You are talking about a different sense of rationality than I am. I'm talking about two specific questions: Given that I want to do/be x, should I do y? and, Should I want to do/be x?

I assume you have no problem with people exploring these questions.

Are you averse to associating those questions with ‘righteousness’ rather than ‘rationality’? From my perspective, when people use ‘rationality’ in these instances - it’s a red flag. If we desire a higher quality of life, then we should strive to become more righteous, not necessarily more rational.

More to the point of your contention with Lagtight: The desire for life and righteousness transcends identity. Identifying as a materialist atheist does not preclude someone from those desires as Lagtight seems to want to claim.

I don't have your hangup with the term "rationality," so I'll continue using it here since it more accurately describes what I'm talking about. I don't care if you want to associate those questions with "righteousness" instead, although I think your writing here is already pretty cryptic due to your idiosyncratic word choices.

You're demonstrating my argument for me.

Unnecessary harm under secular morality is from the perspective of the recipient of a behaviour or action. Whether it is necessary to cut a person open means whether it is necessary from that person's perspective (e.g. necessary harm: they require surgery, unnecessary harm: they are a victim of stabbing).

Under your DCT, the same person could be stabbed to death and it could be considered necessary by Divine Command, which is obviously contradictory to the secular position.

Original Position did you quite the courtesy of responding to a lot of this Gish gallup, despite it sounding like "My First Book of Apologetics".

In addition to responding to OP's question, perhaps you could tell me which out of everything you posted is the single best reason (I ask this even though I'm quite confident that the reason you are a Christian in the first place has little to do with anything on your list).

For bonus points, gold stars, and a cookie, you could tell me which is the weakest of the reasons you listed, and why.

Why You Can Trust the Bible -- Page 3 of 4

19. The Bible contains scientific insights that were far beyond the knowledge of even the greatest minds at the time the Bible was written.

20. No other books ever written comes close to the Bible in power, authority and influence.

21. Few are they who are indifferent to the message of the Bible.

22. “The whole Bible authenticates itself by shining with the glory of the one who inspired it.” - John Piper

23. The quantity of extant manuscripts far exceeds any other book of antiquity.

24. The Bible claims to be the Word of God. Over 3,800 times, the Bible says things like “God said…”

25. Christians by the millions have been martyred for their faith, even though they had nothing tangible to gain by dying. In other words, the martyrs were already assured of eternal life, so they had nothing extra to gain by dying for their faith.

26. The Bible doesn’t flatter the reader; it has a rather unflattering view of mankind and human nature. The Bible frequently tells the reader things that they do not want to hear, and often doesn’t say things that they do want to hear.

27. Faith alone by grace alone is unique to the Bible.

28. The Bible is often mocked, but never refuted.

29. The Bible writers don’t write flatteringly of themselves or their fellow believers. They are often portrayed as unfaithful, rebellious, unbelieving and disobedient.

30. One proof that the Bible is the Word of God is that if it wasn’t true you couldn’t prove anything at all. The Bible alone provides a rational basis for trusting in things that we normally take for granted: logic, basic reliability of our senses, basic reliability of our memories, uniformity of nature, free will, human dignity, application of abstract ideas like mathematics to the physical world, morality, mind/body distinction, purposefulness, self-identity over time, and the existence of other minds, among others.

31. The Bible contains medical and health insights that were not proven by science until thousands of years later.

32. The dishonesty of Bible critics actually helps to prove the veracity of the Bible. The critics are constantly repeating unsubstantiated claims like “the Bible is full of contradictions” and “Constantine decided what books are in the Bible.”

33. Most of the great art, literature and architecture in the Western Civilization was inspired by the Biblical worldview.

34. The perseverance and preservation of the Jewish people is unparalleled in history.

35. The Bible, far more than any other book in history, does more than any other to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.

36. “The Bible is a reliable collection of historical documents, written by eyewitnesses during the lifetime of other eyewitnesses, and they report supernatural events that took place in fulfillment of specific prophecies, and they claim that their writings are divine rather than human in origin.” - Voddie Baucham

37. Many of the greatest minds in history and many of the most simple-minded peasants in history have attested to the transformative power of the God described in the Bible.

Point of Information: Neither Original Position nor BF know what the Gish Gallop is.

A true Gish Gallop is predicated upon a large quantity of arguments presented in a formal debate in which a time restraint placed on each debator makes a point-by-point refutation impractical, owing to the time constraint.

There is technically no time restraint in an online forum debate.

Ergo, no Gish Gallop in progress.

Nice try to your both for attempting to be snarky (I like being snarky myself), but in this case it was an epic fail.

Too bad neither of you knows what a Gish Gallop is. I love your title, My First Book of Apologetics. If I use it, I'll give you credit (but no royalities).

Hard to pick just one gem in a field of so many.

Bonus points, gold stars and cookie ain't enough incentive, buddy. I also want a chocolate cupcake with a candle on it!

Point of Information: I'm busy the next few days (might be re-locating yet again), but hopefully I can address the above thoughtful posts by OP and BF in a couple days.

Thank y'all for engaging me in this thread. I look forward to the discussion continuing in a day or three.

This is false.

I hope part 4 of this embarassing document includes:

38. No other books ever written comes close to the Bible in power.
39. No other books ever written comes close to the Bible in authority.
40. No other books ever written comes close to the Bible in influence.

Might as well maximize saying the same thing into as many numbered points as possible, definitely makes your argument stronger.

Few are indifferent to the US Tax Code also, another divinely inspired text.

lol, again.

Yep, we have good evidence that our modern texts are relatively reliable, but since I don't think any book of antiquity is divinely inspired, so what?

I just read a biography of Okubo Toshimichi written 70+ years after he died. It also included many sentences like "Okubo said (or wrote)..." Really, just a miraculous book.

What does this have to do with the Bible's trustworthiness? Someone believes p, therefore p is true? Ridiculous.

So does the IRS Tax Code...

Interestingly, you aren't a Calvinist, so presumably you don't actually believe in grace alone.

To be more serious for a moment, I think you are disagracing the Bible by pretending this interminable list is why it should be trusted. The Bible is one of humanity's great works of literature and deserves a better defense than the trolling display you're putting on here.
Since we mostly don't know who wrote the Bible (except Paul), this is difficult to determine. But yes, the authors of the Bible were human and like most writers acknowledged such. Just like the authors of the IRS Tax Code....

An obviously invalid argument, but kudos for actually presenting an argument. Let's grant that the Bible provides a rational basis for trusting logic, etc. Showing that the Bible isn't true doesn't imply that we should then not trust logic unless you also show that the Bible is the only rational basis for trusting logic, something you never do.

This point sounds familiar. Will Part 4 include points like:

41. The Bible contains astronomical insights that were not proven by science until thousands of years later.
42. The Bible contains geological insights that were not proven by science until thousands of years later.
43. The Bible contains biological insights that were not proven by science until thousands of years later.

Does this mean that the dishonesty of Bible defenders actually helps to disprove the veracity of the Bible?

And Eastern Civilization? What about them? Too bad, no God for you?

China ftw here imo. But maybe I should go convert to Judaism or something.

I'm sure you've carefully measured this.

Okay. Still waiting for that valid argument for P1. Didn't you teach logic? How would you have responded to someone giving you a list of (so far) 37 copypasted premises that have little to no logical connection to the conclusion they are supposed to argue for?

You might as well post Page 4 now so we can move past this whole sordid ordeal and get back to your actual argument for the claim that if a person violates a command of God, then that person has done an immoral act.

You have so far listed 37 mostly crappy points instead of just doing as I asked and giving a single valid argument for your claim. This response has the same effect, and likely the same intention - to make a point-by-point refutation impractical, because who really wants to waste their time responding to so many obviously bad faith arguments.

I actually sincerely believe that all of my points are valid. Not that I expect anybody to agree with me.

If you really believe that I am arguing in bad faith, and you're not just trying to be a snarky jerk, then please demonstrate your sincerity in that belief with a formal warning and/or by deleting my "bad faith" posts. "Bad Faith Posting" violates the TOS, so please either do your job as moderator and deal appropriately with a "Bad Faith Poster", or please admit that you're just full of hot air.

Thanks in advance.

Have a great weekend, sir.

Sure, I'm not saying you don't believe all 37 points that you listed. But I don't think you believe that all 37 points constitute a valid argument for the conclusion that if a person violates a command of God, then that person has done an immoral act. So far, your response to my request for such an argument was:

1) You trust the Bible.
2) Sin and immorality are the same thing.
3) The Bible says that violating a command of God is sinful.

Okay, fine. But I want to see the actual logic here. That's not a valid argument, as I'm sure you realize. When I asked for that argument, you instead gave me 37 points supposedly in favor of (1). But that doesn't give me the logic and so doesn't answer my actual question.

No, posting in bad faith or trolling doesn't violate the TOS of posting on 2p2. Don't know where you got that idea. RGT does includes a rule against trolling a poster, which I enforce in a discretionary manner, and I don't think your posting ITT so far requires such moderation. Not answering the question I asked, but instead answering a different question with a laundry list of tangentially-related points is annoying and trollish, and I suspect meant to disguise your lack of a good answer to the point I'm making about your moral views, but I'm hopeful that we can get back on track here.

Hi, OP.

Back in track:

I felt compelled to digress at bit and list my "37 Points" as a justification for the key premise of my argument that killing babies is fun is immoral.

P1: The Bible is trustworthy. (Premise putatively supported by the "37 Points.")

P2: If the Bible is trustworthy, then we ought to believe what The Bible says. (Premise putatively supported by the notion that believing what trustworthy sources say is generally a wise practice.)

P3: If we ought to believe what the Bible says, then we ought to believe that murder is wrong/immoral/sinful. (Premise putatively supported by the Sixth Commandment's prohibition of murder [which would include a prohibition on the killing of babies for fun].)

Conclusion: Murder (including murdering babies for fun) is wrong/immoral/sinful

I will engage any and all responses in a day or three.

Have a great weekend, everybody!

When morality comes up, the topic will sometimes bounce between what morality is and are we being moral. To be fair, this seems to happen even in honest good faith discussions, but especially so with apologetics.

As a determinist, when an apologist declares that the atheist acting morally is no different to having a preference for chocolate or vanilla, I don't find it to be the gotcha they think it is.

How morally someone acts in any circumstance is determined, as taste preference is determined - but not in the same ways (moral behaviour being influenced by external factors, with feedback into determining future behaviours etc, taste preferences not so much).

(I think there is a saying:
All people are dicks some of the time.
Some people are dicks all of the time.)

I'm reading between the lines from your comment but I think you are saying something similar, and if someone is motivates to act rationally, and if moral behaviour is a rational behaviour, then they are likely to act morally.




The idea that morality is something 'special' is quite widely held, whether someone is religious or not, probably why so many atheists defend moral behaviour with such vigour against apologists that describe is as "mere preference" - it seems more than that. Reducing it to a base behaviour seems to be quite unpalatable to people (much like Neopolitan ice cream is unpalatable), but it seems to me that people behave morally because humans are evolutionarily motivated to behave morally.

When someone asks "ought humans behave morally?", I don't see any choice in the matter, any more than we can choose whether or not to have binocular vision. If any element of what morality is based on is missing (perhaps empathy?), then whatever subset of humans that do not have that requirement (psychopaths/sociopaths, perhaps), could not be persuaded they ought to act morally just as a blind person could not be persuaded that they ought to have binocular vision.



An anecdote I heard about a person who did not experience empathy. There was a group of friends out together and they needed to leave one of their group alone somewhere for whatever reason, and the non-empathic person was the only one to suggest that they leave one of the group's vehicles with the person being left alone (something that the rest of the group had somehow not considered!). What's interesting is that this person came up with what would otherwise be considered a moral decision, but it was based purely on practical reasoning (e.g. if the person left behind needed to leave quickly, it would be much easier if they could do so themselves rather than someone in the group, such as the non-empathic person, having to go all the way back and pick them up).

I butchered the story a bit, but it's something that I thought was interesting, as it gives an example of how moral behaviour would be rational behavior, even such that it could be evolutionarily beneficial and therefore selectable.

Your god, psychotics, and criminals are the ones that kill babies. By the millions.

As Beaucoup Fish says, this is just an enormous amount of gish gallop, But this in particular is absolutely ridiculous. Please give some examples of scientific insights in the bible.

The bible couldn't even make clear the heliocentric model of the solar system. The bible doesn't make clear that the earth is a sphere rather than flat. According to the bible, stars could fall to earth and are just points of light. No mention of germs and the cause of disease. The bible also proscribes witches, which we all know now is just baseless superstition.

Of all the claims you make about the bible, calling it a source of scientific insights is the most absurd (and that's saying something, since your entire screed is absurd). The bible was written by iron age goat herders who had no idea why we even have seasons, where the sun goes at night, why people get sick, the list goes on and on.

Reading the bible is perhaps the single greatest way to create an atheist. It is a book about the most disgusting person (entity?) in literary history (talking about your god if that isn't clear): jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.

If you could prove to me that he exists, I still wouldn't worship that c-sucker.


If I had knowledge of a child being raped right now and I had the means of stopping it, I would. There's one difference between me and your deity.

That's fine, but you know, conversations are cooperative ventures. I try to keep my comments such that the person I'm talking with can respond in the flow of the conversation and hope that my interlocuter does the same.

Okay, a few problems. First, what does "trustworthy" mean? My friend Mary is a trustworthy person, and I generally believe what she says, but that belief is defeasible. She is sometimes sincere in what she says, but still wrong. Similarly with books - I've read Gibbon's Fall and Decline of the Roman Empire. I regard it as a trustworthy book, but I think some of his conclusions and claims are false.

However, I don't really regard the Bible in total as trustworthy. I'd like to see a valid argument to this conclusion, not just a disjointed list of adjacent claims about the Bible, Jesus, or Christianity.

I also disagree with (P2). Sometimes we should believe what trustworthy people or sources say, but sometimes not. A trustworthy source can increase the credence of a claim, but I do not give prima facie acceptance to them on all subjects, especially in difficult subjects like philosophy. I'm not even sure what "trust" means in philosophy. Aristotle is more profound and illuminating things to say in his discussion of morality than the Bible, but I don't "trust" him as a result. Basically, you have to look at the context to decide whether a trustworthy source should be believed - how likely is the claim they are asserting, how much expertise does the source have on the specific claim being asserted, what incentives does the source have that might decrease their trustworthiness on this topic, and so on.

Second, you keep assuming that sin and morality are the same thing. Why? My view is that sin means something like disobeying God. But this differs from a conventional understanding of morality, which has to do with offenses to other humans as well. It might be that God has commanded people to not act immorally, but this would then mean that it is a sin to act immorally, not that sin and immorality are the same thing (eg God can also command people to do things that have nothing to do with morality). So I disagree with P3 on that ground as well.

I'll also just note that the Ten Commandments prohibits killing, not murder. And most Christians believe the Ten Commandments no longer apply to them.

Yahweh killed every child and baby on earth. We believe this is moral because it says so in a book. We further believe we can deduce from this that abortion of a fetus is wrong.

In so doing, the killing of countless women, Yahweh also killed untold fetuses in utero. Is that a problem? Kind of. Don't use this character as an objection to abortion.

The religion has to be apocryphal. Check.

Why?


I find my document rather kewl. (I considered asking you why you find my labor of love embarassing, but upon reflection I don't care why you find it so.)

My list actually stops at #37. Maybe in my next edition I'll include these to pad the word count.

False. The vast majority of world's population are indifferent to the US Tax Code. Most who read the Bible have a rather strong opinion about it, one way or another -- in virtually every country in the whole world!

In the future, you might try for using better analogies, since the one you chose here is an epic fail (in my opinion, of course).

(more to come....)

[QUOTE=Original Position;57015203]

You deleted a post of mine last week in which I responded to FellaGaga in a similar manner as your response here. Please delete your response. (Just kidding, please don't delete it, I like it when "LOL" is the best that the smartest person in the room can muster.)


I make the above point because some critics challenge the veracity of the text. If the New Testament is thrown out based on textual grounds, then literally every text from antiquity would have to be thrown out.

Sorry, I'm not familiar with Okubo Toshimichi. Is the book miraculous? Please say more.

I personally find it relevant when multitudes will give their life rather than recant their beliefs. It's not like a small cult of several dozen people who committed suicide because of a comet coming near Earth.


Upon your request, I will gladly explain to you why I believe that this analogy is poor.

One way to cash out "faith alone by grace alone" in a non-Calvinist perspective is to believe that faith is only possible by God's grace (which is available to all), but that each person can still refuse God's grace and not be a recepient of God's grace. (Calvinists have unsuccesfully tried to turn Luther into a Calvinist.)


One guaranteed way to disgrace the Bible is to not believe it is the Word of God! I believe I am honoring the Bible with my little defense, but if I am not honoring the Bible, I will accept rebuke from by fellow Christians, not from infidels.

(more later....)

Is killing babies "by the millions" a bad thing?

Survival of the Fittest, Baby!

"Eat, Drink and be Merry, for Tomorrow We Shall Die."

"If it Feels Good, Do it!"

Okay, now we have three people in this thread who don't know what the Gish Gallop is.

My Page 4 is a list of scientific insights in the Bible, which I will post in due course.

How many of the Bible authors were "goat herders?"

The above looks suspiciously like a Dawkins quote.

Aside from that, why are any of the items on your list bad?

Survival of the Fittest Baby, and God is the Fittest of All!

If we're just highly-evolved pond scum anyway, what's wrong with racism, homophobia, sadomasochism, etc....?


Duly noted.

One way to stop children from being raped is to encourage people to read their Bible's and obey its teachings. Rape is evil from a Biblical perspective. (Not so much from an Evolutionary perspective.)