oooooooohhhhhhh yeah. i think. it’s test time. bitch.
sometimes you just need to hear certain words to make you feel better. *hint hint*
although the person this hint is directed to probably won’t read this.
i want to help at the soup kitchen but i don’t really want to go to branch. that fellowship makes me so indifferent. it seems like there’s some kind of pretention there, although everyone remains friendly. i’m trying to decide for myself whether i really want to start going to church. i still have problems with the logic of religion. perhaps all these philosophy courses will help. i’ve pretty much decided that there has to be some higher entity, though. now i just have to find out what he’s like. even if i end up as a christian i don’t want it to become political. and i don’t think that higher entity would either. i could write an argument for that too. yay 24.00 problems of philosophy.
1. God is OOG, that is omnipresent, omnipotent, and wholly good. (premise)
2. Conflict and hate due to the politics of religion is bad. (premise)
3. Politics naturally creates conflict and hate. (premise)
4. Therefore, God wouldn’t like the politics of religion. (follows from 1, 2, 3)
That argument looks sound to me. sorry. i think someone can object to (2) or (3), though, and i’d like to hear those arguments.
indeed, i’ve only met a few people without that sort of pretention, the people that aren’t so caught up that they aren’t willing to see what would happen if they were wrong about what they believed. those are the people that could really show me that religion is good, and who may be the ones who could convert me, by showing that their beliefs hold up even when subjected to a whole host of objections. i’d like to believe, especially if it’s logically sound, but those pretentious people seem to help show me that some of the religious claims inconsistent. REMEMBER, if you have a religion, i doubt you have the role of the highest being(s) in it, so you probably aren’t speaking for him/her/it/them. Some examples of things you probably don’t know the morality of are below.
Example 1. Abortion.
Let’s say you object to abortion on religious grounds. That’s fine for you, don’t get me wrong. But that in itself doesn’t make it wrong. For one thing, to make that claim seems pretentious, anyway, without having to make any arguments. (pretentious seems to be my word of the day.) Then, you have to argue for moral objectivism, which is pretty difficult also, although i believe in it (i’ll craft my argument for it later). Now, even assuming we have moral objectivism, who are you to interpret the will of the highest being(s)? For all you know the highest being(s) may actually LOVE abortion. They may favor you more if you constantly have all the women in the world get pregnant and abort their fetuses/babies (whatever you believe they are, human yet or not), over and over and over again. And you wouldn’t know, because your’e not one of those high beings. I don’t think many religious texts explicitly ban abortions.
The reason why most religious people don’t like abortion is because they consider it harming a person, which most religions decry, and that premise can lead to a valid argument. But the argument isn’t necessarily sound. (you’d have to show that a fetus is a person, first, which is kind of difficult, and that it is alive, which is very difficult.) A better argument against abortion is given in Don Marquis‘s essay, “An Argument that Abortion Is Wrong” (no brainer-title). Marquis teaches at the University of Kansas. They have one hell of a basketball team, too. And he has one hell of an argument.
for the record, i’m pro-life. GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO LIFE! i would never abort my fetuses. but i’ll never get to make that choice, being male and all.
life goes on, i hope (see the above line for more details).
This leads to. . .
Example 2. The death penalty.
Again, some people support, and others don’t support, the death penalty. But i don’t think you can go either way on religious grounds alone. you’d have to fill in this argument:
1. Person A killed someone.
2. Killing someone is bad.
?. ????????????????????????????
n. Therefore, we should kill person A.
or this one, depending on whose side you’re on:
1. Person A killed someone.
2. Killing someone is bad and deserves a fitting punishment and deserves prevention.
3. Killing someone is a good punishment for certain crimes, and prevents a killer from striking again, and also discourages others from killing people.
?. ????????????????????????????
n. Therefore, we should not kill person A.
I don’t think either one can become very convincing, as there’s always something to pick at. oh well, i’m not a lawyer or a killer, so i doesn’t matter to me right now. i guess i’ll think about it more if someone i know gets murdered.
and i should sleep, since i have an exam tomorrow. organic chemistry, errgh. i know my groups pretty well, though. i can see if you’re an acid or not, you dumbass organic compound! i’m seeing carbon atoms everywhere. but i’m not tired, i swear.