More rudeypants.
Kris was about to finish college, and had one last assignment to do. However, he hated his professor (a no-account religious philosopher with a shitty academic record, I later discovered). So what did he do with his assignment?
Answer: Give it the Billingsgate treatment.
According to him, the professor read it, declined to mark it and threw it out. A huge compliment to my writing.
***
"There is a god who loves humankind"
Can anyone have knowledge of statements like the one you have chosen? Justify your answer. If so, how? If not, why not?
(In order to answer the assigned questions you will need to outline your theory of knowledge, at least implicitly.)
(Make sure what you deal with the possibility of knowledge with regard to the set of claims that you have chosen. you do not have to prove that you actually know the claim to be true or false.)
Put arguments into your own words, use quotes sparingly.
600-800 words
***
Masturbating about the nature of knowledge holds no interest here. Psychology is such a scarred, flawed, incorrect process that there seems little point in even saying "I know this to be true". The nature of knowledge becomes as ruptured as the hymen of a 12-year-old Hindu bride when we start to consider all the heuristics, biases, and reasoning errors that the human mind commits willingly and fulsomely every single day it has the unfortunate pleasure of drawing breath.
Knowledge in itself is thus a standard to be aspired to rather than achieved. Objectivity is a shining glass tower which is itself behind bullet-proof glass. The science that we have made for ourselves lets us develop crude paper approximations of that tower, forms which support the super-structure of knowledge around and above it, but not much more. Nevertheless, our progress marches on and even in paper it is a beautiful structure to behold.
Faith has no place in the modern world. Everything that we know is derived, an continuous, endless series of little inductive waltzes. Faith is a product of the ignorant mind which blindly steps off into the unknown, justifying itself every step of the way. Ignoring reason, ignoring intuition, it over-rides, co-opts and corrupts, it ass-pounds, pillages and rips its way through the social fabric of the unworthy.
The criminal history of any Church and its religious leaders is always a good example of how the idea of a loving God is a pleasant idea which is inevitably destroyed by anyone who might have the unmitigated brain-haemorrhaging stupidity to believe in it. Religion, the ultimate moral absolute, tears through cultures and ideas alike. It has the criteria which science is terrified of - unfalsifiability. Why is science terrified of this? Because it means that a theory can never, ever be wrong. Psychoanalysis suffers from this particular affliction. It makes predictions so vague, its links between the mind and behaviour are so tenuous and vague that it can always come up with an explanation for an action which makes sense. When it does so, scientist psychologists are tempted to call it a ?religion?. Why? Because it has become an article of faith, and no constructive use to any bugger.
The idea of God as love is a particularly disgusting 20th century affliction. The idea of all-pervasive happy times could only have evolved after the mass consumer revolution. Tell an Aztec slave, Egyptian servant or a Samurai warrior that the only God (and none of them believe in only one) means love, happiness, hugs and the occasional blowjob from sanctified lips, and they'd laugh in your face and bean you with the nearest lump of basalt. Our senescence, our comfort, our "cakes and ale", have become our justifying force. People seek 'happiness' - isn't that the latest self-help mantra? Are you "happy"? Leave your job/wife/husband/testicles/gender if you aren't. Make yourself happy...
...Make yourself nothing. Suffering is every much a part of life as any of these feelings are. Beanie Babies and the double-stim vibrator have made us forget that we are in fact animals and the will to survive justifies itself. Less animate beings than humans exist entirely separate to theology, and exist for their own sake. Naturally, that stupid mouldy growth on the top of your head that you call a neocortex will not let you do otherwise.
Any discussion about the nature of God and truth is unending, and irreconcilable. Believers begin with, prima facie, God exists. Heretics begin with, prima facie, God must prove himself. Any appeal to the idea of God precludes argument. God encompasses every idea, every possibility, every tangible thread of existence, are all encompassed by our deity. Why should we argue about this? This means that God is either everything or nothing.
When we reach this point, the argument diverges, making it impossible to continue. This is what makes nihilism so convenient, because everything is nothing. God therefore becomes a series of social rituals, each similarly antiquated and pointless.
To this end, let me conclude:
God is not a benevolent Father Christmas without a visible face who lives in the heavens. God is nothing more than a miserable, evil, cowardly method of argument, a confluence of three letters which has caused more confusion, degradation and suffering than any of the others in any format.
God voids his all-mighty bowels directly into the mouth of the very idea of humanity. Yes, God is metaphysical scat porn. So, I hope when you wake up tomorrow morning you can't taste the sweet nutty tang of the fresh turds he dropped in your mouth while you were dreaming of ass-fucking your secretary.
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