Lately I don’t want to brain much so today I will just write on my blogging journey. I have been blogging here since August 2012. I have written on politics, religion, science topics, books i have read, posted videos, songs, photos of the places i have been to and all. And of late, I have made it a point to make sure some of you get tired by just reading about my runs or hikes or rides. Except Brian who rides much more than I do.
In the beginning, god debates used to interest me but not anymore. While I know I haven’t exhausted whatever arguments god botherers have designed to prop their god, I am unlikely to meet a new one that hasn’t been covered already in all the ones I have looked at.
And as I have said elsewhere, I have made friends online. Some have been around this blog from those early days, being critics, supporters and sometimes broadening my perspectives on different topics. Some we have lost. Some have gone to their maker. And some maybe have just disappeared in the thin air.
In the spirit of no braining, I want to repost one of the blogs from 2013. The passage below is from Atheism Explained by D.R. Steele
God cannot be destroyed. He can’t be injured against his will or made to suffer against his will, and he knows this. If this is true, then God can’t be afraid of anything. He has never known fear at first hand, though he may have known fear in his imagination, the way we know fear by watching a horror movie . But if God has never been fearful, then God has never been courageous . The virtue of courage consists in overcoming or disregarding or perhaps suppressing one’s fear or one’s inclination to fear. Bravery, then, is a virtue that God can never achieve .
The same applies to most o f the human virtues. Most virtues, like courage, involve self-control and therefore have no application to God, who experiences not the slightest flicker of appetites or impulses which might cause him to deviate from doing whatever he infallibly decides is best. God cannot be tempted, so he earns no points for resisting temptation. Nothing, to God, is an effort, so he can never become lazy or irresolute, and deserves no praise for being steadfast!
If God is all powerful and almighty, then God has never faced any onerous tasks, has never shouldered any burdens, has never had to give up one thing in order to get another ( except where the alternatives are logically incompatible ) , has never felt involuntary pain or even a twinge of discomfort or anxiety, has never had to make a difficult decision, has never solved an intellectual puzzle ( since he knows all the answers in advance ) . God has no curiosity, since he knows everything instantly, without making an effort to find out.God has never had to work hard at anything, has never been surprised or disappointed. God has never had to make a choice, since that would presuppose at least a moment where he had not made up his mind. God can never be careful or considerate. God can never pay particular attention. God has never experienced, at first hand, the joy of understanding an elegant theorem or experiencing a great work of art. He has heard it all before.
Creation of anything by humans, for example creation of a song or a book, has its joys and its sorrows . But for God, the Creator of the universe, there could be no joy, or sorrow, or sense of accomplishment. He created the universe just by willing it and before he willed it, he knew how it was going to turn out. Aside from that, joy and sorrow are characteristics of evolved conscious beings with bodies, forever enmeshed in the struggle to survive and reproduce.
Such emotional flurries could have no place in the life of. an eternal, indestructible Supreme Being. Theists say that God is wholly good. This implies that he has never known at first hand malice, lust, greed, or envy. Furthermore, God, defined as God who is wholly good, is held to be necessary. If it’s necessary that God is wholly good, then God could never go even slightly bad, he could never start toying with a bit of shadiness here and there . So God can’t do anything even slightly evil . No credit is due to God for being good; he can’t help
himself.Only a very few theists are prepared to say that God could choose to do evil, and it’s easy to see why. If God is free to do something evil, then he might, at any moment, do just that. Being all-good would then be revealed as not necessarily true of God : it must have been a mistake all along to think of it as necessarily true & a practical matter we could no longer depend on God to be good. How could we ever know that God had turned bad? What evidence might we find to give us an indication of any such turn of events? It does seem to be essential to the God concept that God is impotent to commit evil. Even mild naughtiness must be beyond his powers. We begin to wonder whether this entity can really be a person .
Have a good week everyone.
Nice perspective thoughts on blogging here, I enjoyed it!
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Thank you.
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An entity with no responses – and in all senses. What a very interesting essay, Mak. Guess we have to stand on our own two feet then. Also arguing with any kind of unquestioning belief is very wearing, and predictably unproductive, i.e. as in trying to talk the addicted out of an addiction. So more power to your biking. More than anything it gives me huge pleasure to picture you whizzing along the Great Rift. There may be pain in the effort, but what joy! What blooming fantastic vistas.
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We definitely have ourselves to rely on. We can make the world a better place for our neighbours.
I think I agree. Rides anywhere and photos from those rides are much better than counting the angels on a pin.
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Happy week, Mak. Have the long rains happened? We have freezing snowy wind here in UK.
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They are just beginning. I think it rained most of last night but the rest of the day has been bright and warm. Hopefully it only rains at night :).
This is the time to come over, Tish.
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I would love to be there. But we Brits risk being fined £5,000 if we so much as dare to approach an airport.
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That’s a crazy sum!
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And it’s the least of the craziness!
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When are your restrictions to be lifted?
Our new ones have no end date but people have been flouting them all round
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The restrictions are being somewhat lifted, but very slowly. We can now meet up to six people outside. Masks are set to stay for the foreseeable, along with social distancing. Pubs and non-essential shops are opening mid-month but with social distancing etc. This is set to run and run. Lots of talk of passports and continual weekly mass testing.
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The last restrictions here saw closure of bars, sports clubs, bans on political gatherings, among others. Weddings to have no more than 15 or it it 30 people.
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That’s sort of where we are now. Also moves to ban all public demonstrations.
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You have just begun to blog! Carry on!
It’s a damn shame we can’t find a decent god or a god that hasn’t been taken and used 😦
I have a song that expresses this very thing. Will soon post it just for you 🙂
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Maybe we make a god out of clean cloth.
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I’ll look through my rag bag.
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or we could knit a god if your rag bag has used cloth
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lot of old underwear – should do the trick
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Such a god might be a bother, don’t you think? Maybe from old socks
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Sock it to him/her/it !!!
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some of that sort
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Most, if not all of these things in the post are accepted everywhere but the Hebrew religions where god is a deity. A he, a father, the lord, has been concocted to be this perfect and morally just being, even against their own scripture.
I remember posting that god is more likely to be a mad scientist than all that, where his experiment went haywire. Mel Wild snapped at that. “Who would want to worship a god that wasn’t perfect”?. Evidence that they made up a deity that they are willing to bow to. Because evidence and reason show if there is a god, it’s not all that good, unless good is completely arbitrary as he is also the author of his own immunity.
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Or if there were a god, it is indifferent.
To the apologist, god is good, whatever god does is good bla bla
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Well, to match up with your post, god would have no frame of reference nor even know it is god bla…blablabla.
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I saw a post today that made me laugh. The bible god is Yhwh. God is the job description😀 so maybe you have a point
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Glad you’re here and still blogging, my friend!
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And glad you are here making us laugh ourselves silly
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You have created a bit of a “community” Maka, and that deserves kudos at a minimum. when I win the LOTTO tonight, I will send you a new cycling kit! Or a gravel bike!
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Thanks Brian. All of you have contributed to making it worthwhile
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You were second only to MAL welcoming me here in blogsville.
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Mal was a good bloke.
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even the wise have occasionally to revise!
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Congratulations, an enduring feast so far, you manage to keep the punters excited without having succumbed to banality.
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Thank you.
For some reason, the visitors have generally been the rational ones.
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thank you for your thought
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