And stay out my watermelon patch with your pen knife and furtive smile.

You little sinner!

Next: “so as to punish women for daring to engage in sex”. I don’t want to punish women for daring to engage in sex, but I would liket to stop people from punishing little girls for daring to exist. I would like for the final gasps of all 1700 hundred little girls who found out today that they will never enjoy that gift of sex, to ring in your ears the next time you do.

“How many virtues are in a pineapple?”
“Yes!”

Try saying “Yes!” to all your doubts. The Mondo is finished. Now let us meditate.

You are using your logical mind, and yes that is one answer. But it is not a definitive answer. What of its other virtues? Are you certain you have counted them all?

To solve a question of this nature you need insight, not logic. It is a koan of sorts. There is the superficial answer, which is a perfectly reasonable attempt to list the immediate virtues. But what of the other virtues…does it not reproduce prodigiously? Does it not compliment its ecosystem? Does it not provide a form of economic activity for growers?

And yet those answers miss the point too. And by missing the point you are missing out on understanding your own virtues. When we realize that our first answer is not truly correct, we answer it again (well, some will….Think will look in his holy books and dictionaries for answers and they say little about pineapple which is useful for answering the question. Frustrated he will give up, and never be able to solve it).

But it CAN be solved.

Go on thinking about it. Stop all other thinking and concentrate your whole consciousness on this simple question: how many virtues are in a pineapple. Go on thinking of all the possibilities, all the alternatives, all the arguments for and against. Go on thinking about it; make it a deep meditation. Then suddenly one day thinking will stop, because you cannot find any alternative through thinking. And when thinking stops, it is not going to be that you will get the answer. Because the purpose of the question is not to have an answer.

The purpose is to understand the nature of virtues, the nature of pineapple, the nature of self. There are no final answers, only more and more questions, more and more doubt. And by exhausting all these questions, realizing (through trying, not by giving up) that they cannot ever be answered, we go beyond the original question and arrive at perfect understanding.

The same understanding as a three year old:

“I don’t know. I like pineapple.”

Truly I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child will not enter it at all.

I asked you a very simple question and you were unable to answer it. Do you really need to consult your holy books about pineapple? How dole, or should I say, droll…you pointed your eyes heavenward and gurgled. According to your own rules of logic that means you were completely perplexed.

Oddly enough, I asked a little boy who just turned three the same question, and he had no problem answering spontaneously and authentically, without resorting to scripture.

“I don’t know. I like pineapple!”

If a little boy knows more about the universe than you do, and you have to actually consult a dictionary to answer a question which can only be answered through experience, it is because you cannot think. You are so paralyzed by Biblical indoctrination that your mind cannot cope with a simple question. So, you are not qualified to discuss good and evil or any of the ontological questions you raise. If you have to resort to some obscure reference to “postmodernism” when we are talking about a piece of fruit, it’s obvious that you are so lost in theory that you will never be able to put any of it into practice. If God created you, he created pineapple. You should be able to answer the question.

But instead you point your head upward like a turkey and gurgle gurgle gurgle…

If you have to resort to dogma every time there is any ontological doubt and the cracks in your scriptures appear, then either you are failing your religion or your religion is failing you. You have utterly failed to demonstrate any truth, except perhaps, that you are absolutely deluded about the nature of the universe. Your faith fell to a fruity bromeliad.

I urge you to think about what this means about the nature of your beliefs and how truly blind you have become to simple human existence. If you ponder the pineapple enough, you may one day come to a realization about the nature of truth. Remember, child, the original sin was eating the fruit of knowledge.

But think, you aren’t evil – you’re human :)

Your question: “If God made you in his image, and you are evil, then God must be evil. Is this not so?” is a very good one and cuts right to the core of the sin problem that man has. Contrary to what you and Erika stated, I am not SELF righteous. My righteousness does not come from myself. That’s why I said I am evil. If one is evil, how can they be righteous?

Now to your great question: God originally made man according to His image. That is with the ability to love, think, create and most importantly with a free will. Without a free will, man (mankind) would be unable to truly love God (not merely have an affection for a person – like your black lab) but real love. Now God also made man without sin. But man on his own free will CHOSE to sin. That act of disobedience broke his perfect relationship with the Creator and consequently lost his righteousness. That’s how man can be evil and still have been created by God.

There’s much more that I’d like to share with you if you’ll allow me.

If God made you in his image, and you are evil, then God must be evil. Is this not so?

I see in your heart you do.

So, come, now. Let’s not be coy. Try again: How much goodness does the pineapple have?

He isn’t worth your time or mental energy.

Just stop feeding him, and he’ll take his bloviation elsewhere.

And that’s the last you’ll hear from me on this thread.

A pineapple has no virutes as defined by the dictionary (moral excellence; goodness; righteousness) because it is not man. What game are you playing here?

Question for you: how many questions of yours must I answer before you answer one of mine? Or are you hiding again. I understand if you are. You’d have something in common with Richard Dawkins.

Also please answer this question:

“How many virtues are in a pineapple?”

If you can’t answer it will clearly show that your argument is a fallacy. Go on now, answer it.

You know something, Think, you are a self righteous hypocrite and a Pharisee. You had the opportunity to save a soul, but you have driven me from Christ by your example.

“Life is sacred”?

Are you good or evil? Answer the question. Black or white. One or the other. Which is it?

Answer the question.

You also support people who demonize homosexuals and that results in people getting hurt.

Rather than supporting people who favor policies such as universal health care, universal access to effective birth control, and living wages for working families which will actually reduce abortion, you support people who oppose policies that will actually reduce abortion because they give the right slogan. Those same people also support policies that will result in millions of people being killed and maimed.

You claim to be against hurting people yet you would force rape victims to carry their rapist’s child to term which is unspeakably cruel.

That shows that your claimed moral absolute that hurting others is wrong is not so absolute after all.

It also shows that you simply are not an honest person because you do not admit that there will always be moral ambiguous situations because people are not angels and are not perfect.

And that is the problem with your bumper sticker black and white mentality. You claim moral absolutes but act moral ambiguty because you are a human and humans are not perfect. And in order to truly live by moral absolutes people would have to be perfect. If humans were perfect, God would not have had to send Jesus Christ and enabled forgiveness. Have you even ever actually read The Bible or gone to church? For such a self righteous Christian you seem to know very little about Christian beliefs.

I have always been taught to ask questions because the inability of your opponent to answer is a sign of the fallacy of their arguments. So far I have asked each of you the same simple question multiple times. Each time you have chosen to confuse & confound, to demagogue, to run and hide, to disengage and to filibuster. But in all that, you have never answered the question.

Last week, Aron demanded that I answer his questions. What did I do? I answered them. While it is true that he did not LIKE my answers, it is equally true that he could not LOGICALLY REFUTE my answers and didn’t even try.

Like Mr. Dawkins, I can only assume that the reason you refuse to answer my questions is because you CANNOT without revealing the futility of your own arguments. It seems that any conscientious thinker would be so bothered by their inability to answer a simple question that they would want to open their minds to find out what it is they believe that is so fatally indefensible. I know I would. If there was even ONE question that you could ask me that I could not answer simply and succinctly in a way that you could not logically refute, I would begin to sincerely doubt the veracity of what I have committed my life and eternal security to. Not so with you. Your insistence on living in ignorance is astonishing.

Note Yet Again: It is NOT MY OPINION that I am prepared to prove to you. It is absolute, irrefutable Truth that did not come from me. That is because (again) my opinion, like yours, is irrelevant. I am prepared to prove to you that not only is Truth absolute, but that it came from the only place it could… the Creator of the universe. The way I am prepared to prove it is not by TELLING you (that would open me up to accusations that I am trying to force my opinion on you), but by asking you questions that you cannot answer without acknowledging the Truth, and therefore I have no doubt that you WILL NOT answer them.

I realize it is difficult for someone indoctrinated by your set of values to begin to see beyond your limitations. Others here in this very forum who are Christians have my total reverence because they are aware of the moral trap of the absolute. You however, do not see the trap of your own absolute morality. You have no awareness of the trap of self righteousness.

There is nothing in my statements or my mind that indicates my morality requires absolutes. You have again taken your moral outrage over the holocaust and attributed these feelings to me. You apparently have a very hard time understanding what you think and feel has zero applicability to anyone else.

You seem to imply that without moral absolutes, humanity would be lost in moral perdition. We cannot be trusted to guide ourselves through the vagaries of human life and therefore must submit to the will of some unseen and unprovable God, handed down through the most precarious of translations and redactions and outright scrub jobs on separately written scriptures that cannot even be accurately identified as to their specific origins, much less being attributable to “God”.

I am not asking you to abandon your morality. I am not asking to to take on my own morality for yourself. How am I insisting on moral absolutes?

Morality is best determined by the results of our actions and intents. As such every action, every thought, every word, each second of our lives, involves a complex set of dependent relationships and interactions. I urge you to look into this before you respond: dependent origination. This is a vital concept to understand before you will understand my morality.

Nazism was the fruit of moral absolutes. Absolute nationalism, absolute duty, absolute loyalty, absolute ethnocentricity. This was a rigid and highly dogmatic moral code based on supreme belief that what the Nazis were doing was right. Where your argument fails is that even if I believe the Nazis were “wrong”, they believed, at least some, that what they were doing was “right” or at the very least necessary to avoid being killed by those who did feel what they were doing was right. They held compassion as a weakness, a moral failure. They were, just like you, moral absolutists. And they were, like it or not, in their own minds, doing the right thing. This is not an apology for Nazi atrocities. This is recognition of what makes human nature tick.

And who are you to judge anyone? Can you truly state with any certainty that if you were in the same situation that you would have done anything differently? I don’t believe you can. I think you may lie to yourself or get smug in your dogma, but you are closer to being a Nazi than you may care to admit.

Here is an experiment for you. Try going without food for three days and see where you morality goes. Try it. I don’t mean think about it, I mean actually try it. Hunger HURTS. It makes you do things you might even contemplate otherwise. See what happens to your thoughts during a brief experiment with starvation. You might even kill if you got hungry enough. And don’t say you wouldn’t unless you have been there. If you doubt me, try it. If you don’t have the courage to see for yourself where your morals go, then shut up about it because you are a fool.

Now: How are you and I and Aron different?
Think holds to certain moral absolutes and ADMITS it.
Aadila holds to certain moral absolutes and DENIES it.
Aron holds to certain moral absolutes and refuses to answer my main question that I asked him four separate times so he doesn’t have to deal with it.

We all hold to moral absolutes but some of us admit it and the rest of us will do ANYTHING to deny it.

I have no desire to change your opinion. That is a view common to people who feel they must force their morality on others. Obviously you see yourself in some kind of war over morality, or seized upon some idea somewhere that one must either see things are morally absolute or morally relative and decided to carry that battle flag forward instead of looking for ways to reduce the harm in the world.

Go spout platitudes to the woman in Latin America or Africa who gets kicked in the stomach until she aborts because there is no safe alternative. Or to the infant who starves to death. Or the child born with HIV. Or the one sold into sexual slavery. Or the one who is left to its own without love of any kind until finally shot by some policeman paid by a merchant who is tired of street kids stealing his goods. It’s easy for you to do so because you are not in their shoes.

You know something, Think, I don’t have a problem with Christ or his teachings. I’ll even accept Christ as my personal savior if it makes you feel better, because Christ’s teachings on love and kindness are clearly the product of an enlightened being.

But I do have a problem with people like you who think being Christian gives them the right to tell others what is right or wrong when in the name of God, people have tortured, raped, and enslaved other people for virtually the entire history of your religion. Your moral absolutes are an insult to my spirituality.

Obtuse. He is being willfully obtuse.

Everything is Right. Everything is Wrong.

Everything is True. Everything is False.

Everything is Beautiful. Everything is Ugly.

And this Post has become Painfully Boring.

These are not word games. This is the crux of the whole matter. Without absolute truth, right and wrong, good and evil, you have no moral superiority over anyone else. It’s all just your opinion, which is what I was trying to show Aron. Why are you trying to change my opinion to match yours if it’s all subjective? Why is the SPLC labeling certain groups Hate Groups if it’s all subjective? What’s wrong with Hate Groups? It appears to me that the SPLC absolutely believes there’s absolutley something wrong with Hate Groups. Would not you agree? Why was Hitler “wrong” if it’s all in our individual interpretations, his interpretations, your interpretations, my interpretations? We all have different individual interpretations, so how is it that YOUR interpretation ends up being the right one?

90% of what you think I believe, I don’t believe. You’re all over the place. Focus on one thing and ask (don’t tell) me what I believe about it.

1) I never said what you imply by clipping out my words. When I said I base my understanding on science instead of poppycock, it was specifically in reference to ontology and blind religious fervor. If the Bible says the earth is 10,000 years old, and science says millions, I’ll go with science thanks. Clear now? Of course “good” has meaning as a concept, but it is subjective meaning and depends upon symbolism. Words and ideas reside in the mind, and have no absolute meaning except that which you ascribe to it. Stop trying to twist my words because the two comments were never phrased the way you present them, and it’s obvious to anyone of limited intelligence what I meant. Of course we experience things we enjoy, find wholesome, and define as good. But these things are not moral absolutes.

2) Hate has meaning in so far as it is an expression of ignorance. Whether or not you consider the statement you quote as hateful depends on your own mind. Apparently you do, and I don’t. Thus my point is proved. Notions of love and hate reside in the consciousness, not in the object, person, statement, or idea being loved or hated. You must feel these things to understand them. As such, they are entirely subjective.

3) You question twists my words. All words can and do have meaning in terms of experience, but they do not have absolute reality separate from the mind. Notions of good and evil are experienced in the mind and as the mind is dependent upon senses, I refer you to my previous statements for clarification on their ultimate reality. Good and evil are never moral absolutes because they cannot exist without individual interpretations. I think my point was quite clear from the beginning, without tedious word games that do not advance your argument about the existence of gods or moral absolutes. I consider these things to be superstitions, you consider them as truth. If you have a soul to be rewarded or damned by some unseen “God” for reasons unknown, can you show it to me?

me: That is what you believe. Its also what Osama Bin Ladin, Fred Phelps, the Taliban, the Imans who run Iran, the Ku Klux Klan (especially the 1920s KKK which was explicitly a right wing Christian organization), and all of the other religious nutcases throughout history and the present believe.

So that pretty much shows the “flaw” in your reasoning.

If “absolute truth comes from God” who determines what “God’s absolute truth” is?

Perhaps you should spend less time reading the Old Testament to pick and choose which of laws of the Torah you want to selectively enforce – while ignoring the inconvient ones – and spend more time reading the Gospels where Jesus had some pretty strong opinions regarding the people (the Scribes and Pharisees) who claimed to decide what “God’s Law” met.

And you still have even more problems than just the fact that humans have been interpeting what God’s Law is pretty much since the Torah was first written (good luck btw, determining when that was). And likely even before then, the Scribes and the Pharisees were so important in the Judism of Jesus’s time in part because the Torah was not written down so that regular Jews could read it.

Thus, even if the Torah originated with God – and any reasonable mainstream historian would note the fact that the supposed God’s Law – including some of the most beloved passages among the right wingers – borrows a lot from Hamarabi’s Code [which is not surprising when you note that much of the Torah is the ancient Hebrew civil law code and Hamarabi's Code was the most influential civil law code in the ancient world]. In fact one might wonder why there was such conflict between the Hebrews and the Babylonians in the Old Testament – given that the Hebrews obviously borrowed legal concepts from the Baylonians. You have to impose several thousand years of man interpreting what it means. And disagreeing and arguing about what the Torah – and later passages of the Bible means.

To use the example of “killing” – here is where your black and white world collaspes upon itself. Why?

because everyone knows that if abortion is outlawed, illegal abortions will occur and it will result in the death of women. Even you admitted that earlier. Yet, you have no problem with that – apparently because those women are “murderers” according to you so apparently they deserve to die. Or maybe the lives of women just do not matter for you.

Add in the fact that the people who claim to be inspired by God and God’s law have no problem voting for people who promote a whole lot of killing. Just consider, the Republican Party supports tort reform, eliminating consumer safety laws, and eliminating workplace protection. Those policies will all result in people dying. Everybody knows that. One of the classic instances of tort law involves the Ford Pinto – Ford deliberately to save a tiny amount of money on each car sold a car they knew would explode and kill people. General Motors did the same thing in some of their vehicles (and then burned the evidence). The tobacco industry for years denied that smoking kills people – and were aided and abetted by Congress.

Not to mention the fact that the invasion of Iraq doesn’t exactly meet Saint Thomas Aquinas’ definition of a Just War does it?

Basically, honey, the people who are telling you to oppose abortion and to vote to eliminate abortion have a whole of blood on their hands. They knowingly promote policies which they know will kill people. You blindly follow the bouncing ball because you support a policy which they pretend to support – again admitting that you know it will result in women dying.

Basically you may speak out against killing, but you are actually saying that God isn’t always opposed to killing after all. So God might be against murder, but he’s perfectly fine with a large corporation eliminating workplace safety protections so that people will be killed and maimed (and no worker’s comp either). Of course, perhaps you should read some more of the Torah – and not just the out of context bits which people like the Family Research Council (in some ways, a modern version of the Scribes and Pharisees, in other ways, just a right wing front group funded by people who are also funding pro-abortion studies and pro-abortion groups) ignore because they aren’t exactly pro-right wing. And also read the Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles – Jesus is definitely not down with laws that have the known effect of killing people and place a very low value on human life and he doesn’t think very much of rich people who don’t want to pay taxes.

Basically, what you claim is “God’s absolute law” is really whatever Think a Minute believes – or more likely whatever people with a financial interest in cutting taxes for the rich and abolishing workplace and consumer protection laws (as well as destroying tort law) tell you to believe.

You are nothing but a sucker. You claim “absolute truth” for the portions of the Bible you want to use to impose your will upon others – you ignore the portions of the Bible about faith, love and charity. I’m also guessing that you are not engaging in all of the animal sacrificial rites which the Torah lists. You then ignore that even within the religions who worship the God of Abraham (that would be Jews, Christians, and Moslems) there are hundreds if not thousands of different beliefs within those religions. See, honey, I’m a Christian too (but also qualify as a nice Jewish girl) and its pretty obvious that what they are preaching in my church is much different from what they are preaching in your church.

Most people understand that there is a difference between what comes from God and what comes from man. Jesus of Nazareth was pretty clear that there is a difference between laws and man and laws of God. Jesus and the early church also specifically went away from many of the Jewish laws. Especailly since many of the Jewish laws were in fact actually the civil law code of the ancient Hebrews (and um borrowed from the Bablyonian Code) which means that they were laws of man (and as historians of noted, many were extremely practical given the circumstances).

I guess you do have the Ten Commandments – something tells me you don’t actually follow them though. OF course, neither did Jesus of Nazareth – and neither did the ancient Hebrews since judging by the number of people killed in the Old Testament (odd that conservatives are calling for a book filled with so much sex and violence to be mandatory reading for school children – not that they really want people to read the Bible for themselves because if people actually do that, they will see how much the conservatives distort it – probably why so many conservatives support the King James Only belief – or if they are Catholic only support the Latin Mass and the Latin Bible – they know that people are not going to understand the arachaic languages therein).

Meanwhile the sun has finally come out and its a holiday so I have better things to do than to try to educate someone whose mind is welded shut. You pretty much remind me of a bumper sticker on a car on one of my neighbors that i saw growing up “God Said It, I believe it, That Settles It” – even as a little girl who went to Sunday school every week i could tell what the problem with that closed minded attitude it – it sets you up for control from people who will claim to speak the word of God, but have their own agendas.

When not even people within the same denomination of Christianity (let alone when you add in Jews and Moslems) agree on many things, how do you know it was really God talking? When its at least 5000 years removed from the oldest books of the Bible and approximated 1900 from the newest, and the Bible has been repeatedly translated over time – how can you be sure what is really God’s – and what is man’s interpretation of God? You claim God’s law – but it really is Think a Minute’s law – or more likely whatever modern equivilent of the scribes and pharisees snake oil salesman who convinced you to think that God supports whatever will line his pockets the most.

*sigh* even trying to wrap things up and end this so i can enjoy my day off from work – and the fact that it is no longer pouring down rain and the sun is finally out, i just can’t help myself. I don’t even know why i bother, since Think a Minute obviously has his mind welded shut (and he likely agrees with Saint Paul that women should just keep their mouths shut about religion anyway so it could well violate God’s law for him to even listen to me talk about religion. Or maybe he decided to ignore those portions of the Bible). *sigh* why do i bother?

3 Questions?
1) Can you describe the SCIENTIFIC TEST you ran which proved that good has no meaning?

2) Consider this quote from a poster: “I think it is because they don’t really care about hate crimes or hate groups at all, they just want to find a convenient reason to keep hating” Question: Does the kind of hate expressed in the above quote have any meaning?

3) If ‘hate’ can have meaning, then why can’t “good” have meaning, since neither ‘hate’ nor ‘good’ are scientifically verifiable.

There is no good and evil except that which you, as observer, ascribe to a given action or intent. The good and evil reside in your own mind, not in the action you observe.

Even the very words you use for “good” and “evil” are entirely misleading symbolic constructs born of ignorance. They have no ultimate meaning and entirely subjective upon your experience of being raised and/or indoctrinated in a given faith to the exclusion of all other views, ideas, and understanding.

Whether or not you wish to believe in such utter poppycock is your own business. I prefer to base my understanding of the universe on the advances of science, and testable experience.

Particularly, I would like to point to quantum physics and the interconnectedness of all things, which are completely indivisible into paltry mental constructs such as good or evil. These ideas may be comforting in a universe whose order is difficult to grasp, and where suffering exists, but they have no more meaning than you give to them. Of themselves they are just ideas, and like all ideas they arise from consciousness and return to consciousness like a wave.

They have no ultimate reality.

“If man thinks of the totality as constituted of independent fragments, then that is how his mind will tend to operate, but if he can include everything coherently and harmoniously in an overall whole that is undivided, unbroken, and without a border then his mind will tend to move in a similar way, and from this will flow an orderly action within the whole.”

–David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order, 1980

About God’s absolute law, I’m not expecting you to believe me based on MY opinion. That’s what I was trying to tell Aron. No one cares about my opinion, least of all you. But I am expecting you to believe your own sense of logic. Two opposites cannot both be true at the same time and in the same relationship. There’s no example in this life, or in nature, or in the cosmos, or in the human experience where you can show that two opposites are both true at the same time and in the same relationship. You can draw scenarios where people are deceived, or don’t have all the information, or are lying. But that does not change the Truth. Your abortion and murder examples above do NOT contradict each other. Only your OPINION contradicts someone else’s OPINION. You said murder is wrong. Correct. But then you said “so if killing Hitler is moral… “. Incorrect. “Killing Hitler is moral” is YOUR opinion. “Murder is wrong” is God’s opinion. Therefore Killing Hitler is IMMORAL, because God says it is. So the correct answer is not “everything is shades of grey” That statement contradicts itself because IF everything is shades of grey, then THAT statement would ALSO be shades of grey, and if THAT statement is also shades of grey, then NOT everything is shades of grey. The correct statement is “SOME things are shades of grey and OTHER things are Black and White. The flavor of ice cream that is the best tasting is Shades of Grey, it’s relative. When your pharmacist dispenses drugs she works in black and white world. When you check your bank balance you work in a Black and White world. The computer screen you’re reading right now was designed in a black and white world. When NASA launches a satellite NASA works in a black and white world. Now are there Grey areas in all of those endeavors? Of course! But there are also very very very Black and White rules involved having to do with electricity, gravity, mathematics, physics, biology. To say that EVERYTHING is shades of grey is rationally self defeating AND practically impossible since such a world does not exist.