There is also, Mark 14:61 - 62:
61
But he held his peace, and answered nothing. Again the high priest asked him, and said unto him, Art thou the Christ, the Son of the Blessed?
62
And Jesus said, I am: and ye shall see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven.
I wouldn't rely on the Jehovah's Wittnesses to give a good account of the Bible as they have vested interests and actually misrepresent key passages to edit Jesus' divinity out of the Bible:
(
http://www.skepticsannotatedbible.com/acts/jw_list.html)
I think there was some good points made in this thread but GoD has a pretty confused arguement, and I want to address a couple of the things he said:
I do, however, feel that belief in a deity clearly has no basis in reason and every basis in the fact that it provides an answer, meaning and refuge for those who fear mortality. Anyone can doublethink as long as it means they have a meaning!
Some of the greatest practitioners of reason actually used it to prove God's existance(!) If you want to rely so heavily upon the implications of reason I suggest you read a philosopher like Spinoza or Leibnitz who both set out arguements
for the existence in God. In Spinoza's "Ethics Geometrically Proven" The existence of God is derived logically from 7 axioms I challenge anyone to contradict:
I. Everything which exists, exists either "in" itself or "in" something else.
(By "in" Spinoza means logically "in" i.e. A is "in" B means A "is logically dependant upon" B. For example; an apple exists "in" the concept of matter, because its existence is dependant upon the concept of matter)
II. That which cannot be conceived through anything else must be conceived through itself.
III. From a given definite cause an effect necessarily follows; and, on the other hand, if no definite cause be granted, it is impossible that an effect can follow.
IV. The knowledge of an effect depends on and involves the knowledge of a cause.
V. Things which have nothing in common cannot be understood, the one by means of the other; the conception of one does not involve the conception of the other.
VI. A true idea must correspond with its ideate or object.
VII. If a thing can be conceived as non-existing, its
essence does not involve existence.
(by essence he means a predicate that a thing MUST logically have i.e. couldn't be otherwise)
From this follows the existence of God and a lot of other moral implications. I personaly have a lot of problems with reason and Kant does a good job of laying these out "antinomies of reason" which can be googled for or found later on in his magnum opus "The Critique of Pure Reason".
To directly contradict what GoD says, belief in God has every place in reason, the real question is how you can keep faith in reason and
not believe in God!
Important: You don't understand why I'm linking a few of these things to Christianity because you think what I'm talking about is simply human nature, but in reality the collective human mentality has been shaped primarily by Judeo-Christianity. Many people don't realise how much the world is still based upon the core Christian values, regardless of how corrupt it may seem on the surface. Note that these couple of examples weren't supposed to be your belief as a whole, I'm just describing a couple of spin-offs from the Christian worldview. I'm not even suggesting it's what the religion intends, I'm far more interested in the end than the reasons for coming to said end. I'm not trying to "blame", I'm just trying to trace problems to their source.
Your views seem to be along the same lines of Freidrich Nietzche. I think that it is easy to get confused with arguements, especially from charismatic writers like Nietzsche, however his arguements have some pretty major flaws and you have based your own views upon these problems.
Firstly the idea that all the ideals of modern society are Judaeo Christian seems wrong. Thou shalt not kill and thou shalt not steal are hardly unique. Honour they mother and farther is hardly unique either, nor are taboos around adultary and incest, and plenty more besides. To me general aversion to these things seem more like features any society needs to be sucessful, and satisfy some archetypal images in the collective unconscious. Even if you
were to trace every instance of these laws back to Judaism, you simply beg the question "where did the Jews get them from?" and indeed "if they go so much against our true nature why are they so readily accepted and for so long.
This leads nicely into the second aspect of the attack on the "Judaeo-Christian" elements in our society. I don't know what your own objection would be but Nietzche's was that they were a "weak" doctrine, that originated from the Jews slavery in Egypt. The idea was that they inverted the "rule of the strong" and created the "rule of the weak". Bad things become good and good things are made Evil. However the idea that a semitic culture is a weak culture is madness. From the military success they had as a nation state in antiquity to the modern day, they have had a lot of success. The Jewish culture has stood the test of time far better than societies such as Rome where the views you encourage were more heartily endorsed. Also there is perhaps the idea that the Jews are falling appart under their terrible philosophy, but on the contrary the percentage of Jews in prominant economic, scientific, academic and political circles is surely a sign of their success. The bulk of anti Jewish critisim is merely anti Semitic.
Humanism arose from the Christian idea of "loving thy neighbour". Egalitarianism arose from Humanism as a way of superficially wiping out our strengths and weaknesses (instead of letting nature genuinely wipe out our weaknesses) - it's unnatural, unfounded and perilous, serving only to discourage strength and progression. And our society is obsessed.
This is the strangest part of your arguement, for the "Will to Power" is an inherantly humanist doctrine. The basic idea of the human experiance being the most important factor in making descisions isn't something I would have thought you would have been so opposed to:
(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanism)
Read this, I think it will change your mind about humanism and dispel some of the lies spread about it that you seem to have bought into. The idea being to trancend the shackles of society and acheive the latent potential of all humans to become almost Godlike ("Companions the creator seeks, not corpses, not herds and believers. Fellow creators the creator seeks--those who write new values on new tablets. Companions the creator seeks, and fellow harvesters; for everything about him is ripe for the harvest. ")
in fact we're conditioned to do so, but it's mentally impossible to do something that doesn't benefit you in some way. To do so would be to cease to be.
er?!?!?!
To refer to Spinoza, (and therefore for a doctrine about as founded in reason as it is possible to be!) two people working together are stronger than two people working alone. To become as stong as we can possibly be is not gauged by individual merits because noone is so mighty they can "go it alone". We will always need the help and suppourt of those around us. With some people the best way to help them is obviously to give them a good kick up their lazy ass, but at the end of the day everyone is capable of greatness, so it is in our own interests to foster as much of it as we can.
Regards,
Korona
