RoR: Forum

Joe, thanks for the kind words.

I must take issue with you, however, on the devil's being a proponent of justice, because of the cruel and unusual nature of the punishment which he inflicts on those who are consigned to Hell, a punishment which serves no useful purpose and far outweighs the gravity of any offense that the victim might conceivably commit while he is still alive. Moreover, observe that the devil punishes people for disobeying God, so he is simply enforcing God's commandments.

In fact, disobeying a tyrannical and evil dictator like God is just what any self-respecting individualist should do. Punishing him for it is thus an expression not of justice, but of injustice. Such punishment reflects a hatred of individualism, not a respect for it. God is in league with the devil, who is God's righthand man.

Neither of these evil demons is worth our respect or admiration.

- Bill

Post 41

Wednesday, June 6, 2007 - 8:31pm

Bill, I agree that the devil is just the right hand man. That's why I didn't want to get too deep into the details. The whole picture is rotten. But I find it interesting that when you focus on the basic characteristics, you get a god hungry for irrationality, and a "devil" who punishes the wicked, aiming at justice. And keeping with the theme that they are immortal enemies, which is good and which is evil? Given the details, we can disagree with these assessments as you've done by suggesting infinite torture is not really justice. So we can say people are mistaken in believing these myths should be characterized as they are. But my point was that given these assessments, and put into a context of a morality outside of the whole religion, it's interesting that they side with the rewarder of irrationality and condemn as evil the practitioner of justice. In other words, given their assumptions, isn't it interesting which side they picked?

Post 42

Wednesday, June 6, 2007 - 10:09pm

The concepts of hell and Satan developed separately.

Satan is the seducer. Hell is the place of punishment. Satan is in hell, but he's not the creator of hell, just its strongest prisoner. Originally hell (i.e., hole) was simply the abode of the dead. And the dead were ruled by the Crone goddess - a woman/vulture hybrid, a harpy... Satan is almost entirely absent from the bible - pretty much just found in Job, and identified with the serpent in Eden.

The serpent, the tree of life, and the virgin/goddess/mother are all very old mythological concepts. Think of all the snake/goddesses of the chthonic tradition continued in the Greek myths. Hydra, Echidna, Medusa, all earth/snake/females and all killed by males associated with the sky, winged horses, & Olympus.

Zeus is the sky personified as a father. Jupiter literally means sky-father. The Earth Goddess cult ruled from Europe to the Levant and beyond for millennia. The sky gods didn't arrive until the horse nomads invaded from the Steppe about 4500BC, only fully penetrating Greece and the Levant around 2500-1500BC.

One myth of Greek origins traces the Gods back to Hyperborea. This is not Iceland or Ireland but the Altai mountains of Mongolia. If one faces into the North wind, one can walk from Macedonia to Mongolia with the wind never at one's back. The hyperborean myth is a remembrance of the origins of the pre-Indo-Europeans in what is today Mongolia.

When the earliest matriarchal pre-Semites encountered Northern patriarchal sky-pantheons, the Earth Mother who was identified with the apple and the snake was demoted to Eve.

These ideas are worked out rigorously by Robert Graves in The White Goddess Frazer in The Golden Bough and by the archaeologist Marija Gimbutas in various titles.

Ted Keer

(Edited by Ted Keer
on 6/07, 9:02pm)

Post 43

Friday, June 8, 2007 - 6:52am

Bill, I would highly recommend you get ahold of a copy of Hitchens' new book. Not only is it great fun, he'll certainly please you with his comments that parallel yours here on this thread.

Ted

Post 44

Friday, June 8, 2007 - 3:47pm

Yes, I'll have to add Hitchens to my library. But I do hope that the book is better than his debate with Sharpton. I'm sure it is.

I'm currently reading Dawkins' The God Delusion, which, with a few minor exceptions, is excellent. Dawkins addresses Sharpton's argument that without God we'd have no standard of morality, by pointing out that the Bible advocates genocide and a host of other atrocities, so if one wants to base one's morality on the Bible, one must separate the wheat from the chaff, which means that one must use a standard of morality other than the Bible to determine which parts of Biblical morality are worth following and which aren't.

Of course, Sharpton would reply that God tells him personally what's right and wrong, which is presumably different from what God told Moses. I'm wondering if Sharpton would stone to death those who break the Sabbath if God told him to. Or would he reject God's commandment as immoral? Beware of someone who says that you are morally obligated by whatever God tells him in private communications.

It's a shame that Dawkins hasn't read Rand. She would complement a lot of what he is saying and enlighten him on the proper foundations of a secular morality. Despite his rejection of religious dogma, he still seems a bit too intuitionist or deontological in his thinking -- although I haven't finished the book, so perhaps I'll learn differently in the course of my reading. I hope so; he has so many other good things to say. This book is well worth reading.

- Bill

Post 45

Wednesday, April 30, 2014 - 6:54am

Bill: Congratulations for your (I’ve read it in the “Random Past Article” section) valiant letter to the religious institution you visited in your youth, where you witnessed the way how religious teachers “handle” pupil’s misbehavings, a clear evidence to what happens when a given institution reaches the point where it can establish with impunity a regime of threats and fear. Not only pupils but people in general then easily become putty in the hands of sadistic and, often, also sex-obsessed persons. Their underlings know it, due to their superiors undisputed authority and the fact that parents will, most of the time, yield to the teacher’s and/or the further school authorities' contentions. Often, marks depend on the pupil’s submissiveness and the teacher’s likings, his/her mood or further intentions to oblige the child to yield to his/her pederastic intentions. There are also cases where the pupil’s own sexual preferences motivate acquiescence to avoid unfavorable marks or else. This must have happened uncountable times since the establishment of religions in general (Unknown are the cases in the Islamic and other religious schools) and, most probably, similar situations happened also elsewhere since, as the saying goes, “the beginnings of time”. Probably, and most unfortunately, there will never be a permanent solution for these transgressions of human behavior.

Which brings to mind Dawkins & Co and their adherence to their altruistically based “morality”. Allan Germani wrote, several years ago, a most enlightening article on this fact (The Mystical Ethics of the New Atheists) which I sent to Dawkins, Harris, Dennett, etc., though none of them ever replied at that time nor do I think that they even took the time to read the short message I had sent them. After all, I’m a total stranger, completely unknown to them or to any academic circle and, thus, What the Hell!, why should the recipient care for something a totally unknown person writes. And, also unfortunately, no better known or highly respected academic atheist will take up the task of sending an article written, of all people, by an Objectivist (Allan Germani) to people whose ideological standpoint is, anyway, noticeably left leaning. For such people to read anything coming from an Objectivist must probably be akin to a heinous sin, as it would be for a believer to read anything written by an atheist (Ha, ha, haaaa!) So, well, this comment of mine is just for the record, with no further effect on anything I touched in it.

(Edited by Manfred F. Schieder on 5/01, 2:50am)

Post 46

Wednesday, April 30, 2014 - 10:55am