On Mon, 2 Dec 2002 15:35:05 -0800 (PST), David Silberstein <davids at kithrup.com> wrote: >Wow. I've never had a simple statement so completely misunderstood. >Maybe you should go into politics? heh. I am in politics. sort of[1]. And I don't know that it was that completely misunderstood - there was a smiley there. And here :<) Yes, I understood you to mean as you expanded. >OK, I see a bunch of ethical/moral questions here. Since these all >relate to behavior of human beings towards other humans beings, they >are all in the real world. They can be answered based on one's >experience of other human beings. What do they have to do with god or >gods? > >Most such questions can be answered by starting with asking "How would >*you* feel if someone else were doing it to you or your loved ones?", >and arguing from there. First, I have to apologize because I had to run off and hit send when I meant to hit save. However you seem to have managed well enough. Thank you. (and then when I sent this off, I didn't send it to the list) I don't know that such questions have anything to do with god or gods (SHB). I haven't been advocating any particular religion - only that everyone must make choices that cannot be obtained scientifically. Some of those are because we haven't learned enough yet. Others, such as those I listed, will never be answerable scientifically. You present a way to arrive at an answer. Seems reasonable. I'm not here to argue relative merits. Only to say that you cannot design a scientific test that might disprove your proposed method - or anybody else's proposed method. You can give many reasonable arguments, but it isn't the same. This is different than whether or not some SHB that at best seldom manifests might exist. If someone feels that they have such a relationship and it works for them, why not? [2] You don't seem apt to go that way yourself - I'm not about to try to convince you. Particularly since I am of the same persuasion. But, hey, maybe you and I are lacking something. Lacking or not, we still have make these ethical/moral decisions that traditional religions try to help people with. Science will get better at helping us with predicting the consequences. Logic may help with internal consistency. We have to choose the ethical/moral values ourselves, perhaps by the way you suggest, perhaps by throwing dice, perhaps by other methods. When you said that only agnosticism was completely reasonable, I thought (1) you were being somewhat lighthearted - if I was wrong I do apologize - and (2) that you were (lightheartedly) claiming an advantage for agnosticism that I don't think it has - for the important questions - i.e. like the ones I listed and you correctly generalized. I realize a lot of people consider the question of the existence of some SHB to be very important - but as a practical matter it is the guidance, comfort and support obtained that make the difference and that definitely does exist, not whether or not there is anyone on the other end of the phone line, which seems to be difficult to ascertain. Richard [1] Village council. I thought I got there because they needed a person and I was retired and had some time, but perhaps it was because of my Machievellian tendencies. :<) [2] Well, one reason is that some people like to use the SHB as a higher authority to support their own positions. However, I've seen people get pretty excited, fervent and irrational over purely secular topics, too, so I really have poor expectations of improvement were any attempt to exile SHBs actually to succeed.