Creation "science" and a Bible-based morality

[excreationist]

The reason Alan Watts brings up the decadent antics of Nero and his absurdly extravagant games was because it horrified contemporary Romans.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOZqGUCrje8&t=465s

"....the next minute they would release wild lions into the arena to eat up all the slave girls. They [the crowds?] got a big sadistic kick out of that because you see pursuing pleasure beyond a certain place takes you in to what are the Buddhists call the Naraka world - that is to say the hells - when you have explored pleasure to its ultimate limit the only thing you can get a kick out of is pain...."​

It seems like the crowds got a sadistic kick out of it - they weren't just horrified....

And Alan Watts is saying it is normal for people who have explored pleasure to its ultimate limit to look to pain... (other's pain?)

....I agree with both Allan Watts and the Roman people. Feeding slave girls to lions isn't cool.

I got the impression that the crowd were entertained seeing the slave girls being eaten. And I might too in an uncomfortable sort of way - if I had been pursuing pleasure and power to its limit and was getting bored... after all, this is what some people do in the Sims: (though in that simulation the people can't really feel the pain)

 

[excreationist]

I don't think I'm alone but on the other hand it isn't clear what the intelligent force wants of me.

If you don't know what the intelligent force wants of you, you're in the same position as if there was no intelligent force. In practice you're in the same boat as atheists.

Well sometimes I think I know what it wants...
e.g.
https://talkfreethought.org/showthr...nces-that-suggest-an-intelligent-force-exists
When I was gassing myself in my car and turned the radio on, the two songs that played gave me the impression that I should not kill myself.

Due to experiences like that I get the impression that the intelligent force is there and cares about me but sometimes I think it can involve "tough love" and it doesn't like the hubris I have from time to time (that I could become rich or famous, etc).

But when I've been an atheist I often am suicidal - especially at the age of 29 and earlier when I had never really had a girl that I had been mutually attracted to. I had been looking for super attractive girls. Then at the age of 29 I met the woman I ended up marrying. We are extremely compatible and I think God might have helped that happen.

My current girlfriend is Christian. One day when she was going to church I joined her. Now I go to church on Sundays. I'm an atheist. I can follow any religion. I'm cool with it. To me God is just a metaphor.

A few years ago a relative of a friend invited me to church - the first two services were Q&A about hell and Q&A about science and the Bible. I was an atheist and asked them tough questions. (about why bad dogs get put down while torturing them for years would be seen as cruel - and Psalm 104:5 saying that the earth can't be moved). Now I usually go to church on Sundays - with my wife and her brother.

....The good news is that there's no way to fuck it up. With "it" I mean life. No matter what you do you'll fail or succeed at the same rate

Well I think it is different for me... at the start of 2019 I was very psychotic and after six treatments of ECT and more anti-psychotics I have severe memory problems and ended up doing trolley pushing instead of PHP programming. I think hubris was a central issue.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Just curious -- and obviously, you have no burden to respond -- but have you read such works as (the online title) God Is Imaginary...or Paine's Age of Reason...or Dawkins' The God Delusion...or any of the many Ingersoll collections? Did they make compelling arguments? When you weigh such writers against Ken Ham, who seems more substantial and who speaks more powerfully to your experience?

Well I don't believe that most of the Bible is historical or scientific and a lot isn't moral - I see it as a kind of test:
https://www.lifesplayer.com/bible.php
Some readers of the Bible would think that "God is perfectly just and loving, even if most people are going to hell, perhaps forever".
I believe in an intelligent force so I disagree with that aspect of atheist books.

All books are atheists. None of them believe in god(s).

 

[Keith&Co.]

Ken Ham influences a lot of Christians and can get them to believe in creation science due to talks like the 1980s "Genesis solution" one in the OP.

I don't think he convinces anyone to change their mind to creationism. He's one of a bunch or charlatans that convince already-believing Theists that their views are correct and science doesn't disprove them.
As mentioned above, his arguments are isolated ones, and only deal with one claim at a time, so as a whole the creationist model doesn't stand up to scrutiny.

If he never converts Christians to YEC then I wonder why he is now the CEO of Answers in Genesis and helped create the multi-million dollar Creation Museum and Ark Encounter... he also published many volumes of The Answers Book which has answers for common answers/objections...

People who already believe give him money because he SAYS what they want to hear. Just like Trump.
He founded AIG... not a big mystery how they picked him to be CEO.
The Answer book tends to have problems like cites and footnotes that are not academic articles but books by other creationists that Ham agrees with.
It looks sciencey, and convincing, and loving Christains buy them as gifts for relatives that they want to convince.
But the arguments are dismal PRATTS. That's okay by Ham, he's already made his sale.

It is a scam. Don't forget the Ark Encounter was given big tax breaks by the county on the promise it would be a big tourist draw...this has not borne out.

 

[excreationist]

People who already believe give him money because he SAYS what they want to hear.....

Ken Ham also helps raise children to be YECs with books and videos, etc, see post #488
https://talkfreethought.org/showthr...seem-plausible&p=919477&viewfull=1#post919477

This singer was discovered by Ken Ham and here he is teaching kids that dinosaurs are mentioned in the Bible...

[YOUTUBE]https://youtu.be/TitCoikDJ40[/YOUTUBE]

"I don't believe in evolution": (sing-along)

 

[DrZoidberg]

The reason Alan Watts brings up the decadent antics of Nero and his absurdly extravagant games was because it horrified contemporary Romans.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOZqGUCrje8&t=465s

"....the next minute they would release wild lions into the arena to eat up all the slave girls. They [the crowds?] got a big sadistic kick out of that because you see pursuing pleasure beyond a certain place takes you in to what are the Buddhists call the Naraka world - that is to say the hells - when you have explored pleasure to its ultimate limit the only thing you can get a kick out of is pain...."​

It seems like the crowds got a sadistic kick out of it - they weren't just horrified....

And Alan Watts is saying it is normal for people who have explored pleasure to its ultimate limit to look to pain... (other's pain?)

....I agree with both Allan Watts and the Roman people. Feeding slave girls to lions isn't cool.

I got the impression that the crowd were entertained seeing the slave girls being eaten. And I might too in an uncomfortable sort of way - if I had been pursuing pleasure and power to its limit and was getting bored... after all, this is what some people do in the Sims: (though in that simulation the people can't really feel the pain)

The Roman empire was a dictatorship where the emperor was sitting in the audience. Roman power was all about where you were in that hierarchy. It was at games Romans showed how important they were. The retired general Vespasian was famously taken out of retirement and sent to put down an uprising in the outskirts of the empire because he fell asleep during a show put on by Nero.

Not applauding extaticly wasn't exactly an option. For most people getting a seat at the games was a rare privilege and they wouldn't want to insult the guy who invited them.

Tickets to the games weren't purchased. The games were always free. You got in depending on where you were in the Roman hierarchy. The higher up the more tickets you got, and they could distribute them to their underlings.

We know people were horrified because they wrote about it and later they deposed Nero for this kind of behaviour.

We love to tell the story of the sadism and depravity of the Roman empire. But it's just a story. They were for the most part quite similar to us.

 

[excreationist]

......We know people were horrified because they wrote about it and later they deposed Nero for this kind of behaviour.

We love to tell the story of the sadism and depravity of the Roman empire. But it's just a story.

Yes many of the people would be horrified but I suspect Alan Watts was right that some of the crowd got a sadistic kick from watching slave girls being eaten... I think that kind of sadism occurs in the public now - like in Postal 2 you can kill innocent bystanders in cruel ways. Or the thrill I guess some would experience with cock fighting.

They were for the most part quite similar to us.

Yes that's the point I'm trying to make.... then there are "snuff films" that certain people would want to watch.... and some people would like porn involving (simulated?) rape - though it would be outlawed.

This part of the music video for Pearl Jam's "Do the Evolution" is relevant:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDaOgu2CQtI&t=194s

 

[DrZoidberg]

......We know people were horrified because they wrote about it and later they deposed Nero for this kind of behaviour.

We love to tell the story of the sadism and depravity of the Roman empire. But it's just a story.

Yes many of the people would be horrified but I suspect Alan Watts was right that some of the crowd got a sadistic kick from watching slave girls being eaten... I think that kind of sadism occurs in the public now - like in Postal 2 you can kill innocent bystanders in cruel ways. Or the thrill I guess some would experience with cock fighting.

They were for the most part quite similar to us.

Yes that's the point I'm trying to make.... then there are "snuff films" that certain people would want to watch.... and some people would like porn involving (simulated?) rape - though it would be outlawed.

I think you've misunderstood the point of watching horror (or the Postal/violent video games). Everybody thinks they're horrible and depraved. Even the people who play them. Sadistic pleasure can be fun. But we all feel a conflicted sense of guilt afterwards. That's the fun part. It makes us feel alive. And most importantly, they're not real people.

In the gladiatorial arena the people sacrificed were convicted criminals guilty of the most horrendous crimes. The gladiators were professional athletes who did so willingly, hoping to win big. As far as the crowd was concerned no innocent victims died in the arena. That was important for them. When Nero tried accusing the Christians for setting fire to Rome, something everybody understood was a lie, the crowds had had enough of his nonsense and they deposed him.

The thing we love about horror is that we know it's not real. It allows us to test our humanity.

Snuff also isn't real. In the snuff trend of the early 90'ies the films we watched later turned out to all be fake. And they were pretty obvious fakes to. I remember the school yard conversations about snuff. When we watched them together the ONLY thing we talked about was weather they were fake or not. It was an exercise in spotting the trickery. I doubt any of us took any pleasure from watching the cruelty.

Simulated rape is a common porn category. But something watched alone in shameful silence. It's not a thing we go to festivals and cheer for. A culture like that has never existed on this planet.

What those outraged about videogame violence and violence in movies (and porn) is that they don't understand that people are fully capable of figuring out what is fake and not. People are fully capable of holding parallel thoughts in their heads.

What makes violent video games fun is the fact that we are empathic creatures and it hurts a little inside every time somebody dies. That makes it exciting.

And just to be super clear. I'm talking about sadism and violence as popular entertainment for the masses.

Human beings are fully capable of the most dreadful acts of violence and depravity. But we don't admire it, or hold it up as a great achievement. Not even the Nazis did that.

This part of the music video for Pearl Jam's "Do the Evolution" is relevant:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDaOgu2CQtI&t=194s

No bribes, (or any amount of threats and violence) can make me willingly watch a Perl Jam video. I'm sorry. It just hurts too much inside.

 

[excreationist]

I think you've misunderstood the point of watching horror (or the Postal/violent video games). Everybody thinks they're horrible and depraved. Even the people who play them. Sadistic pleasure can be fun. But we all feel a conflicted sense of guilt afterwards. That's the fun part. It makes us feel alive. And most importantly, they're not real people.

Though an Australian judge considered Simpsons child porn to count as actual child porn:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2008-12-08/fake-simpsons-cartoon-is-child-porn-judge-rules/233562

In the gladiatorial arena the people sacrificed were convicted criminals guilty of the most horrendous crimes. The gladiators were professional athletes who did so willingly, hoping to win big. As far as the crowd was concerned no innocent victims died in the arena. That was important for them. When Nero tried accusing the Christians for setting fire to Rome, something everybody understood was a lie, the crowds had had enough of his nonsense and they deposed him.

Though the part about all of the slave girls being eaten would involve some or complete innocence...

....Snuff also isn't real....

I think a lot of stuff on rotten.com was real though....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotten.com

What makes violent video games fun is the fact that we are empathic creatures and it hurts a little inside every time somebody dies. That makes it exciting.

Though in the future it would be possible to put conscious beings in the games like in episodes of Black Mirror.... and then make them suffer....

And just to be super clear. I'm talking about sadism and violence as popular entertainment for the masses.

Human beings are fully capable of the most dreadful acts of violence and depravity. But we don't admire it, or hold it up as a great achievement. Not even the Nazis did that.

Good because my biggest fear is that one day I'd be tortured by a professional (and hopefully hell isn't real either)

No bribes, (or any amount of threats and violence) can make me willingly watch a Perl Jam video. I'm sorry. It just hurts too much inside.

It is a good cartoon though....

 

[DrZoidberg]

Well sometimes I think I know what it wants...
e.g.
https://talkfreethought.org/showthr...nces-that-suggest-an-intelligent-force-exists
When I was gassing myself in my car and turned the radio on, the two songs that played gave me the impression that I should not kill myself.

Due to experiences like that I get the impression that the intelligent force is there and cares about me but sometimes I think it can involve "tough love" and it doesn't like the hubris I have from time to time (that I could become rich or famous, etc).

But when I've been an atheist I often am suicidal - especially at the age of 29 and earlier when I had never really had a girl that I had been mutually attracted to. I had been looking for super attractive girls. Then at the age of 29 I met the woman I ended up marrying. We are extremely compatible and I think God might have helped that happen.

If you become suicidal from being an atheist I suggest you stay a Christian.

But here's my two cents, all the Christians are just guessing what God wants. They don't really know. Nobody does.

So you can stop worrying about it.

My current girlfriend is Christian. One day when she was going to church I joined her. Now I go to church on Sundays. I'm an atheist. I can follow any religion. I'm cool with it. To me God is just a metaphor.

A few years ago a relative of a friend invited me to church - the first two services were Q&A about hell and Q&A about science and the Bible. I was an atheist and asked them tough questions. (about why bad dogs get put down while torturing them for years would be seen as cruel - and Psalm 104:5 saying that the earth can't be moved). Now I usually go to church on Sundays - with my wife and her brother.

....The good news is that there's no way to fuck it up. With "it" I mean life. No matter what you do you'll fail or succeed at the same rate

Well I think it is different for me... at the start of 2019 I was very psychotic and after six treatments of ECT and more anti-psychotics I have severe memory problems and ended up doing trolley pushing instead of PHP programming. I think hubris was a central issue.

No, offence but if you have a tendency towards psychosis you know you can't trust yourself. I have a friend of mine who is very intelligent but has also a tendency towards psychosis. I'm sorry to hear it. But I think people like you need to have somebody you trust to ask if you're spinning out of control. Preferably somebody who doesn't have any extreme ideology or weird religious faith and is just very down to earth. My friend is very intelligent. But speculating on the big picture and the supernatural, due to his cerebral makeup isn't healthy for him. So he tries not to. After all, none of these big picture things really matter. Not really. Most of us are just trying to get on with life as well as we can and enjoy the small things of life.

I'm just relaying what my friend has says works for him.

 

[excreationist]

If you become suicidal from being an atheist I suggest you stay a Christian.

Well in high school I had a depressing romantic life but looked forward to heaven.... (and didn't know that Jesus says that there is no marriage in heaven) Then as an atheist I believed that all I had was my life on earth - without an invisible friend. A few years ago when I was suicidal I tried hard to believe in hell but I had trouble doing that.

No, offence but if you have a tendency towards psychosis you know you can't trust yourself.

I think part of the cause were books by Ken Keyes - I learnt to stop having negative emotions...
https://lifesplayer.com/happiness.php
I learnt to be detached but I think the lack of negative emotions caused me to seek excitement including risky situations. Also when I'm psychotic (manic) it involves a night or two of little or no sleep - now I always make sure I take sleeping tablets if I am up too late - until I fall asleep....

Here is an email I sent to my employers (for a PHP programming job) in the morning of my 2019 hospitalization....

Hi S***,​

I have resigned without warning....
....​

I have done a subject at university that taught me about how to start a business. They said that normally entrepreneurs fail the first two times before they succeed.​

Well these two projects:​

.....
​

were a failure - I didn't make any money.​

But I've learnt from my mistakes.​

By [My] new project combines the Bible with fat loss (without any muscle loss). Apparently the weight loss industry is worth tens of billions of dollars per year and Christian authors like Joyce Meyer make millions of dollars. Perhaps combining the two plus making a unique cheap and easy diet would less [sell] more than a million copies....
...
​

Check mate.​

​

That was based on purely my own reasoning without any feedback..... but now I can instantly see if my websites are actually getting any visits, etc, but I still can get a little hubris with small wins. Before that email I had already registered a company (Cheap Easy Fat Loss Dot Diet Pty Ltd), got a custom drawing done and made the site live - within a few hours.... (in the early hours of the morning)

 

[Keith&Co.]

People who already believe give him money because he SAYS what they want to hear.....

Ken Ham also helps raise children to be YECs with books and videos,

Yes, but he's still not converting anyone. YECs buy the stuff to give their kids that are being indoctrinated anyway.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

So the Code of Hammurabi exists well before the Tanakh is put into scrolls.

Most of the world doesn't believe in Yahweh. And the part that did, nearly annihilated the world in the 20th century via two unspeakably barbaric wars and then the Cold War.

 

[excreationist]

Ken Ham also helps raise children to be YECs with books and videos,

Yes, but he's still not converting anyone. YECs buy the stuff to give their kids that are being indoctrinated anyway.

For basically all non-AiG children's materials the Ark looks like it is a fairy tale:

In AiG kid material it looks like an historical event:

By the time these kids are taught about evolution and dinosaurs in schools they'd already have a foundation of lots of clever sounding counter-arguments rather than their parents just merely asserting that they didn't come from monkeys, etc.

Ken Ham did help convert me - he helped write "The Answers Book" though there were several other books and magazines that helped. BTW my dad told me that a day can be a thousand years - so I wasn't originally a YEC.

 

[Keith&Co.]

Ken Ham also helps raise children to be YECs with books and videos,

Yes, but he's still not converting anyone. YECs buy the stuff to give their kids that are being indoctrinated anyway.

For basically all non-AiG children's materials the Ark looks like it is a fairy tale:

Yeah. Never could understand decorating a nursery with images of a mass slaughter to make the Holocaust look like a mere elementary school shooting.

In AiG kid material it looks like an historical event:

Yeah, that's a much more convincing cartoon.

By the time these kids are taught about evolution and dinosaurs in schools they'd already have a foundation of lots of clever sounding counter-arguments rather than their parents just merely asserting that they didn't come from monkeys, etc.

Which they don't really remember. But that's okay, their parents don't, either. They just ask leading questions and assumptions. "Isn't it true that Java Man is a Fraud? Or was it Peeking Man?"
And they still quote their actual authority. "My daddy says this scientist knows the truth about that."

Ken Ham did help convert me - he helped write "The Answers Book" though there were several other books and magazines that helped. BTW my dad told me that a day can be a thousand years - so I wasn't originally a YEC.

So sorry for your loss.

 

[excreationist]

If you become suicidal from being an atheist I suggest you stay a Christian.

When I was looking into anti-YEC resources I did say to whatever was out there "I don't care how depressing it is, I want to know the truth" and then for the only time in my life I felt a strong tingling over my body.... I guess I chose the red pill over the blue pill.....

 

[DrZoidberg]

If you become suicidal from being an atheist I suggest you stay a Christian.

When I was looking into anti-YEC resources I did say to whatever was out there "I don't care how depressing it is, I want to know the truth" and then for the only time in my life I felt a strong tingling over my body.... I guess I chose the red pill over the blue pill.....

A common line said about religion is that all religion is fundamentally about man's relationship with the unknown. And that's just the basic fact of the matter. Nobody knows the truth. And if we've made it so far without any final answers, chances are pretty good, that no answers will ever be forthcoming. The people who invented Christianity were just guessing. I think they weren't lying. I think they had a sincere conviction that they knew the truth. But that doesn't change the basic fact that it was, at best, just an assumption.

If you turn to religion for the truth, you might meet people who say they know the truth, but the reality of it is that they don't.

I think a part of what it means to be human is to accept that we will never know the answer to the big questions.

My Christian girlfriend is a scientifically minded highly educated engineer. She's extremely intelligent. She is a Christian. But she has no illusions about the shaky foundation of her faith. She knows that the church fathers were just guessing. She understands how people's belief in the reality of miracles can make miracles out of the unmiraculous, and then add Chinese whispers to that. In spite of all this she takes her faith very seriously.

My point with telling you about my girlfriends faith is just to say that you can be a Christian without being foolish about it. Your only choice is to accept the truth of our shared ignorance or to be deluded. Any truth you pick will be a choice of a delusion. Not the actual truth. There's nobody out there who can teach you the truth.

Or to put it more succinctly, it doesn't matter whether you swallow the red or the blue pill. Either way you'll learn the same things.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

My Christian girlfriend is a scientifically minded highly educated engineer. She's extremely intelligent. She is a Christian. But she has no illusions about the shaky foundation of her faith. She knows that the church fathers were just guessing. She understands how people's belief in the reality of miracles can make miracles out of the unmiraculous, and then add Chinese whispers to that. In spite of all this she takes her faith very seriously.

My point with telling you about my girlfriends faith is just to say that you can be a Christian without being foolish about it. Your only choice is to accept the truth of our shared ignorance or to be deluded. Any truth you pick will be a choice of a delusion. Not the actual truth. There's nobody out there who can teach you the truth.

Or to put it more succinctly, it doesn't matter whether you swallow the red or the blue pill. Either way you'll learn the same things.

That sounds pretty truthy to me, saying the truth is that there is no truth.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

If you become suicidal from being an atheist I suggest you stay a Christian.

When I was looking into anti-YEC resources I did say to whatever was out there "I don't care how depressing it is, I want to know the truth" and then for the only time in my life I felt a strong tingling over my body.... I guess I chose the red pill over the blue pill.....

If I were to claim that I am atheist, but hold that the universe is created and maintained by a single dust mite that inhabits my bed, what would you think about that? My point is that whether I believe in a god, a dust mite or a simulator it's all the same thing. We don't have words for dust mite and simulator deniers anymore than we have words for Santa deniers.

It's okay to pretend, just so it's conscious pretending, like actors do. It can be quite satisfying and restorative, emotionally. And whether you are aware or not you are pretending.

The key is to know when the brain is pretending and when it's not, to have self awareness. It's the battle royal between your prefontal cortex and your limbic impulses.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

If you become suicidal from being an atheist I suggest you stay a Christian.

When I was looking into anti-YEC resources I did say to whatever was out there "I don't care how depressing it is, I want to know the truth" and then for the only time in my life I felt a strong tingling over my body.... I guess I chose the red pill over the blue pill.....

What is depressing about the truth? Being alive can be like winning the lottery! Yet, some people what to complain that 60 to 100 years of existence isn't enough. We are literally the universe becoming aware of itself. The whole concept is awesome!

So instead of trying to want more, engage with what is... what you like to do... and do it! There are no warranties.

Unless, that means fascinating over Ken Ham and his manipulation, bullshit, and lies. In that case, find a new hobby.