471–480 of 513 posts
Vatican want merge with high tek just to influence it. It's not about saving someone, it;s about control.
China will make it their own way. India the other. etc
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> It seems obvious to me that the gods of all religions are designed by human minds to be receptive to human interests, otherwise nobody would bother worshipping them Nah that's just what atheists convince themselves. There's nothing obviously nor truthful about this conclusion or the line of reasoning behind it. All arguments for and against the existence of God are inherently unfalsifiable, but that doesn't mean at…
I wasn't making an atheistic argument. I'm saying that if God exists and is the infinite creator of everything, it's suspiciously convenient that he also happens to be interested in human affairs. Why does theism have to go hand-in-hand with the belief that God loves us? The former may have philosophical merit. The latter, which makes the bulk of the religious, is what I am saying is made up. We can certainly assign…
This might seem unique or unusual, but technology has been intertwined with religion since well, forever, especially if we consider the book to be a form of technology. Personally one of my favorite historical topics is how the printing press had a huge impact on the Reformation. With the Internet more broadly I think we are in the midst of a second “Reformation” in terms of information sources, the media, etc. Anoth…
Technology works well for decentralized religions, like Protestantism and Judaism, where there is no overarching authority on scripture, or where there are multiple entities competing for believers' attention that the majority choose to focus on scientific dogma instead. Once there's a central authority at risk from technology eroding at their base, they will be undermined. Like Catholicism, Islam, the Orthodox Churc…
This is absolutely not the case for Islam. According to An-Nawawi, Al-Majmu', (Cairo, Matbacat at-'Tadamun n.d.), 380, at least a chapter of the Qur'an was translated to Persian by a companion of the Prophet ﷺ. This would have been forbidden by the Prophet if translating the scripture was haram in principle.
In the future - perhaps even the near future - we may have AIs with richer inner lives than humans. Hopefully the situations we put them in, as they do our work, don't cause them pain or anguish. It's clear already they will have an uphill battle gaining any recognition of personhood from us.
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That is not rational. You can’t just make up an idea and then claim it’s true because no one can prove it isn’t. If you want to claim something that is outside our ordinary perceptions (and tests!) of how reality works is true then the onus is on you to prove it.
I did not argue God exists because no one can prove he doesn't. I claimed that your claim is just as unprovable as the claim that God does exist.
You are saying that by claiming that my claim is dogma. If I say the sky appears blue that isn't dogma, it's a statement of human perception of reality. I see it, you see it, everyone sees it. We know because it's what we perceive. We know how it works down to the quantum level. We can describe it with words and with math. We can test it.
Claiming there is a god is not that and the fact that it's unfalsifiable doesn't lend it a shred of legitimacy. It's an idea, nothing more.
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This is also true from a Catholic point of view (I am). At the very least, that’s debatable or less absolute than that. Because evidence (schisms, actual errors from the Church institution throughout time, not the least sex scandals we are not done with yet) shows that if God was actively directing the Church in the past and today, oh boy… not sure you would be sane to want to follow such a “peculiar” guidance.
> Because evidence (schisms, actual errors from the Church institution throughout time, not the least sex scandals we are not done with yet) shows that if God was actively directing the Church in the past and today, oh boy… Except all the scandals and anti-Popes are empirical evidence of the Holy Spirit guiding the Church. Despite all that the teachings of the Church are fundamentally unchanged. I can read St Justin…
> Jesus rose from the dead and against His Church the gates of hell won’t prevail.
I'll never understand how anyone can believe these things.
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> why should I accept what one specific council of European priests 600 years ago or whatever decided is to be considered holy canon? Well, firstly the canon doesn't just come from the decisions of Europeans and bringing race into it is a non-sequitur. The canon of Scripture comes from the Sacred Tradition, preserved by the Church and lead by the Pope and the Bishops (who FWIW weren't and aren't just white guys), and…
That's a lot of talking around the actual question >that has kept his Tradition alive through the centuries and alive fundamentally unchanged the answer to which is an emphatic, "No." Which is why Protestantism exists in the first place. The fundamental conundrum is whether or not you believe god is operating through people who are clearly behaving in self-serving ways, as many Catholic officials have in the past. Th…
Early Church scholarship makes it impossible to maintain the Protestant contention that the teachings have changed in their essence, obviously vocabulary has changed. Some recommended reading on the topic that is a mix of popular and scholarly works:
* The Fathers Know Best by Jimmy Akin
* Upon This Rock by Steve Ray
* Four Witnesses by Rod Bennett
* The Faith of the Early Fathers Volumes 1 to 3 by William Jurgens
* The Early Papacy: To the Synod of Chalcedon in 451 by Adrian Fortescue
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> Because evidence (schisms, actual errors from the Church institution throughout time, not the least sex scandals we are not done with yet) shows that if God was actively directing the Church in the past and today, oh boy… Except all the scandals and anti-Popes are empirical evidence of the Holy Spirit guiding the Church. Despite all that the teachings of the Church are fundamentally unchanged. I can read St Justin…
I don’t buy this so much as this is the perfect excuse for evil in humanity to continue to govern, wherever it is (“yeah it’s bad, but there’s a Plan behind all this” - very similar to how Qanon tried to operate). You see continuity and consistence while others see that it’s not only the religion that conquered the Roman world, but the Roman Empire that also conquered the religion to secure its existence. So much of…
Historical facts, like the Church and her teaching being invincible to the attacks against her over the millennia, has no relation to what ought to happen. Facts are facts not excuses and attempting to bring in that into the issue is a non-sequitur.
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I am saying that a document that says nothing new and claims no authority is not a Magna Carta.
> claims no authority It should be obvious what authority is implicit in a document from the vatican .
It could state 'intelligence is only something humans can have because we have God's authority to say so', but instead tries to use science and philosophy to make those claims. This doesn't work, because everyone else is trying the same thing and it is just a mire since there is no science which can prove intelligence is biologically based and there isn't even a standard definition for intelligence.
Instead of joining everyone else in the same tired debates while providing no proof for their conclusions, they had an opportunity to use their religious authority to go 'Because God told us' or whatever, and they didn't, so this document is effectively pointless.
In the future - perhaps even the near future - we may have AIs with richer inner lives than humans. Hopefully the situations we put them in, as they do our work, don't cause them pain or anguish. It's clear already they will have an uphill battle gaining any recognition of personhood from us.
They don't have an "inner" to begin witn.