Go to any of the Canadian Reddit forums for example that allow discussion and man, it's fuck the government, fuck immigrants, who do you think controls everything, etc... it's not what it was like 5 years ago.
Meanwhile on here it's like hello KIA2, I'd like to have a discussion on... Banned. DOM didn't like your haircut.
Well if you havent read Blood Meridian you probably should. The antagonist of the book literally believes almost exactly what you do lol.
I am curious at this point...how do you live your life? Are you taking steps to be a warlord or do you just work a 9 to 5 and go home to an empty house? It's one thing to believe something, but I feel that it's a big tell if you aren't actually living as if what you believe is true. My suspicion is that you belive these things, but you aren't going around taking women by force, murdering your enemies, and enslaving children. The biggest give away is that you said you personally wouldn't do such things. Should that be the case I'd argue that you, existing in a moral universe, feel drawn to morality. Just as you are drawn to the earth when you jump. There's a little more freedom with morality as compared to gravity, but your existence still revolves around it regardless of how you feel about it.
I'm both horrified and fascinated by you. Your arguments are exactly the same ones I use against atheists who claim to believe in morality in a godless world. In fact, your worldview is precisely why I began studying religions (our backgrounds sound very similar, though i certainly disagree with your assessment of the Quran). Lest I sound like I'm judging you, I just want to be very clear that while I oppose you wholeheartedly, I have a lot of respect for your consistency and your willingness to discuss your ideas.
A final question...if you could live in a world where Christianity was true, would you want to? Obviously, our feelings don't determine truth, but I feel like this answer would better help my discussion with you.
Your Blood Meridian looks like a good suggestion. I'll probably actually read this, thanks.
How do you propose I live like a warlord? I'm not stupid, as you've pointed out. You haven't "got me" just because I'm not living the way I want to live. Imagine you asked a Lion who was caged at the zoo why he wasn't living like a Lion in wild and then you accused that Lion of not walking the talk. Of course he isn't living like a wild Lion because he's in a cage in a zoo not out in the wild. I am forced to adapt to my circumstances and these circumstances do not allow me to live like a warlord. Only one man has lived exactly like Genghis Khan in the history of humanity, so to suggest I can just go out and become more Genghis Khan than Genghis Khan himself is absurd and it is also absurd to then suggest I am somehow inconsistent in my overall being ("but I feel that it's a big tell if you aren't actually living as if what you believe is true") simply because I am not living that way when it doesn't make sense to live that way given the current situation I find myself in.
Obviously, much of what I've spoken too is idealistic not realistic. I've said as much: " An ideal civilization for me would..."
Keep in mind that what I say I am fine with isn't necessarily what I would do myself. You are correct in that assertion. I do not believe I must solidify a set of morals for myself that everyone else must also follow. Each person is different. One man may in fact go around and enslave children, while another man wouldn't. I don't have to take a position that because I wouldn't do it that all other men should also not do it and it's wrong for them to do it simply because I don't want them to do it because I would never do it myself. I just don't subscribe to these sorts of moral restrictions on the actions I may or may not take. It's all circumstantial but I don't believe any action I did take would be evil but rather would be good because I know myself and I know I am a good person. Though, my actions may in fact significantly differ from what others think is good or evil.
If I had total freedom to be Genghis Khan, I wouldn't just murder people for sport and I wouldn't treat women with 0 humanity. Do you think Genghis Khan was also devoid of any emotion and total evil psychopath? Hardly. That has never been the case of our reality since the dawn of time.
Since your seem fascinated by how am I, let me say that I guarantee if I ran society, the outcome for you and your people would be better than it is now and you would like a society run by me more than you like the current society if you had an open mind to it and weren't stuck on keeping to how things were before I took over. You can gauge whether something is good or bad based on the outcome. You can measure the results. Right now in society, we have results. You can measure things like happiness, loneliness, quality of life, economic prosperity, freedom, feelings of accomplishment, feelings of being needed, love, passion, alienation, breakups, tiredness, frustration and everything that one measures of a society and its people that is tangible. If there are objectively good things, I believe that at the core we both would agree on what those things are. Not a value like good means women have equality to men, that's not what I mean but rather good in how people feel about the lives they're living at the core. A value like the aforementioned is supposed to exist to then provide value to people because without it things are supposed to be worse than with it and this measure of better or worse has nothing to do with the value in itself but how such a value impacts everyone else in the society. I would propose that a society run the way I wanted to run things would be better for you and I than the current society or even a society run by you. Lastly, I could make my society adhere exactly to Christianity also if I wanted to. That's the beauty of Christianity and the ugly of it.
Answering your last question is actually more difficult than you think because how would I know for certain Christianity was in fact true? The answer to that changes absolutely everything. What about Christianity is in fact true that isn't already true now? Presuming it's all true then nothing changes. It isn't the truth of Christianity that matters to me but the result of Christianity. I would change nothing about the way I am living now regardless of the truth of Christianity. It isn't truth that concerns me but results. If one wants me to live "like a Christian" in the way in which you or another Christian defines it then provide for me value to live that way. If not living like a Christian provides more value to me than living like a Christian why would I live like a Christian? What am I sacrifice for? To go to heaven? I don't care. You say I care. Make me care. Words will never convince me of anything. The only thing that will convince me is tangible results and/or feelings. The thing about Christianity is that many of its adherents are people I would never want to be like. I don't like the way they act nor do I enjoy their company. Want me to be Christian then show me that Christians are people that I do like and want to act like. They aren't and until then I wouldn't want to live in such a Christian society.
Keep in mind that your idea of a Christian has differed in different periods of time. The Holy Roman Empire and the Knights Templar were much different Christians than modern evangelicals.
At the end of the day, I do not care about the lore of any worldview. Flat Earth, Christianity, Islam, Greek Gods/Goddesses, Evil Jews, this that or the other thing. I only care about how the values/beliefs of these things impact me directly in a tangible and concrete manner. Christianity can be useful if the words of the religion have strength enough to change people in a manner that would benefit me but the way in which Christianity often changes modern people is in a manner I happen to dislike not like. I find the men in Christianity and Christians overall to be a little too weak/soft for me and I find the women to be too unattractive to me (in personality not looks). In this sense, I don't believe Christianity holds any value for me because I wouldn't want to be Christian based on what I've observed of Christians nor do I want other people to be Christian based on what I've observed the people who are Christians in being.
I definitely believe in God though but I don't believe that means going to church and living my life the way another human wants me to. I am already living exactly how God wants me to live. I am me, the way God intended and I don't need to change me at all. My purpose is to serve God's will and that is what I am doing by living like me. If God wanted me to be a warlord, then I'd be one. Do I enjoy my life now? Not particularly but most people in life have never liked their life because my life isn't my own. I am living out the life God chose for me. I have no real say in how I am to live. The life I want is unattainable so I just live until I die and in that sense my life is already over so I'm just playing the game in the credits now. I can hypothesize how things could be better, discuss things, fantasize, imagine, care and not care about happenings to maybe hope or despair but I can't truly change anything for the better for me because anything I want is entirely unattainable even if I fully embraced your Christianity, it still wouldn't provide for me what I wanted, it would just be another iteration of some form of coping while I wait until I die.
If you want me to accept different views than my own or different ways of life than my own, the formula is simple. Provide something tangible to me in exchange for me changing my beliefs and/or way of life. That is all.
I don't think I can possibly provide you a response to everything you said, but I want you to know I read it and I'll certainly spend some time pondering it. I don't want you to think I'm ignoring anything or trying to side step it. You made several points that we could probably discuss for hours.
That said, one thing I would like to ask you is if you believe in free will. Your belief that God wants you to be exactly who you are without ever changing makes me believe you don't. I may have misinterpreted, so I'd appreciate your clarification.
I'd also ask how you know you are a good person, especially if I assumed correctly in you not believing in free will. If being the you that only you can be makes you a good person, how would you rate Mao, Stalin, or Hitler? Surely they were just being the people God intended them to be. Obviously, like Genghis Khan they aren't completely devoid of humanity, but telling me that they are good people is going to be a hard sell. At best, I can see where they were coming from, but nothing can excuse their actions.
At this point, you probably would make a better leader than what we have. The bar is exceptionally low. In the end I believe you would be just as bad, or possibly worse, because your mindset is exactly the same as theirs: power is supreme and the ends justify the means. One thing I'll concede, though, is that you'd probably be a lot more effective as I'd doubt you'd waste any time or effort in pretending to be anything you aren't for the sake of political correctness...and you are certainly more intelligent. And that I say to your credit.
This is a complicated question. One that many smart people still haven't fully solved. Do I believe we have complete autonomy outside of God such that we can act in a manner God does not want us to or doesn't already know we will do? No, I do not. When it comes to God, we do not have free will. We cannot do something unexpected from God's point of view. God already knows exactly what we will do before we do it and he knows exactly how the story of humanity will unfold before it does.
Do we have free will in relation to God? No.
Do we have free will in relation to us? Yes. From our perspective we have choice but only because we aren't God so we don't know what we're going to do before we decide to do it and therefore we believe we have choice; however, this choice is ultimately an illusion from the perspective of God. We evaluate the actions we're going to take by envisioning multiple different actions and then decide on one. We have free will in the sense that we could pick absolutely any option and nothing is stopping us from doing so but God already knows exactly what we're going to pick before we've picked it and God knows the formula to change reality such that we would pick something different if that is what God wanted.
I think many people have the wrong idea about God. God isn't testing you to see if you will be good or evil. Imagine you were an all powerful God that knows everything. Omnipotent. Supreme. Etc... What's the one thing that you would truly be concerned with? It wouldn't be whether some humans you created were good or evil. Good and evil are trivial concepts to you that don't matter. What does matter is NOT KNOWING. The one thing God doesn't have is the ability to not know. God created humanity to try to not know. He gave us "free will" in hopes of us doing something he didn't know we would do. He's not trying to get us to be good or evil, he's trying to get us to surprise him but we can't. God still loves his creations but unfortunately, we are actually incapable of fulfilling our purpose in relation to God. God keeps the world going and changes the parameters all the time in hopes of being surprised though he gave up that hope long ago and now entertains himself with repetitive stories he already has seen a trillion times before. The evil person redeems himself to be good is a redemption story God has done infinite number of times or the good person who is corrupted. We believe we have choice in the matter but we were always going to be that part of the story if that is what we were destined to be.
You may say something like well if you believe that why don't you just go full evil and start killing everyone for sport and raping whomever you want? Why don't I indeed. I'm not doing it. Why aren't I? Shouldn't I? But I don't. Interesting... isn't it. Because I wasn't meant to or I would be.
The concepts of heaven and hell do exist though which is basically God just placing "evil" people/souls with other "evil" people/souls because he knows these evil aligned people are better suited to be with other people like them and "good" aligned people/souls are better suited to be with people like them. God already knows where you're going before you do and when you get there it will be where you were meant to be.
I do believe I am good aligned but maybe I'm wrong. I'm not God so I can't say for certain. Just based on my observation and evaluation of people, that's where I believe I am. From what I know of Mao, Stalin and Hitler? Mao = Evil, Stalin = Unsure, Hitler = Good. But my answer is biased and truthfully, we really don't know enough to pass judgement because what we know about these people is pretty warped given their significance. There's a reason the bible says not to pass judgement and to leave that for God because most people are probably going to get things wrong but we can make a good guess anyhow. Mao was objectively making his people's lives worst and killed a lot of good people to achieve his aims which were not good aims from the perspective of enhancing the people he represented. Stalin to me seems like he may have had good intentions and managed as best he could given the situation he was in. I can't say for certain he was evil. Many of the evil things attributed to Stalin are actually pet projects of other powerful men within the USSR regime not necessarily Stalin himself and I think people overexaggerate his power over the entire USSR, hence why Stalin was such a paranoid man also. Hitler clearly was trying to do what was best for his people and came across resistance from not-so-good of people. Did he make all the best decisions? No, but he wasn't meant to either. Of course everyone's understand of Mao, Stalin and Hitler is pretty biased. You might be better off asking me about less significant and controversial figures that each have billions of pages of writing on them.
Good and evil is another really complicated subject. It is not easily understood. Good and evil exists within everything. The same action can be both good and evil depending on circumstance, which is what makes good and evil so complicated. If I had to reduce good and evil down to anything, I think good people promote equity and bad people promote inequity. I don't mean a modern leftist take on equity either. Equity just means getting what you deserve (fairness). Much of what people say equity today is actually inequity. That is one aspect, furthermore I think good people understand and accept their nature and promote values/beliefs that are inline with their nature while evil people either don't know their nature or accept their nature so they promote values/beliefs that are in conflict with their nature. At a high-level, if you were a vacuum cleaner then an evil vacuum cleaner would be one that blows dust everywhere and then demands to be paid half your income. A good vacuum cleaner would be one that sucks up dust everywhere and then demands to be paid a price you both agree to be fair given the supply/demand for the work of a vacuum cleaner.
In my opinion it is wrong to suggest power corrupts but rather it's just that the people currently with power are corrupt. If power corrupts then God is the most corrupt force in existence. Those who wield power can be good or evil, like all things. It's just currently evil wields more power than good which doesn't always have to be the case. I think historically, this has changes from time-to-time from era-to-era. It is true to say that good people in power won't last forever even if those good people never become corrupted themselves, they eventually die and things change.
Very well written and very interesting perspective. You've certainly given me a lot to think about.