Talking to God | Hacker News Reader

Talking to God

fullmoon.nu

156 pointsartagnon102 comments

Thought-provoking, and I say that as a Christian. It also reminds me of my favorite short story: http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html

Also Christian, and I found it to be a clever bit of fiction, really. Well-written, entertaining. Also, thanks for that link :)

Funny, thats just how I feel about the old testament...

Really? Not to offend the persuasion of any attendees (I do mean that, stop reading if your rage is easily focused), but did you try the Hebrew version? I have studied it, as part of my education, along with ancient Hebrew laws and such. The writing is unclear, terrible at times, poetic at times; the language is so simple as to appear broken. And nearly all of the story, morals, message, or poetic meaning you take away is your own,– because of how broken Biblical Hebrew is. Whatever you take away will end up being a by-product of you studying it, not a direct product.

Some 10+ years since, I can still read Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic, and I'm still not sure there was any direct product in there. So much so, that I call modern spoken Hebrew which is somewhat loosely based on Biblical Hebrew, – I call it Jibberish in my own mind, with a `j'. Like the one in Jihad, or "sacred struggle"; something inspired by—but completely unrelated—to the original scripture.

And the King James is even better still, having been translated to English from Greek by a German man. Particularly the Revelations is—at times—absolutely 4chan material, I find.

EDIT: ^holy\ war^sacred\ struggle

Nitpick - Jihad does not translate (in its original arabic) to "holy war". It translates to "struggle".

For someone who studied Scripture in its original language, you've still managed to hit my pet peeve of pluralizing the title of the scroll of Disclosure.

That's the part that I didn't study, it's the Christian part. It has no Hebrew source/prototype; the original is in Greek (AFAIK), and not taught in the Migdal Emeq boarding school for boys (as it is a jewish school).

EDIT: I read some King James for the shear lulz. And lulz to deliver it has.

And the King James is even better still, having been translated to English from Greek by a German man

What? That's not true at all. It was translated by a committee of English scholars and clergy. It is also a landmark of literature and history that contains some of the finest English ever written.

Ooh, look, I am being wrong on the Internet. I am now ashamed to have remembered this incorrectly. Thank you for pointing out my error, I'll be sure to double check things I have only passing familiarity thereof in the future.

But you could have provided a link, like this one: http://www.av1611.org/kjv/kjvhist.html

EDIT: I'm not being sarcastic up there. I'm being sarcastic below here.

EDIT: and the historical/literary value remark is just plain balls.

"And they had hair as the hair of women, and their teeth were as the teeth of lions. And they had breastplates, as it were breastplates of iron; and the sound of their wings was as the sound of chariots of many horses running to battle. And they had tails like unto scorpions, and there were stings in their tails: and their power was to hurt men five months."

If that's not balls I don't know what is.

I find the theory by Rene Girard to be quite rational explanation of what product the Bible contains. He is an apologist of Christianity - but what he writes is completely convincing for an agnostic like me.

That's alright. All the really good shit happens in the New Testament.

Out of curiosity, what would your reaction be if you found that it wasn't fiction? Would you accept the entity the author was conversing with as God? Or would you think he was a demon? Or just an advanced godlike alien being beyond which another, more powerful entity exists in the unknowable (kinda hard, since this being created the entirety of our reality).

> advanced godlike alien being beyond which another, more powerful entity exists

It all depends on how tight one's definition of God is. If it's very rigid, anything they encounter in the real world except something that sufficiently satisfies all the attributes of a textbook-God (read: Jesus, Mohammed, Krishna) including physical appearance wouldn't qualify as God.

Muhammad never claimed to be a god, but a prophet of the Jewish and Christian god.

If it wasn't fiction? Here's the thing: I might be open to the prospect of a humanoid 30-something white guy talking to me being an apparition of God. But I really don't get hung up or terribly passionate about things like all the laws in Leviticus, or whether certain stories are 100% literal or metaphors. Maybe I'd ask, but it wouldn't impact my faith one way or the other, really. And if it turned out that the guy who said he was God was just a telepathic, shape-shifting alien? Meh. A lying alien. Big whoop.

It's not a telepathic, shape-shifting alien, it's an omnipotent alien that created the universe and implies that there is no reality higher than this. Would that impact your faith? Assuming for the sake of argument that he's not lying, would you think that a) he's God, b) he's mistaken, there's a higher reality over which God presides or c) there is no God.

If it runs counter to what my beliefs are, I'd assume he was mistaken, but it would certainly put some kind of perspective on how my God went about things.

I am not the type of Christian who forces the issue on others, but I find debates of Christian canon interesting if trite, and all too often tantamount to trolling. I really don't assume to know how we got here, and whether the universe as we know it was actually wrought from nothing over the course of 168 Earth hours, or whether it was "steered" by some higher power over trillions of years is not something that matters too much to me. Therefore, the mechanical minutiae of said creation matters even less.

The fact is that we are here, and that's a mysterious and wonderful thing!

Agreed.

Amusing read. The one thing that broke the suspension of disbelief was the Velociraptor reference, which was based off of a movie and not history (God would know the difference).

http://dinosaurs.about.com/od/dinosaurbasics/a/velofacts.htm : "There's no evidence that Velociraptor hunted in packs" and "Velociraptor wasn't the smartest dinosaur of the Cretaceous period"

"(God would know the difference)."

I frequently refrain from nitpicking when dealing with children ("yes, the internet is how robots talk to each other"). It wouldn't be too much to expect an omnipotent being to do so as well.

This may help restore suspension of disbelief: just because we don't have any evidence doesn't mean this "god" is wrong.

If you start a computer program, that runs evolutionary algorithms, you become their god, and you will be omnipotent (to them, at least). It's easy to write the story off as fiction, but in fact, it would explain a lot, I think.

to any program you write you are god. You are expecting the result of that program to behave in a specific way, the program never ran but at any point of the program you can predict what will happen to the logic of the program. But to the program you are an omnipotent god, yet in reality you may have made some mistakes, gota kill and restart see if it works better after a bug fix.

The only question is: to the program, does it matter that you are god? Does it make any bit of a difference if it believes in you or not? Will the outcome change depending on that fact? Do you care if the program worships you? (unless you wrote a program to worship you)

That's exactly my point. I will never understand God's plans (because there is no feedback from him, or I can't sense them), so I should be focusing on the problems that face me everyday.

Thus, I don't think God (if he exists) wants us to believe in him. (The same way, I don't care if a program or and ant worships or believes in me).

"The only question is: to the program, does it matter that you are god?"

Well, if you program it to worry about that stuff then yes. If you don't, then no. My current program couldn't care less about me. I'm okay with that.

Nick Bostrom has written a paper about just that, arguing that we may be living inside a computer simulation. It's an interesting read. See http://www.simulation-argument.com/

I will be omnipotent? Huh, that's a stretch. I can barely understand the relatively simple programs I write. If there is a human being who understands his own code completely, in a large system, I'd like to meet him.

Well, you don't need to understand your code fully to effect changes in the simulation. The point is that it is a simulation, and you control the code. So you'd be omnipotent, just not omniscient. You know, that scenario would actually explain a lot about this world. The reason why evil exists is because God did create a rock too heavy for Him to lift, and that rock is us. Be patient, he may be in the process of debugging the system. :p

Let's say you believe that our existence can be attributed to a 'divine engineer' who developed said program and our physical laws are a by product of his engineering. How do atheists respond to such an statement? I am just having a hard time defining myself spiritually (not that I feel the need to).

Atheists seem to say "there is no God", but the 'divine engineer' theory would say there is a God, just not one in the traditional sense.

Such a theory is useless because it does not explain where the divine engineer comes from, or what is his nature. So it is just dodging the relevant questions.

Please explain yourself, because no atheist argument that "there is no god" has ever convinced me that the lonely, yet repeatable physical laws we observe weren't created by something higher than ourselves.

I'm sure if there is a God he wouldn't have resorted to anything as crude as 'creating' the laws. It's more beautiful that they weren't sledgehammered into existence. It gives them some substance, instead of just a proxy for something we couldn't possibly understand.

Besides, we're been explaining anything inexplicable as the work of the gods for thousands of years. This conversation could have happened in Greek times and you would still have been convinced at the existence of Apollo at the end of it.

I'm sorry, but as sure as atheists are that there is no god, you have convincede to belive it

The problem is that explaining something by invoking a "god" is not an explanation at all. There is no piece of evidence which points to a god and excludes other hypotheses.

I think it is the wrong question. The interesting question would be, what is the nature of god? If it is just some entity that create a universe (like maybe we could simulate a universe in a computer), then you have to ask where does god come from? You have not answered the question at all, you have only pushed it up one meta-level.

Imagine we were beings in an artifical life simulation, created by droodlewhoops. Maybe one day we would figure out that that's the case. Then we still don't know what droodlewhoops are, hence we don't know anything.

You are right that atheism is also a kind of belief, that is way these day it is more common for rational people to be agnostic.

Thanks for the reply, it's interesting to think about recursive creation. I do agree that atheism is a belief system just as much as classical religion is, they just beleive very different things.

I still think there is difference. At least atheism encourages you to look for other explanations, whereas religion simply is the end of the story ("things are what they are because god made them so - that's it").

This reminds of a "proof of God" that appeared (I think) in Seven Ages of Madness by Svend Aage Madsen:

If God exists, then there must be some way to realize what the true religion is. Some hint or pointer that would make it clear, and this hint would be available to all humans. Some people would not understand it, or ignore it, but everywhere in the world, a few people would choose to follow the correct religion.

There are many religions in the world, but only one is universal: non-belief. In some places they are few and far between, but everywhere you find a few people who don't believe in God. For all other religions there are places in the world where that religion is simply not present. But every place has a few people who don't believe. These people must have correctly understood God's hint.

Hence, if God exists, atheism is the true religion.

Thanks for posting this! I read it a while back and lost the link.

The part that's stayed with me the most about this story is the following:

"...imagine discovering a secret thought or program, accessible to any intelligent individual, which, if abused, will eliminate your species instantly."

"Each and every individual in such a species must eventually become capable of destroying their entire species at any time. Yet they must learn to control themselves to the degree that they can survive even such deadly insight."

What a great thought. How would our species survive if any one of us had the ability to destroy all of us. I think of this in the context of the internet. I'm strongly of the opinion that the internet should not be censored or restricted in any way. However, what if there was a way to make the equivalent of a Nuclear Bomb with low-cost, easily available materials? How would the internet handle that knowledge? What would it do to society?

The simplest way would be to relinquish free will.

Evolution halts at the point where a single individual dooms the entire population. It cannot work with a step fitness function, with no margin for error.

And by evolution I mean the abstract understanding for evolution that we have, which is the core of the genetic algorithms (not just biological evolution, nor some abstract "a population getting better in something").

I think we are encountering the problem at different scale at first: some countries can destroy the entire species, then more and more countries do, then it would become possible for some large or committed enough organizations. We are learning to cope along the way, and the approach so far is to keep knowledge under covers, and not to give such powers lightly.

Forum "Conversation with God" http://www.fullmoon.nu/rtpforum/phpBB2/viewforum.php?f=4

other discussions : http://www.fullmoon.nu/rtpforum/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=10

Just in case people are still wondering, this is one of many articles under the heading "Fiction?" in the on site's sidebar.

Yes. I found that this one to be especially good though.

I am still waiting for someone to tell me how they know the difference between what they call god and an advanced alien race tricking them into believing in them.

How would you know?

I would guess that falls into the same category as Artur C Clarke's Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic

The point is essentially moot - what can you / are you going to do about it?

Stop believing in things that could might as well be an advanced alien race.

Or just use the "sherlock holmes" approach he mentions in the piece.

Why would you care? Either they are interesting or not and helpful or not. If neither, ignore them.

That's the eternal question. According to the western religions, an entity (a certain Satan that should not be confused with yours truly :) rebelled against God precisely because he did not believe in the whole story and sought the "throne".

"And remember when Abraham said, `My Lord, show me how You gives life to the dead.' God said, `Do you not believe ?' Abraham said, `Yes, but I ask this that my heart may be at ease.' God answered, `Take four birds and make them attached to thee. Then put each of them on a hill; then call them; they will come to thee in haste.' And know that Allah Is Mighty and Wise." - 2:262

I think the interesting twist in the meme that OP is seeding is to consider whether fairly advanced species send agents to emerging species to mind fuck them into oblivion. According to OP's vision, it is not merely possible, but absolutely necessary, for us to pursue destructive technology to the point that the fate of the species can be decided by any single individual in the collective.

And that's what I found most interesting. How can you preserve free will and continue to exist after developing an effortless, universally-known means of condemning the entire species?

Perhaps an iterative culling of the herd, destruction of the wicked kind of thing. Think of a farmer tending an olive grove, burning branches, transplanting here and grafting there. At some point you get left with a species that can decide among a myriad of interesting choices but all decide to avoid making that one.

I do not think that is possible for the human race without some serious brainwashing. Either that or look out for the school/office shooting types and make sure they get constantly laid, for the good of all humanity.

I would also say: what does it matter? Is the assumption that we should obey all commands from god, but not from an alien race? Why?

Would a universe where everybody just does what god tells them even be worth living in?

Playing devil's advocate against myself: what if elementary particles are basically just entities doing exactly what god tells them - apparently interesting results can still occur.

‘so what, exactly, makes you god?’

‘I did’

‘Why?’

‘Seemed like a good idea at the time’

^ When I read this I looked around for Douglas Adams. Rest his soul.

"Coming to terms with the realisation that you have created your successor, not just in the sense of mother and child, but in the collective sense of the species recognising it has become redundant, this paradigm shift is, for many species, a shift too far. They baulk at the challenge and run from this new knowledge. They fail and become extinct. Yet there is nothing fundamentally wrong with them - it is a failure of the imagination."

"I hope that if I can get across the concept that I am a product of just such evolution, it may give them the confidence to try."

I vote for staying human, and not obsoleting ourselves.

The idea of becoming like the god of this story reinforces this conviction. He reminds me of Q from Star Trek, toying with species for his own amusement, having some arbitrary conception of what makes a species worthwhile, mainly revolving around that species ability to shape the material universe around them.

To me, what this story demonstrates is that Atheists are not actually opposed to God like beings. But they are scandalized by a God who does not regard technological advancement as the highest calling. They cannot possibly take a God like Jesus seriously, for example, because he was not at all concerned about correcting the scientific misunderstandings of human beings. He only cared about how people treated each other, human relationships, attitudes of the human heart, and love. For me, the verse that demonstrates Jesus nature is also the shortest in the Bible: "Jesus wept." True, he did not (and does not) always intervene to eliminate suffering and tragedy, like the being in Talking to God. But he does empathize with us, to the point he was willing to literally share in our suffering alongside us.

an incorrect assessment. As an atheist I believe that the concept of god as put forth by religious is ridiculous. That is all. God is invisible to all senses, his logic completely defies our logic, knows all bug gives us free will (um a contradiction), the sun revolves around the earth (oh wait that was only discarded 30 or so years ago).

The point is a religion that does not teach "treat all human beings regardless of believes or values as human beings and as your own people, try to figure out what is right and what is wrong together rather than impose values from an ancient book and it's infinite interpretations on everyone. As a human being you can make mistakes but you must take responsibiltiy for them." or something to that extent. Since I have yet to see one religion state this I cannot subscribe to any religion nor can I believe any notions of god. Remember the notion of "god" is christian/muslim/jewish. Other religions believe in many gods, or spirits, or something that is not quite what our "god" is. Who is to say that "god" is what I should believe in, vs "gods" of the hindus, etc.

He only cared about how people treated each other, human relationships, attitudes of the human heart, and love.

I think most atheists would agree that Jesus sounds like a great guy.

The sticking point is probably more the lack of actual evidence for a deity existing, plus the general observation that, judging from history, religious groups tend to act as if "gain political power and/or go kill that other religious group" is the highest calling.

For that matter, if Jesus returned and resumed his ministry in the modern USA, I'd actually expect more Christians to be "scandalized" than atheists.

If you really take a look at it, it does not matter what religion or belief you follow. Once that belief includes someone taking power and ruling over people: The Pope, Stalin, Hitler, and take any modern dictator and add them to the list, the belief is up for corruption.

Remember power corrupts, and absolute power is just more fun. -- Benny Hill

For that matter, if Jesus returned and resumed his ministry in the modern USA, I'd actually expect more Christians to be "scandalized" than atheists.

There are two possible approaches to the Jesus story. One is to realize that he was criticizing the abuse of religious power in general, and make an effort to avoid that.

Of course, the preferred approach for those who actually do abuse religious power is to assume that his criticism focuses on some evil peculiar to the Jews, since being antisemitic is always less work than being introspective...

I believe you mean, this particular Atheist believes that. Don't generalize.

Smiled through the whole read.

Only thing that needs to be revised is 'genetic warfare'. That is definitely not a future problem. It's a very very old one.

Also, while I think "prescience" would most certainly be in god's vocabulary, I think he'd be 'ultra fashionable' and think of it's use in casual conversation as being passe.

Kinda Spoiler

The end reminded me of "What does Marsellus Wallace look like?"

This is all out of the recollection of the author in the story; if the author is the type of person to use "prescience", he could easily have injected the word in his narrative.

On the other hand, if this god is what he claims to be, I imagine he'd use whatever words best conveyed his point- if he was trying to make one- and who are we to say "prescience" was not the perfect word when speaking to our narrator?

Arguably, all violence is a sort of genetic warfare. But we've yet to encounter the problem of engineered-from-scratch superviruses.

I was thinking more along the lines of 'eugenics'

Ah. This is so much in the "I want to believe" dept. :/

Possibility One was that I was dreaming or hallucinating. Nobody’s figured out a test for that so, at the time I think that was my dominant feeling.

Actually, there is a pretty good test for this. Look at your digital watch, look away for a bit, and look again. If the digits are different between checks, you are dreaming. I'm told that this happens with enough regularity that it's a fairly reliable universal dream-test. (There are also others; google "lucid dreaming".)

The most effective test for me has been trying to jump out of my window. If it doesn't hurt (I live on the 16th floor...), then I must be dreaming. This is probably a bad strategy if you take hallucinogenic drugs, however :)

I just tried your first test... and the digits were indeed different... (the last two digits, in particular).

I guess that means I'm dreaming?

No, it just means you're a pedant.

Silly of the author not to let God finish about the "thinking machine". Looks like God wanted to explain, but time ran out.

Anyone have any thoughts on it.

As an atheist, I find this essay truly inspiring and would say most (if not all) predictions make lots of sense. That being said, I'm afraid that the spiritual tone employed by the author might distortion the message he really wanted to pass.

What broke the argument and suspense for me was that there was no explanation of the Fermi paradox. With 14 million type 2 and 3 civilizations and billions on our level he need to address that paradox for the story to be interesting.

I think it was implied that the type 2 and 3 civilizations are intentionally avoiding us.

Hilarious ending. I wonder how it would sound if a woman had the same conversation?

"Pat Robertson would wet himself if he actually understood who he was talking to."

Interesting and well written. However, being an agnostic I offer this:

From A Scientific Rationale for Belief in God http://www.vexen.co.uk/religion/God_AI.html

>I present here a concise rationale for the existence of God. The work of Ray Kurzweil and other artificial intelligence researchers is critical to my thesis. An entity (computers or humans, it not mattering which) will eventually become all-knowing. How much time passes before what is likely to be a rapid convergence to all-knowing is not important...

I stopped reading when the author made a leap in logic from superhuman intelligence to omniscience, and then from omniscience to time travel just within the abstract. This was obviously not a well thought out piece.

I didn't read it just because he says that Kurzweil is critical to his thesis.

What is a "password association?"

I think it is just the way he remembers/has selected that particular password.

I think it's why he chose that particular password. So if my password was lucy, the association would probably be a girl I was attracted to at the time I chose it.

Fun way to generate a reasonably complex password: pick six+ words out of a favorite song, take the first letter of each word, turn to CaMeLcAsE, pick a letter or two and replace with an ascii equivalent (e.g. s becomes 5, a becomes @, etc.), and wrap it with $'s or ^'s or one of those top-row characters.

$JuNa5t5$ ==> Join us now and share the software

Wouldn't using the six word phrase most likely be a much more secure password than condensing it to a mere 8 characters?

The method's for a password, not passphrase. If more places allowed passphrases, then yeah, of course I'd go for that.

Actually, if a man who came up to me and went as far towards "proving" he was God as this fellow did, I would immediately grab him by the lapels and start scream "you fucking bastard, what the hell do you think you're doing, can't you see the fucking suffering your causing..." and continue the rant for as long as he would take it...

Maybe that's why "God" hasn't come to me...

If you believe in free will, God couldn't be causing any of the suffering to happen. People have been given the complete choice to do whatever they please, and this world is a product of that. This world's suffering is our own.

Allowing something to happen != causing

Secondly, who are you, in your own infinitesimally small amount of knowledge, to question an omniscient, omnipotent being?

You do know that much of human suffering is not caused by humans? Earthquakes, viruses and all that stuff. Oh, yeah, death, too, of course. But I wouldn't be very mad at god because of that. I also wouldn't respect him very much. I'm pretty blind to the suffering of animals or sometimes even other humans (I was much more shocked when I heard about the death of my grandpa than when I heard about the earthquake in Haiti). So I can understand his perspective. But god doesn't exist anyway, so this point is pretty moot.

Also: omniscient and omnipotent? Does not compute.

But god doesn't exist anyway, so this point is pretty moot.

Well then, it is solved! And to think, we've been wondering all these years!

I hope your open-mindedness and skepticism (forgive me if I'm wrong, but I believe science is one of the biggest champions of this quality), translates well into your other pursuits for knowledge.

So you can’t think there is high probability god doesn’t exist and still be open-minded and a skeptic? Perfect 50:50 agnostics as the only bearers of skepticism and open-mindedness? :)

> If you believe in free will, God couldn't be causing any of the suffering to happen. People have been given the complete choice to do whatever they please, and this world is a product of that. This world's suffering is our own.

Free will is an elegant answer, if we accept it... But what about natural disasters?

>Allowing something to happen != causing

No, but Jehova seems to have gone a lot farther than that in the OT. Killing innocent children -- infants even -- for being first-born comes to mind...

> Secondly, who are you, in your own infinitesimally small amount of knowledge, to question an omniscient, omnipotent being?

Someone who believes that certain things are intrinsically wrong, regardless of whether the perpetrator is God.

Free will is an elegant answer, if we accept it... But what about natural disasters?

Well, if you are going to assume the existence of God (Jehovah - the Biblical deity) to make your argument, then the simple answer is that yes, we are responsible for our own suffering, starting with Genesis 3. A perfect world would have no suffering.

No, but Jehova seems to have gone a lot farther than that in the OT. Killing innocent children -- infants even -- for being first-born comes to mind...

Ok, but yet again in your argument, you are assuming the existence of God (who is both all-knowing and all-powerful) and then questioning His ways. Morality is relative to the information one knows. You, not being an omniscient deity, do not have all the information available to make a perfect judgment.

I never understand arguments where people temporarily accept the existence of an all-knowing God, question His divine motives (in their limited capacity), and then conclude that he simply could not exist. Even basic logic would tell you "God Exists" does not lead to "Therefore, God does not exist." in the same argument.

> Even basic logic would tell you "God Exists" does not lead to "Therefore, God does not exist." in the same argument.

Incorrect. A common form argument is: suppose a leads to not a, therefore a can't be true or suppose a leads to contradiction, therefore a can't be true. Arguments of this form have been made on this topic based on morality (counter arguments exist: cf. Descartes).

But I'm not trying to do so, anyway.

My argument was solely that the God of the Bible is immoral. As the quote goes: "even if a God as described in the Bible does exist, he is not fit for worship due to his low moral standards." There are misotheists who believe Jehova is evil.

> Morality is relative to the information one knows. You, not being an omniscient deity, do not have all the information available to make a perfect judgement.

I would disagree. I believe that moral absolutes exist and that certain things are intrinsically wrong. I don't need to be omniscient to know that infanticide is wrong. Jehova commits Crimes Against Humanity and Acts of Genocide at several points in the OT.

I would disagree. I believe that moral absolutes exist and that certain things are intrinsically wrong.

If you really believe that moral absolutes exist, then you must conclude that there exists some infinite being capable of being the foundation for that moral absolutism. Here's why...

Absolute morals (a perfect morality) can only be established by infinite knowledge... A perfect morality is knowing all information at once, weighing all that information, and then making the perfect decision.

We as humans are morally relative because we don't know all available information and knowledge. It's why a tribe on some island genuinely believes infanticide is acceptable (they genuinely believe the child is possessed), while you do not (you would know the child has a neurological disorder).

As I demonstrated by a simple human example, more information and knowledge = better moral decisions. Thus, an all knowing being, God, is the foundation for an absolute (and perfect) set of morals.

Let me preface my answer with asking you a question. You see, you seem to have very similar beliefs to those I did a few years ago. My beliefs started changing once I asked myself the question: suppose Satan was all powerful and God/Christ was weak; Satan will reward those who will murder, rape, and torture but sentence those who try to act morally to eternal torture (Hell)... Would you still act morally or would you embrace debauchery? Which would be `right?'

If you are willing to act the way Satan wishes for you to, then the reason you act the way you do now is just selfishness. If you are not, you must be prepared to question the morality of God and to reject immoral actions. I came to the conclusion that the person I was required I reject `Satan' and you can see where things went from there.

>If you really believe that moral absolutes exist, then you must conclude that there exists some infinite being capable of being the foundation for that moral absolutism. Here's why...

It is my opinion that your comment does not proceed to demonstrate this. I will return to this later.

> A perfect morality is knowing all information at once, weighing all that information, and then making the perfect decision.

So an omniscient murder is a good person?

> We as humans are morally relative because we don't know all available information and knowledge. It's why a tribe on some island genuinely believes infanticide is acceptable (they genuinely believe the child is possessed), while you do not (you would know the child has a neurological disorder).

What the tribe does is wrong. The fact that they are doing it out of ignorance makes it understandable but it doesn't make it right.

It's possible that I, like the tribe, am wrong.

But lets reflect on what you've argued. At the beginning you stated:

>If you really believe that moral absolutes exist, then you must conclude that there exists some infinite being capable of being the foundation for that moral absolutism.

You haven't demonstrated this. The only thing you've really made an argument for is that only an omniscient being can know with certainty what is right or wrong. I don't agree, but am willing to grant it temporarily. You still haven't shown that morality can't exist without an omniscient being, or that an omniscient being is necessarily moral.

As Humans we must do the best we can.

Are you willing to argue, then, that infanticide is acceptable? Think about what (supposedly) happened for a minute: God killed thousands, perhaps million, of children. Some wouldn't have been able to speak. Most wouldn't be of an age where they could in anyway be held responsible for their civilisations crimes (slavery) by any sane morality (Yes, I know God likes to go and punish ``even until the third generation.'' I happen to disagree.).

If you are willing to accept this, are you willing to accept Herod's slaughter of the innocents? They're are many similarities between God's actions and Herod's.

Regardless, the question is whether you are willing to justify God's actions. Please answer: is the mass slaughter of children to punish their parents justifiable to you?

The reason I act the way I do now is out of love and obedience, not selfishness. Besides, that hypothetical scenario is not reality, and we have enough to debate given the present reality.

What the tribe does is wrong. The fact that they are doing it out of ignorance makes it understandable but it doesn't make it right.

Ok right, but you still won't acknowledge the fact that from a moral perspective, their conscience is entirely clear. Put on their glasses for a moment. Why? As you just stated, their own ignorance aka a lack of knowledge is the reason why. I need to re-emphasize that their moral conscience is clear. It's all relative to humans, who are clearly reliant on more knowledge to make better moral decisions.

Nevertheless, I agree (and concede to you) that moral absolutes don't prove the existence of God. However, thousands of simple human examples show that more information and more knowledge should allow us to make better moral decisions. By should, I mean more knowledge doesn't necessarily stop us from cutting up and suctioning children in the third trimester from their mother's womb (for example).

Regardless, the loaded question you asked me would be properly re-factored as a moral dilemma, one that both of us could never answer without bickering for years:

Is the mass slaughter of a single generation of children to punish their parents justifiable... in light of... The 400 years of brutal slavery and genocide inflicted on an entire race of God's chosen people?

Two moral crimes, good sir, now who's to be the judge? Certainly not I, I know not enough.

> 400 years of brutal slavery and genocide inflicted on an entire race of God's chosen people?

You make it sound like the `God's chosen people' part is relevant to the moral discussion. If the Egyptians had been the slaves and Israelites the slave holders, would that change things?

What about if it was the Americans and their black slaves, a couple hundred year ago?

Would infanticide be justified then?

I don't even see how the Egyptians moral crimes are relevant. The party that is primarily punished is the only innocent one: children.

That's before we even consider whether the death sentence is ever justifiable.

> Two moral crimes, good sir, now who's to be the judge?

As the old adage goes, two wrongs, good sir, don't make a right.

tldr: fiction. I closed the tab when he started talking about dinosaurs not having respect for other life.

> tldr: fiction

The title says "Talking to god". You didn't seriously expect...?

Perhaps he expected a scientific study of what happens in people's brains when they think they are talking to God, or some statistics relating the things people think God has told them with their own prior beliefs, or something of the kind.

Perhaps he expected an account of how someone met with someone else they admired/feared so much that it was like talking to God.

Perhaps he skimmed the title too quickly, and thought it said "Talking to Dog". Around the dino part, he realized that the dog shouldn't be talking, and rejected the article.

Tell that to the billions of religious people. I don't even know what I expected. Maybe something real, seeing as it was so high on HN.

Just flag it, I did. That's what flagging's there for.

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