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from the how-many-wrongs-does-it-take-to-make-a-right dept.
Common Dreams reports
In a much-hailed, if modestly problematic, act of righteous revenge, [on Thursday August 4,] an African-American inmate allegedly sucker-punched [...] Dylann Roof--an act that sparked much online praise for the "vigilante hero", a fundraiser for donations to his commissary account, and, finally, the posting of his $100,000 bond by a supporter.
Roof is in protective custody at the Charleston County Detention Center for killing nine African-American churchgoers in South Carolina in 2015. He was in the shower when Dwayne Stafford, a 26-year-old inmate reportedly doing time for either weed violations or strong arm burglary, allegedly got out of his cell, reached Roof, and landed a couple of punches to his face. The sheriff said Roof was attacked "for no reason", which many would argue was less than accurate.
Roof suffered only minor injuries, and his lawyer declined to press charges.
[...] The next day, 18 months after he'd originally been arrested, an anonymous supporter posted [Stafford's] bond, and on Friday he was reportedly freed.
I find that heavy.com typically has the facts quickly on violent crimes.
Previous: [Racially-Motivated Mass Murder in] Charleston, SC
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday August 10 2016, @01:49PM
I'll be perfectly honest with you - no I couldn't do that. I'll go further. Those individuals who hurt me, personally, in my lifetime the most? I learned not to hate them any longer. But, no, I've never forgiven them. Not even the ones who have assumed ground temperature. I don't have that much forgiveness in me. If anyone killed my wife, my sister, my kid, no I'd never forgive them. It's far more likely that I'd forgive someone for shooting me.
If that makes me a "bad" Christian, so be it.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 10 2016, @04:12PM
It does, as you're telling Jesus to take his teachings and shove them up his ass. Its funny how those "Christians" advocating for laws to be written straight out of the bible only want those laws to come from the Old Testament, and very selectively cherry picked at that - eating bacon and shrimp, which God expressly forbids, would of course remain legal while things like homosexuality would result in execution. Laws inspired by the New Testament, which Christians tell me made the Old Testament obsolete, would revolve around Jesus's teachings, like forgiveness and remaining passive in the face of violence.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday August 10 2016, @06:15PM
On the other hand there's Mt. 5:17-20, which, try as apologists might to "interpret" it away, specifically says the Old Testament laws still apply. This is especially interesting because it reflects an embryonic schism in the young religion (Matthew is agreed on by scholars to have been written no earlier than 60-70AD, possibly as late as 90AD): between, one might say, an older and more Judaic branch and some new, more Greek innovative branches.
People forget that Jesus was a Jew, and a very learned one, if the account of him impressing his elders at 12 is accurate. He knew the Law, all 613 mitzvot of it. He seems to have deliberately broken some of them when they were clearly going against the spirit of the Law (such as helping ill people on the Sabbath, which idea was NOT original to him...), as for example "is it not what goeth into a man's mouth which defileth him but what cometh out."
Besides which, he and everyone else thought the End of the World was Coming Real Soon Now (TM), evidenced by passages such as Paul's "what I mean, bretheren, is that the time is short" and "the living shall by no means prevent [go before] the dead."
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday August 10 2016, @05:56PM
Wait, didn't you admit to being some kind of agnostic a while ago, or am I thinking of our resident divas J-Mo and Shitey Uzzard?
In any case, the Christian thing isn't reeeeeally about forgiving and forgetting; it's more like "revenge isn't yours...and the Flying Canaanite Genocide Fairy will torture eeeeeveryone you don't like forever and ever and ever and YOU GET TO WATCH! Won't that be so much fun? Aren't you already creaming yourself just thinking about it?!"
Self-righteous hypocrites. No sense of proportion either. And they don't know what forgiveness is: it's about you, not the person who hurt you. It's accepting a write-off. It's more or less admitting the other guy was/is basically q force of nature, and not worrying so much about it any longer.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday August 10 2016, @06:24PM
https://thejesuitpost.org/2016/04/the-privilege-of-unbelief/ [thejesuitpost.org]
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday August 10 2016, @08:56PM
Aaaaaaaaaaaahahahahahahahaha! Oh lordy let me catch my breath! Runaway, please, please, think before you link things like this. That entire article is predicated on a false premise: the idea that somehow the null hypothesis is an unduly privileged position.
If you've been paying attention at all you should know I've spent nearly a decade doing counter-apologetics, STARTING with Cornelius van Til's mind-bending presuppositionalist arguments. That is like learning to swim by bathing in BBQ sauce and jumping in the Amazon during piranha season, or learning Linux by beginning with Gentoo...which I ALSO did.
Incidentally, despite being from a Catholic group, that article comes dangerously close in spirit if not in form to presuppositionalism itself. It at least isn't outright accusing the infidel (which is ALL non-Christians here, not just atheists) of beginning the search hostile to their conclusion. This is unmitigated, ballsy bullshit. The rest of it a long series of small philosophical turds coated in chocolate; a wheedling, whiny, mock-conciliatory complaint that if those mean ol' infidels would just TRY a worldview which incorporated this conclusion they'd come to that conclusion. Naturally; it's really asking them to take it as axiomatic.
This is also committing one of the most common and dishonest bait-and-switches in the apologetic world; that is, arguing for an essentially Deist/generic-theist concept of God, and smuggling Yahweh the Genocidal Maniac in when it thinks no one is looking. There may be a God, and I think there is...but I also know that by the very definition of God Abrahamic theists use, the egomaniacal demon they worship is not and cannot be God.
I am amazed this piece of dreck was allowed to be published. Any sophomore philosophy undergrad ought to be able to shred it and fling it around like so much ticker tape.
Come back when you have an actual argument. I'm not insulted by this but only because you clearly are not competent to argue this and just posted the first thing that seemed like a good argument to you. May as well be angry at a little kid throwing a tantrum...
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday August 10 2016, @09:22PM
To further add to this little humiliation conga: this article seems premised on the idea that the highest good is for the greatest possible number of free-willed beings to choose, freely, to worship Yahweh.
This leaves you (and them) in the unenviable and frankly unsupportable position of arguing that this is indeed the best of all possible worlds; that no possible change in this state of affairs, no matter how large or how small, could lead to more people worshiping Yahweh. That, for example, rearranging the stars to say in a dozen languages "I YHVH am God" would not affect a single infidel. That effecting the miraculous cure of an amputee (lotsa cancer patients but never an amputee, hmm...) wouldn't get the message across. That making it rain tacos every Tuesday in impoverished regions wouldn't.
That is a hard row to hoe. Only a successful ontological argument could achieve that, and the OA itself in all its forms, including Planginga's Modal OA which abuses axiom S5, is a case of bad grammar.
Oh, but it gets *even worse.* Unless you are a Calvinist, you agree that it is at least theoretically possible that ALL free-willed beings COULD come to worship Yahweh and be saved. Being an Abrahamic theist, you also believe that your God is omniscient, omnipotent, eternal, time-transcendent, and absolutely-sovereign.
Therefore:
P1) The Greatest Good is for the maximum possible number of free-willed beings to worship Yahweh, freely
P2) All free-willed beings are capable of freely choosing to worship Yahweh
P3) Yahweh, being omniscient, knows exactly what state of affairs to bring about to cause all free-willed beings to worship him freely
P4) Yahweh, being omnipotent, has the power to bring about said state of affairs
P5) Yahweh, being independent of causality, eternal, and transcendent of space-time, could bring about this state of affairs at any and all conceivable loci of space and time
P6) Some free-willed beings do not worship Yahweh of their own free will
C1) Therefore: Yahweh is not God and/or it is not the Greatest Good that the maximum possible number of free-willed beings freely worship Yahweh.
Your move, Runaway...
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Thursday August 11 2016, @02:43AM
My move? Really? This is kinda like chess - there aren't any original moves left to make. But, I haven't really been playing the game seriously, either. The link above was more or less a random link, that touches on a central idea. The Jews have been kicking the idea around for a few thousand years, as well. Another more or less random link. Time is in short supply, or I might go to the effort of finding a more serious link.
http://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/must-a-jew-believe-in-god/ [myjewishlearning.com]
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday August 11 2016, @04:35AM
What was the point of that piece of aimless claptrap? I've seen all this before; there are a number of Reform Jews on my father's side of the family and I've had discussions with some of them that brought ideas like this up. I swear to Cthulhu if you're going to chide me for being too literalistic, too hardcore, or (ye gods) "too fundamentalist" I'll be stuck in an infinite loop trying to decide whether to laugh at you or spit right in your eye.
In case this needs repeating, say, if you missed it the first time, I'm not an atheist. I simply know an evil spirit when I see one, and if this Yahweh fellow is real, that is what he is: a raging, genocidal, blaspheming demon arrogating the properties of God to itself, things it can never have and will never be. By simple logic, that makes you a devil-worshiper. And it explains so, so, SO much about the entire almost-4-billion-strong population of Abrahamic cultists.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 11 2016, @05:23AM
The Gnostic branch of Christianity came to the same conclusion, that Yahweh was an evil god that was literally imprisoning us in the material plane to keep us from being able to know the real God. Gnostic Christianity is about the only branch of Christianity I can stomach, namely because it isn't built of the blasphemous foundation of violating the first and second commandments.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday August 11 2016, @07:23PM
Gnosticism is bullshit too; the Gnostic conception of God has precisely the same problems Yahweh does, and perhaps more. Gnostic-God has TWO adversaries to deal with, Satan AND Yahweh, while Abrahamic theism only has the one. And Gnostic-God has an even WORSE record of dealing with the Argument from Divine Hiddenness than Yahweh does.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Thursday August 11 2016, @01:47PM
What's the point? Well, I'm in several different camps. Is God real? Nahh, don't think so. Yeah I think so. Hope so. Hope not. Well, if God is so damned good, why doesn't he fix the world? AC mentioned the Gnostics. The Jews have their own questioners, who believe that if there is a God, he must hate us.
http://www.mishpacha.org/wrestling.shtml [mishpacha.org]
Back to agnosticism - I'm definitely agnostic about religion. I'm betting that NONE of our teachers has a clue about the afterlife. Heaven ain't going to be what people are expecting, if it's real at all.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday August 11 2016, @07:13PM
If my experiences and what my girlfriend claims to know about the afterlife (which really is a misnomer according to her) are true, no human religion gets it right, but the less-dogmatic forms of Buddhism are probably least-wrong. All the times I keep telling people like Uzzard he's going to hell? Hell is not a place, or rather, it's any place if your state of mind is hellish. There are no more illusions when you die; you understand *everything* you did, and you can't hide from yourself. People like him are going to find it very unpleasant going for I know not how long, and they will deserve it--because the OTHER thing she's told me is that somehow, something is keeping track of the evil you do, say, and believe, and it all rebounds back on you in a precise one-to-one ratio.
THIS is why I insist on the truth, and speak it fearlessly. Most all of my decisions are made in light of the above information. Does this explain anything about me now?
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...