Do you want a Big New Idea that will unify America and restore our collective aspirations? Then try the Old Idea again: the appreciation and implementation of the Bill of Rights. Yeah, what a bore. I know you wanted to read something sexy. But listen. If we had a national reminder, like a Bill of Rights Day or a frequent media blitz just on the existence of the First Amendment alone, it would work. I'll tell you why. I don't think anybody knows that these rights exist anymore. If they did, they couldn't help but to coalesce in restoring them at the next elections. The founding fathers unified our country two hundred years ago on the premise of protecting minority and individual rights, and nothing can compete with the relevance and impact that the concept still holds today. The First Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1791, makes it a law that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."
The United States of America came into existence from the objective notion that "We hold these truths self evident" . . . "All men are created equal". . . with the right to "Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." The late 17th century political philosopher John Locke (who coined the above phrases placed in our Declaration of Independence and the Constitution) passed on to our founding fathers several poignant ideas that have been lost on the present administration and, obviously, also on We the People.
The opinions of the members of a governing body are never the same as those whom they govern. They inevitably develop their own polarized self interests and are influenced by powerful lobbyists who often work against the welfare of the people. In answer to the question "Who should rule?" Locke argued and Thomas Jefferson later reiterated that an individual or special group should never be allowed to rule without the legal inhibitors of constitutional checks and balances. John Locke was the architect of the idea of a governing body divided into three branches elected by the will of a majority vote. Jefferson, less than a century later, clarified that the Executive, Legislative and Judicial branches must serve as internal barriers to the human tendency toward oligarchy. The three branches should jointly rule in a manner that would gratify the majority and simultaneously protect the rights of minorities. In 1787, when James Madison sent Jefferson a proposed copy of the Constitution, he responded immediately from France, "a bill of rights is what the people are entitled to against every government on earth . . . it must guarantee freedom of religion, freedom of the press, protection against standing armies, restrictions on monopolies, the eternal and unremitting force of habeas corpus laws and trial by jury." The majority can be as despotic and abusive to its minority subjects as any dictator or monarch, right? Madison took Jefferson’s fears seriously and fashioned them into the Bill of Rights, ratified in 1791, barring the government from infringing on minorities and one’s personal individuality and unalienable rights.
Who knew that, in less than 100 years after Locke penned the illegal blue prints for a new government and a dream for a free world, it would actually begin on the soil of the Americas. The catalyst for change in the America of 1776 evolved from the pangs of oppression under the divine right of British kings. However, the philosophical and emotional attachment to king-like behavior will never go away.
Just as the originators of freedom anticipated, the Federalist Party under President John Adams immediately padded the judiciary with conservative monarchy minded sympathizers. Then, under the pretense of being in a naval war with France, Adams enacted the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798. To the horror of Thomas Jefferson, Madison and others, the new laws forbade any criticism of the President and the Federalist government, prevented free press and discriminated against non-citizens. The friendship between Jefferson and Adams would not resume again until the sunset of their lives which ended on the same day, July 4th, 1826. Adams' deathbed words were, "Thomas Jefferson survives." These violations by President John Adams against the people's civil liberties and restriction on the Free Press Clause of the Constitution propelled Thomas Jefferson by majority vote into office as the third President of the United States in 1800. He stated in his Inaugural Address that, " The minority possess their equal rights which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression." The Alien and Sedition Acts expired on their own in 1801 before Jefferson’s Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions could effect a legislative repeal. Today’s Alien and Sedition Act goes by the name of The Patriot Act.
Two hundred years later, the Bill of Rights is again sacrificed by the "exception to the rulers," a phrase coined by Amy Goodman from Democracy Now. Modern Americans who take freedom for granted have looked on as their civil liberties from government infringement have been surreptitiously eroded away like sand on the sea shore. Conservative Christians, who make no bones about their agenda to create an American theocracy, have worked relentlessly and successfully to gain control of the three branches of government. Neither Christianity nor any other religion is bad in itself. The objection is to religious agenda in government. Religious involvement in government brings with it an historical subjugation, discrimination and eradication of all opposing philosophies. The Patriot Act, Faith-based Initiatives, Mid-East colonialism, the erosion of Roe v. Wade, the prohibition of stem cell research, the promulgation of the biblical creation theory in public schools, the threat of constitutional tampering in regard to gay marriages, eaves-dropping and monitoring of all national telecommunications are all enforced against the intent of the Bill of Rights. Do we need any more reason to join in a common cause than to take back what is ours? You go Portfolio Magazine! A Bill of Rights Day! We’re all behind you!
Faith and The Learning Process By Matt Taylor
Can I get a witness without being stoned? What I’m saying here will inevitably offend the absolutists (fundamentalists) as this article avoids leaps of faith and ventures into the stressful realm of questioning causes and looking ahead to consequences. But this shouldn’t offend the many good people who love a "God" and are inspired by that notion to live in peace and harmony with their neighbors.
What is the learning process by which we imbibe our religious faiths? Infants and toddlers have no knowledge or religious beliefs until they are taught them. Actually, we/they arrive as little atheists in the sense that they are "without belief" in God until a creed is installed. Jung and Skinner argue that there may be genetic inclinations in some of us to seek the gods but the actual creed of a child will be learned from its unchosen environment. As children, we learned our lessons through the imposition and indoctrination of data as opposed to the free reign of objective research as reasoning adults. Like little sponges, children absorb categorically (without conditions, experience comparisons, grey areas or relativity) the passed down truths, myths, favoritisms, prejudices, do’s and don'ts (the culture) of their parents, teachers and distinct communities.
This categorical acceptance of faith-based absolutes saves lives during this time of infantile obliviousness to danger. But this trait of acquiescence or conditioned suggestibility (or both) persists, unfortunately, even after the development of reason renders it pragmatically moot. Children take at face value the hearsay of what one man said, that another man said, that "God" said to him . . . what it is we must all believe. Why, as adults with reasoning faculties, do we continue to do the same? Why do we continue to take things at face value without questioning their sources and veracity? Because, we are fixated in the psychological security or comfort zone of our first infantile and adolescent indoctrinations.
These original values are the tools we use to work on the first mechanical breakdowns of our expectations in life. When we reach the age of reason, we re-enforce our first knowledge (if it can be called knowledge), be it true or false, by using it as the predicate for our future inferences. Wearing the rose-colored glasses of our origins, coupled with an in-house (in-the-box), survivalist, self-censoring, self-rationalizing mode of research, we tend to re-enforce our passed down creeds instead of opening up to new ideas. As many objective travelers have noted before me, an Irishman is Catholic because his mother was Catholic, the Israeli girl is Jewish because her father was Jewish and the Amazonian is, and may well remain, a Tree Worshiper throughout the rest of his/her life if the parents and culture were Tree Worshipers.
Universally, religious faiths and political beliefs are maintained by a two-fold process of reiterating the doctrine and then backing it with the threat of misfortune or punishment if not believed and practiced. The Abrahamic religions ward off contrary belief with the indoctrination of fear of uncleanness, Satanic control over the individual and eternal damnation. Eastern religions threaten ancestral punishment, terrestrial misery or deprivation of karmic flow for the consequences of unbelief. Political doctrine is instilled with the threat of personal humiliation, loss of honor and citizenship for the philosophical traitor to the party, tribe or nation.
And what is the result? The result is that the natural compulsion to persist in our original credos, disallowing an exchange for anything else, no matter how untrue, unnatural, unobserved, unscientific or prejudicial to ourselves or others our doctrines may be, causes social separation, division and war. Unless we force ourselves to seek a different perspective than the one to which we are emotionally attached and utilize the reasoning process, we will remain the ignorant, shallow xenophobes that we really are.
Are you repulsed at the names of certain authors and books that you haven’t even read? That is the sign of indoctrination. Give your neighbors far and wide a break.
Read some books from other cultures which contain forbidden philosophies.
If in the event you don’t like them, you will have learned a lot and, at least, enjoyed a little freedom from your cage.
One more Thing About Dubai Port World By Matt Taylor
Get the connections? One thing the Bush oligarchy has never done is ignore its friends, especially those involved in the oil trade. The issue of a Bush crony’s low skill level, ability to fill a position, or in the case of Dubai Port World conflict with the perception that there is a war on Muslim terrorism, is irrelevant. The incredible, in your face effrontery of Bush positional favors to family, staff connections and campaign contributors, speaks clearly to the outside world about American apathy or hypocrisy toward qualification and merit based equal opportunity. Placing Harriet Meyers for Supreme Court nomination and putting "Brownie" in Charge of FEMA are chump change in the puppeteering and cronylogical Bush picks.
The crony connections and list of rewarded White House political campaign and economic benefactors who are making a "killing off the killings" in Iraq, is too large to mention here. But a few are, the Science Application International Corp, winner in 2002, of a $38 million Media network contract in Afghanistan and Iraq. It was headed by Bob Reilly, 1980's White House information operation chief; Flour Corp., 2002, Afghan and Iraq $500 million engineering contract, CEO Philip Carroll Jr., former Shell exec.; DynCorp., Afghan and Iraq $50.1 million 2002, rent-an-army contract, CEO Van Honeycutt of Bush’s National Security and Telecommunications Advisory Committee; Bectel Group, Afghan and Iraq 2002, engineering contract worth $1 billion, former president of the group and present board member, George Shultz, Reagan-Bush Secretary of State; not last and not least is HALLIBURTON, gaining over $7 billion in bid and no-bid Iraq oil related contracts, ex CEO Dick Cheney, Vice President USA. All of the above are multi-million dollar political campaign contributors. (From Amy Goodman’s book, The Exception to the Rulers)
The Bush family connections in Arabian oil are not diminimus. Salem bin Laden, Osama’s brother, helped finance George W’s, Arbusto Energy Company, that made his first million twenty years ago. Prince Bandar, the Saudi ambassador to the US gave $1 million to the Bush Presidential Library. Now deceased, King Fahd, gave $1 million to Barbara Bush’s campaign against illiteracy. Saudi Prince al-Walid gave $500,000 to George H.W. Bush’s Scholarship Fund (The Exception to the Rulers).
I have read two journalists, Stephen Zunes and Amy Goodman, mention The Carlyle Group. The Saudis and the United Arab Emirates are investors in this equity investment firm which started in 1987. George W. Bush was a board member of one of its subsidiaries, Caterair, in the early 1990's. Frank Carlucci, who was Reagan’s former Secretary of State and head of the Carlyle Group, Bush Sr. And James Baker III, Secretary of State under Bush Sr., both senior counsels, and Shafiq bin Laden, another brother of Osama, were all present for a meeting of the Group in Washington DC on September 11, 2001. All US air traffic was halted that day except for that which was needed to fly 140 Saudis, including 24 members of the bin Laden family safely back to Saudi Arabia. Just privileged friends helping priviledged friends.
Now, Dubai Ports World, owned and operated by the United Arab Emirates: Any Bush connections? Beside the fact that we buy most of our oil from the UAE and sell them billions of dollars worth of Apache helicopters, arms and Boeing jets, there is our own Treasury Secretary, John Snow. In 2003 Snow was the CEO of the CSX railway firm. A year later CSX sold its international port operations to DP World for 1.15 billion. Then, in the Federal driver’s seat, Snow’s panel signs off on the sale of the British firm, Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company to DP World, for 6.8 billion, giving them control of Manhattan’s cruise ship terminal and Newark’s container port. Coincidentally, one of DP World’s own, David Sanborn, head of DP World’s European and Latin American ports, has been selected by Bush to be the head of the US Maritime Association. Even ex-Republican Senator Robert Dole was a lobbiest for DP World (Michael Mcauliff, New York Daily News).
Do you know what the offensive thing about all this is? Bush said he didn’t know anything about the Dubai Port World and US ports deal. Go figure.
Creation or Transformation By Matt Taylor
The "God" cause is accepted as axiomatic by creationists. Surprisingly, there are a handful who can academically argue their point. They are the few who have found the cosmological arguments from Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica. The arguments are based on the analysis of cause and effect/prime mover first postulated by Heraclitus of Ephesus (500 BCE) and perfected by Aristotle (300 BCE). The Muslim, Averroes, the Jewish, Maimonides, and the Christian, Thomas Aquinas, applied these same arguments for the existence of "God." If they had utilized the syllogism it would have gone like this:
All things that exist are the effect of a cause.
The universe is a thing that exists.
Undeniably, the universe has a cause.
However, to relate the "cause" in the last sentence to a "First Cause/God" is to change the syllogism to a sophism. Thomists skip necessary propositions that would lead to the conclusion of a First Cause, event horizon (Necessary Being) transcending physical experience. These absent propositions in their reasoning are the missing links to the cosmological theory.
The secular philosophy of Aristotle, as applied by Aquinas, saved Christianity from the inquiring minds of the twelfth century ( as did Neo-Platonism in the third century through the teaching of Augustin). However, after the scrutinization of the cosmological theory by Immanuel Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason, the "God" cause revolved back to a leap of faith. Kant declared the obvious, that the principal of causality derives from the physical and can explain only the physical. The knowledge of cause and effect comes by sense perception (empiricism) and can only apply to the perceptible. Causality is not transcendental nor can it lead by induction to the existence of the immaterial.
I grant the premise that each cause is the effect of some precedent and that each effect is the cause of its consequent. But I can’t draw a rational conclusion from this premise that there was ever an "Uncaused-First-Cause." If one applies the concrete principle of causality, one doesn’t arrive scientifically or philosophically at a finite past and then disembark into Alice’s looking glass and enter the fifth dimension of a timeless environment of non-physical gods and angels. Instead one simply confronts the Conservation Laws of Physics; specifically the First Law of Thermodynamics, in that energy and matter can neither be created nor destroyed only changed in form; and the Second Law of Thermodynamics wherein everything cools off, atrophies and breakdowns. The synergy between the two Laws reflects a universe of eternal transformation, not creation. Matter is as eternal as the decimal equivalent of one-third: .333 . . . it goes on forever.
The Big Bang theory without the mention of a pre-existing subatomic environment from which a blast could be induced reflects the desultory, magical thinking of the Thomists. There would be no "laws" of physics, and monkeys might fly out of your you-know-what if it were determined that something could come from nothing. What is the corollary to eternal transformation? Got time? Is some form of pantheism in line for deification? I don’t know. I can grasp the eternal transformation of matter but I am agnostic over the dualism between inanimate and animate things. Life, especially at the level of self consciousness, is inadequately explain by science. If life is not, in essence, a particle or an electro-magnetic wave, it is immaterial. And this does indeed beg the question of origin. This notion should bring the assertive atheist out to the watch tower. As for the pantheist, transformation of matter may have some control over whether one might come back as a inanimate bookend but not as an iconoclastic animate sacred cow. In any event, we could all live in peace with each other if we settled on theorizing our ultimate issues instead of dogmatizing the unknown.
The Learning Process By Matt Taylor
This expose of secular thought arrives as a series from the book, Tent Revival for Agnostics, by Matthew T. Taylor, Sr. It is a rational pursuit of the truth and is not meant to offend the many good people who love a “God” and are inspired by that notion to live in peace and harmony with their neighbors. This series is an argument against the assertive atheist as well as the doctrinal theist. It will inevitably offend the absolutists (fundamentalists) on both sides of the issue as these articles avoid leaps of faith and venture into the stressful realm of questioning, induction and deduction.
Thomas Huxley, the late 19th century philosopher, biologist and compatriot of Charles Darwin, coined the term “agnostic.” He combined the Greek prefix “a” meaning “without” and the noun “gnostic” meaning “understanding or knowledge” to form the appellation for: “one who does not know or understand” the religious doctrines defining the nature of “God.”
What we usually know about ultimate issues after the formative years of our upbringing, if it can be called knowledge, is generally the hearsay of what one man said, that another man said, that “God” said to him . . . what we must all believe. Initially, however, we are born little atheists, with no belief in a “God” until our parents, teachers and culture instill deep within our psyches the basic religious creed with which we will, chances are, be inescapably clothed and saddled for a lifetime.
We are hardwired to acquiesce to authority. This categorical acceptance of information is a genetic survival trait for the young and inexperienced, but it unfortunately persists even after the development of reason renders it pragmatically moot. The youthful conditioning and trait for being open to suggestion affects our responses to the predicaments we will face far into the future. Generally, the Irish boy is Catholic because his mother was Catholic, the Israeli girl is Jewish because her father was Jewish and the Amazonian child is, and remains, a Tree Worshiper throughout the rest of his or her life if the parents and culture were Tree Worshipers. Whether compulsion to persist in our original credos is natural or conditioned, we will rarely exchange it for anything else, no matter how untrue, unnatural, unobserved, unscientific or prejudicial to ourselves or others our beliefs may be, unless we force some mental effort to utilize the reasoning process. Can I get a witness!
Aristotle’s Logic By Matt Taylor
Aristotle believed that the unexamined life, which fostered the religious myths of his day, was the disease and scourge of society. He advanced methods of reasoning known as induction and deduction in opposition to taking things for granted. Aristotle taught that sophist statements of fact begged the question of evidence. The human body is a fact gathering machine, but because of the shortcomings of the senses, one must verify the held out premise with an accumulation of evidence before one can sanctify the belief as a fact. The method of gathering evidence (from the particular to the general) is called “a posteriori” induction, adding particular pieces of evidence together in order to come to the knowledge of the set of things in an entire class. Today it is called the “scientific method.”
After having substantiated the known truth of a class, one can deduce from that fact “a priori,” (from the general to the particular) other facts about the set of things within the class. The masterpiece of deductive reasoning is Aristotle’s three sentence syllogism; two premises and a conclusion. Each premise must have one term, subject or predicate, in common with the other premise and one in common with the conclusion. The sentences must be categorical in that the verbs are either: “is/was/are” or “is not/was not/are not.” Check out “Philosophy Made Simple” by Popkin and Stroll, as a great 101 on the rules for the syllogism. If the premises are facts and the rules for using the syllogism are followed, the conclusions will always be infallible.
Now, a person comes to me and says, Hey, Jesus walked on water. Based on the assumption (for which argument exists) that Jesus really was a man, I can induce and weigh the evidence that I have never seen a man walk on water, nor have I known anyone who has seen this occur. As a consequence I’m not convinced. In addition, I can deduce from the known fact already gathered about the density of man as compared to the density of water and can affirmatively say that . . .
A man (is one that) cannot walk on water.
Jesus was a man.
It follows then, that Jesus (was one that) could not walk on water.
The use of inductive and deductive argument will illuminate the disparity between faith and reason.
Cosmology By Matt Taylor
The argument of intelligent design based on the physics of cause and effect was first postulated by Heraclitus of Ephesus (500 BCE) and perfected by Aristotle (300 BCE). The Muslim, Averroes, the Jewish, Maimonides, and the Christian, Thomas Aquinas, applied the same argument for the existence of “God.” If they had utilized the syllogism it would have gone like this:
All things that exist are the effect of a cause.
The universe is a thing that exists.
Undeniably, the universe has a cause.
I grant the premise that each cause is the effect of some precedent and that each effect is the cause of its consequent. But I can’t draw a rational conclusion from this premise that there was ever an “Uncaused-First-Cause.” If one applies the concrete principle of causality, one doesn’t arrive scientifically or philosophically at a finite past and then disembark into the fifth dimension of a non-physical timeless environment of an uncaused “Cause.” Instead one simply confronts the Conservation Laws of Physics; specifically the First Law of Thermodynamics, that energy and matter can neither be created nor destroyed only changed in form. Even a Big Bang theory without the mention of a pre-existing subatomic environment from which a blast could be induced is merely the magical thinking of the Thomists. There would be no “laws” of physics, and monkeys might fly out of your you-know-what if it were determined that something could come from nothing. Matter is as eternal as the decimal equivalent of one-third: .333 . . . it goes on forever. Hence, the universe has come about by eternal transformation and not by creation. Is some form of pantheism in line for deification? The transformation of matter may have some control over whether one might come back as a bookend but not as a sacred cow.
Attributes of “God” By Matt Taylor
A “God” either does or does not exist. The paradox occurs in that one must define “God” to say that it exists. Yet one can not define it unless it exists for observation. The effort to define a “God” on the level of observation is, so far, impossible. People infer from observing an awesome universe that “God” must be even more awesome; even infinite. But the fact is . . . to insist on characterizing “God” as an unlimited, supernatural and infinite being disables any attempt to define it without causing its own fatality.
Once a theist has labeled “God” with an attribute, he or she has given “definition,” parameters or boarders to that which is defined. That’s okay for physical beings, as George A. Smith in his book, Atheism, A Case Against God, explains, because everything has a specific nature and attribute which limits it to the predictable thing that it is. But the fates of infinite “Gods” are doomed to the oxymoron of the “infinite attribute.” Once you have defined it you have limited it.
Relinquishing the attempt to define “God” in positive terms, some theologians have attempted to define it in the negative by what god is “not.” As a consequence, when a thing is defined as infinite, which is another term for “not” finite; eternal, i.e., “not” bound by time; immaterial, i.e., “not” physical; invisible, i.e., “not” visible; ineffable, i.e., “not” describable; or immutable, i.e., “not” changeable, the ultimate inference is that it is “not” or nonexistent.
Even if we believed on faith, which the cosmological argument requires by its “something-from-nothing” suggestion, in the existence of a creator, the failure of its definition proffered by organized religion is obvious on many arguable fronts. Due to the limited supply of talking burning bushes, the cosmological argument lends little corroboration to the allegation that such a “God” has revealed itself as a personal being, dictated a codicil to the natural law and enlightened selected individuals as to its own specific attributes.
What we really want, as typical human beings with fantasies, is a little magic in our lives, but not omnipotence. I’ll tell you why. The consequences of the existence of omnipotence and its mutual exclusions are beyond man’s mental ability to grasp what at first he proposes, i.e., the all powerful capability to do anything imaginable. To the surprise of shallow thinkers, such autonomy and self subsistence excludes the notion of a being with “needs” or “desires” or any lack of fulfilment. According to most religious scriptures, creation is the fulfilment of a desire to share and the replenishment of a need to be adored. Count out omnipotence. Also, the other biblical adjectives of “jealousy,” “anger” and “offendability” are indicative of a being with weaknesses and impotence, not omnipotence. Absolute omnipotence is anti-intuitive because anything outside of it or added to it, like creation, is mutually exclusive to the being that is perfectly content and all powerful in itself.
OK, even if one overlooks the argument of a “God” with needs and dumbs down to the semi-omnipotence of a finger-snapping ability to create . . . Alas, the stumbling block continues in that will and action must remain identical. Creation, at the metaphorical “hands” of “God” would not have come into existence by the work of design, contrivance, time interval, cause and effect, by the gradual degrees of the six day Genesis story (with the creative limitation of needing to rest on the seventh day), or even by the gradual degrees of 14 billion years of evolution. If “God” requires a means-to-an-end in order to create then he is not omnipotent. Even with semi-omnipotence, creation would have had to have been instantaneous, complete and perfect at the moment of “God’s” existence.
The notion that “God” is omnipotent . . . “therefore he can do anything he wants, by any method he wants” . . . is irrational. The key word is “want.” As explained previously, an omnipotent “God” can’t be lacking or “want” anything. Besides, the intervention of an omnipotent being into the physical world would invalidate the realities of causality and the existence of science and all of the laws of physics. The term “rational explanation” would become a meaningless phrase. Miracles would take the place of order and effects without natural causes would surround us. This means magic.
Magic is nonexistent.
Omnipotence is magic.
This being the case, omnipotence is nonexistent.
Take a walk on the wild side and stick with reality. You’ll be amazed at what certitude has to offer.
Omniscience By Matt Taylor
Omniscience is the eternal knowledge of all things. The term is unintelligible and is as self defeating as the word omnipotence. The only knowledge known to exist involves a thought process of perceptive effort, evaluation, comparison and memory. Omniscience, on the other hand, is uncaused, un-acquired and unworkable. Again, people really aren’t grasping what they are at first proposing. The faithful want the magic of a “God” that knows when everybody has been naughty or nice. But the literal meaning of omniscience backfires on most faith practitioners’ pragmatic use for “God” in their lives.
That which accompanies a “God” with a Wizard-of-Oz-like knowledge of the future is the flat out elimination of freewill, the consequence of predestination and the evaporation of the utility of prayer. Freewill is the uncoerced, arbitrary ability to choose a variety of future actions. A “God” can’t have pre-knowledge of his own future actions and arbitrarily change them, or vice-versa. It wouldn’t be arbitrary. If “God” knows the future then the future is immutably fixed. By the way, if “God” can’t change the future then “God” can’t be omnipotent at the same time. Thus, omniscience and omnipotence can not coexist in the same being. John Calvin understood the dichotomy of omniscience and freewill when he dogmatized predestination in his Institutes of the Christian Religion in 1561. With eternal knowledge of all things, the future is as determined as the past and can’t be changed. The apostle Paul corroborated this reasoning when he spoke of those who were “predestined to conform to the image of his son” (Romans 8:29). As far as getting the magic one wants through prayer . . .a perfect and omniscient “God” can’t change the course of events for better or worse, not only because it was already a perfect plan or act, but because the knowledge from all eternity of the outcome of an event results in the inability to change the event and make good on the prayer.
One benign aspect of omniscience is the write-off of the “last judgement.” Judging is what humans do -- not “Gods” with un-acquired knowledge. Aside from the fact that the elimination of freewill acquits one from culpability for the commission of crimes, judgment involves observation, evaluation, and comparison. Remember, omniscience is mutually exclusive to any time element or thinking procedure. Have a nice day.
Omni benevolence By Matt Taylor
The Judeo-Christian “God” is supposed to be all good. Yet he floods the earth and drowns all living creatures, young and old, guilty and innocent, save a few. He rained fire from heaven on whole cities for committing, it is assumed, some sexual perversion, yet afterwards blessed the hero, Lot, with an incestuous romp with his two daughters. Go figure. He sent plagues and pestilence to the entire nation of Egypt and killed all of the innocent first born children. Moses, under the inspiration of “God,” being angered at his army for taking captives, commanded his officers: “Now, therefore, kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman who has known man by lying with him. But all the young girls who have not known man by lying with him, keep for yourselves” (Numbers 31:17-18). Joshua comes upon innocent folks on his route to the promised land and, “utterly destroyed all in the city, both men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep and asses, with the edge of the sword” (Joshua 6:21). World history gives frequent examples of the same holy, loving images and acts sanctioned by “God.”
The New and Old Testament stonings, burnings, tortures, executions and ethnic cleansings could fill an ocean with the victims of benevolence. Oh . . . those were human beings that did those things. One can’t blame “God.” OK then, don’t forget the earthquakes, floods, fires and other “acts of God” that cause so much pain, injustice, suffering and confusion.
Good is that which benefits mankind.
The murder of innocent children is not a thing that benefits mankind.
Consequently, murder is not good.
According to the Bible, “God” commands the murder of children.
The murder of children is not good.
If a “God” commands the murder of children then that “God” is not good.
“If “God” does not know there is evil, he is not omniscient. If “God” knows there is evil but cannot prevent it, he is not omnipotent. If “God” knows there is evil and can prevent it but desires not to, he is not omni-benevolent.” George A. Smith.. (Emphasis added).
I am an agnostic. I don’t blame a “God” for any wrong doing. Nobody gives “God” a bad name except those who have defined him. It is OK to theorize our ultimate issues but don’t dogmatize the unknown. Amen.
Infallibility of the Bible By Matt Taylor
The Bible has been heralded as infallible by Pope Leo XIII in his encyclical, Providentissimus Deus, and by the American Baptists of the tent revival era in the 1870's. It may well be an inspiring and useful chronology of religious history and belief, but to crown it as an infallible work is an unjustifiable act. The attributed authorship of many of its works is flat out wrong, unknown or questionable, thus weakening the standard for “authority” from which the word derives. Its credibility for spontaneous inspiration directly from “God” is weakened by cut and pasted passages. And finally, its infallibility is embarrassingly overcome after being fleshed out through the scrutiny of varying depictions of the same events retold within its pages.
The genealogy of kings found in Genesis 36:31- 40 is copied and pasted from First Chronicles 43rd verse. Thus, Genesis and Chronicles were probably co-authored after the reign of Zedeckiah, who was carried captive to Babylon around 588 BCE, 1000 years after Moses’ death. The first three verses of Ezra and the last two of Chronicles are the same. Cutting and pasting mocks the idea of spontaneous revelation. Few, if any, of the prophetic books, psalms or proverbs were written entirely by their alleged authors. Joshua and Samuel describe histories after their deaths. Isaiah is an accumulation of more than 200 years of Israelite history. David’s Psalms describe distinctly the sorrow of the Babylonian captivity, 400 years after his death.
Many New Testament scholars have concluded that the Gospels of Matthew and Luke are remakes of Mark, the most basic Gospel. And the fact that they were written in classical Greek and arrived between 90 CE and 135 CE after the Epistles of Paul, casts doubt that they were written by eyewitness Judean fisherman who would have spoken only the local Aramaic. For conflicting accounts and narrations of the same events read the genealogies of Matthew, which lists 28 generations of the line of Jesus from David to Joseph, and Luke, which lists 42. Neither of the two versions have any names in common between Joseph and David. Finally, read the four Gospel accounts of the resurrection scene. The variations of the number of people, angels and their recorded actions are mutually exclusive and not cumulative. There are many contradictions in both Old and New Testaments, but we only need to find one to destroy the element of infallibility.
Many of the Jews of the Greek speaking diaspora had their own gnostic traditions and reconciled the gnosis of the Greek mystery cults and the gnosis of the Essenic Yahweh. Paul was an exemplar of the Greek educated Jew. His doctrinal epistles do not relate one historical incident of the life of Jesus (except for allusions to his crucifixion and resurrection). Since the pagan mystery cults of Attis, Mithra and/or Dionysus each involved the blood sacrifice of their alleged sons of god for the sins of mankind as well as a spiritual death to self and a baptism of water as an initiation into the new life of spiritual quest, their names could conceivably replace the name of Jesus throughout his epistles without a pragmatic difference. Paul’s accounts of being caught up into the “Third Heaven,” his references, in Greek, to the “Archons,” (neither of which are Christian doctrines), the nomenclature of the “children of light,” and the “powers of darkness” are contained in previous writings of the Persians, Greeks and gnostic Jews. His epistles, appearing in 70 CE, are the first known Christian writings. Although the Epistles appeared more than 30 years before a biography of Jesus appeared in the form of the Gospels, it can be argued that the Church placed his epistles chronologically after the Gospels to make it look like the Epistles were the result of the Gospels instead of the cause.
Early Christian history relates the account of the arguments between Celsus, the pagan historian, and Tertulian, the Christian apologist, over the imitation of the Gospel stories of the miraculous pagan god-men. Not denying their similarities, Tertulian dismissed the coincidence as “diabolical mimicry,” and that “God” permitted it to test the faith of the Christians.
Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy, in their book, The Jesus Mysteries, chronicle a long list of mythic god-men mirrored by the Gospels. The Zoroastrian Mithra, circa 500 BCE, was born December 25th. He performed miracles, cast out demons and raised the dead. His religion included seven sacraments, one of which was baptism of water. An inscription to Mithra reads:
“He who will not eat of my body and drink of my blood, so that he will be made one with me and I with him, the same shall not know salvation.”
The Greek “God” Dionysus, circa 600 BCE, was born in a cowshed to a virgin, changed water into wine at weddings, rode into town on a donkey amidst palm waving crowds, has been depicted as crucified and allegedly rose on the third day.
Imitation is (a thing that) comes after a previous event.
Christianity came after Mithra and Dionysus (a previous event).
Having been born in the Western hemisphere, I am more familiar with Christianity than any other religion and that is why this expose on definitions of “God” has concentrated on Western definitions. Since I am unable to speak to Eastern definitions of “God” with confidence, I will call myself a Western agnostic, and the issue of biblical contradictions and the missing secular history of Jesus is one of the reasons why I am so. Nobody wrote about Jesus except Christians. Historic Roman references are made about “troublesome” Christians in the empire, who did indeed exist. But no secular historian witnessed the life of Christ. Josephus, who will not escape comment, and Tacitus, are the only exceptions to secular corroboration.. Tacitus, in his Annals, 112 CE, wrote of Christians, that “their originator, Christ, had been executed in Tiberius’ reign by the procurator of Judea, Pontius Pilate.” Tacitus’ knowledge of the hearsay of the times is reflected in the fact that Pontius Pilate was the “prefect” and not the “procurator” of the region. Freke and Gandy in, The Jesus Mysteries, list nearly the entire cadre of known contemporary chroniclers and historians of the region who, excepting Tacitus, make no mention of Jesus:
Arrian; Pliny the elder; Pliny; Suetonius; Martial; Petronius; Appian; Plutarch; Seneca; Juvenal; Appolonius; Dion Pruseus; Theon of Smyrna; Pausanius; Valerius Flaccus; Damis; Ptolemy; Florus Lucius; Silius Italicus; Dio Chrysostom; Quintilian; Aulus Gelius; Hermogenes; Favorinus; Statius; Lysius; Lucanus; Columella; Valerius Maximus; Philo; and Justus of Tiberius.
Josephus, the pro-Roman Jewish historian, has become the foundation for Christian apologetics on the historicity of Jesus. In his Antiquities of the Jews, circa 101 CE, there exists a brief mention, interrupting the flow of his historical theme, of Jesus the Messiah whose miracles and crucifixion came to pass in Judea. Historical argument surrounds the issue of the Christian scholar, Origen, who laments the absence of Jesus in Josephus’ works in the 3rd century and the “discovery” of the passage by Bishop Eusebius in the 4th century. The mention of Jesus in the Antiquities is also out of sync with the rest of Josephus’ ravings about the many messianic imposters to whom he attributes the political fall and physical destruction of Jerusalem. Besides, Josephus died in Rome as pharisee of the diaspora and not as a Christian. Why call Christ the Messiah and not end up a Christian? One doesn’t need a syllogism for that . . . but here’s one for the road:
Reliable history is supported by objective, unbiased references.
The biography of Jesus is not supported by objective, unbiased references.
We can therefore infer that the biography of Jesus is not reliable history. Amen.
