to expend a significant amount of their time and effort on protecting themselves from each other, the surplus wealth or "capital" they were producing (which defines civilization) will vanish and we'll be right back in the Stone Age.
Of course that will suit the religionists just fine, because in the Stone Age people weren't as well educated and it was much easier to convince them of the literal truth of supernatural fairy tales.
That's a tough call. Children do not have all the rights of adults, this is patently obvious even in a liberal constitutional democracy. So what rights do they have? Who gets to decide that?
Shouldn't you wait until the empirical findings come in, so that you have proper evidentiary support and everything is rational?
That was a lie brother, I tell you truly jesus was never put to death on a cross.
Peace be with you.
just pointing out how reincarnation almost always incorporates a sense of being liberated from repeated birth and death, so notions of heaven and reincarnation are not mutually exclusive
Just because you may be a professional writer in no way means that whatever subject you write on is professional .. and hence the whole muzzle business
:shrug:
actually I am just reciprocating with fraggle's coarse toneI love this language ...
how do you know that?
so am i.
you misquoted me there, by mistake i assume. god has communicated with me, and so i have been able to witness the results of that communication first hand, which allows me to compare the fruit of my own experience with god, and that of these parents' "act of faith". and imo, based on my own experience, i would say that this is not an act of faith, but an act of indoctrination due to a lack of faith.
i suppose we can attribute your incorrect assessment of the results of my faith to a narrow perception, but even so, it doesn't match with what i've testified to, and described on this forum for many many years.
genetics, and the fact that we're all born into a society we had no part in creating.
Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
But what do we do in the meantime? Grant all the rights of adulthood to one-year-olds? Hell, we're heading in that direction here. The United States is practically a pedocracy.
Is that because he never existed? There is considerable skepticism among scholars. The writings of Josephus are the only contemporary evidence we have, and historians keep changing their mind about whether they are forgeries written much later.
So someone who dedicates himself to the destruction of society from the moment he has enough awareness to make the decision would be atoning for this inherited sin?
As for genetics, the fundamentalists who take all of this woo-woo seriously don't even believe in it, since the world and its entire biosphere is only 6,000 years old.
Most Americans don't even take a share of responsibility for what was done to the Indians in order to provide us with this home--something that only happened a few hundred years ago and was done by people whose names are written down. It's hard to understand why so many of them are sanguine about accepting responsibility for something that was purportedly done millennia ago and was only attested in oral legends. So many of the legends in the bible have already been falsified, how irrational does one have to be to continue trusting in the others and not accept them as metaphor?
Muslims know that Jesus never died on the cross for the same reason that Christians know that he did. Their holy book tells them so.