Here we see something that does not make any sense at all, even if one trust that what is said is valid. But the devoted religious person will anyway accept that what is said is valuable despite not making any sense.

 

Hosea 9:7King James Version (KJV)

The days of visitation are come, the days of recompence are come; Israel shall know it: the prophet is a fool, the spiritual man is mad, for the multitude of thine iniquity, and the great hatred.

King James Version (KJV)

 

This does not make any sense at all, even if one trust that what is said is valid. But the religious person will accept that what is said is valuable, despite this being totally loopy. 

At a pinch we could interpret that god has instantly decreed at the end of time, that you — effing morons — had enough fun, wars and games —  and the musical chair tune stops now.

 

The loosers shall be announced by visitation, Israel will be declared the winner, the prophets are idiots, the spiritual man is mad and those who are great shall be hated... Why? Oh WHY?... This seems to be a unilateral godly decision that makes absolutely no sense. It's actually farcical. That some people trust this shit is beyond belief, but to do so, they declare it a mystery that should not be investigated — because of course a full investigative disclosure would reveal the deception, like that of a card trick, on Penn and Teller...

But the trick is not in what is said which is silly, but in the style of old dusty gravitas of the phrase as if it meant something beyond imaginings, and in fact is a lot of crap. It even sounds a lot more mysterious in Latin, which was used till the 20th century to bamboozle the ordinary folks in trusting these arcane voodoo values and the theatre of religious traditions. 

Leonardo di Vinci expressed his art as "cosa mentale" which was "a spiritual thing". No wonder he was always avoiding the full daylight in regard to his tortuous relationship with the Church. "His spiritual thing" was his own investigative mind rather than the deception of the Church, which to say the least was completely mad and full of its own importance, torture racks and conquistadors. 

So we could try to interpret Hoesa, but nothing can make proper sense, unless one is completely intellectually deficient and accept it as a meaningful statement, without understanding. Contradictions galore. Some believers will nonetheless accept it as a godly announcement. Thus, where is the truth? Where is the sense of this nonsense in regard to our place under the sun?

Benjamin Myers tells us where it is or not:

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Nick Trakakis is worried that religious faith gets in the way of a philosopher's search for truth. But how do we know that truth is desirable? Why do we assume that truth is better than falsehood? These are the questions that Nietzsche raised in Beyond Good and Evil (1886). He pointed out that the whole philosophical tradition has been founded on a premise of religious trust. Philosophers can't demonstrate that truth is better than falsehood. They accept this on trust in order to get the reasoning process started. They are willing to assume that truth is a good thing. But Nietzsche slyly asks, "Why not rather untruth?"

Why not? And, to return to Augustine's example, why not encourage children to question who their parents really are? The simplest answer would be that nobody wants to live in a world like that. It would obliterate society; we would never get anywhere. In a similar way, it is clear that Nick does not want to live in a world where untruth is better than truth. But if that is the case, his reasoning as a philosopher will have to take certain things on trust.

That is not the same as having religious faith. But it shows that faith - adopting an attitude of basic trust - is the friend, and not the enemy, of philosophy. As the fourth-century preacher Gregory of Nazianzus put it, "Faith is what gives fullness to our reasoning."

Benjamin Myers is lecturer in systematic theology at Charles Sturt University's School of Theology. He is author of Christ the Stranger: The Theology of Rowan Williams and Salvation in My Pocket: Fragments of Faith and Theology. He writes at the popular blog Faith and Theology.

read more: http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2015/12/09/4368935.htm

 

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Gus is unimpressed: 

Balls!!!! What Myers writes is elegant balderdash in the same insane vacuous vein as Hosea's. 

Belief is not seen as the enemy of anything. Belief is seen as a deliberate hindrance in the search of our proper belonging to this planet, in relative truth or otherwise. 

Inventing god and the arcane does not help a tit in formulating an understanding of whom we are. It only creates an illusion of whom we wrongly glorify ourselves to be. 

The truth in this respect can be as desirable as pain, though for most people, once the earthly relativity of truth is understood, we can be much better for it — and live without the weight of sin, the burden of hypocritical godly invention nor the illusion of false eternal life — a hope which is enticingly deceptive and which leads us to do untold damage on humanity in the name of god, allah or whomever we have imagined.

The best elegant reasoning, including this religious reasoning, is crap if the original information or premise is faulty — which in religious construct, invariably is — in regard to evolutionary evidence. 

If this does not make sense to you, Benjamin, then you are nothing more than a grand-titled dissector of old crap, sadly convinced that the snake-oil you sell is holy. If you are happy with your chosen position, that is your privilege, but don't try to push it as the universal handle on reality. 

Truth or untruth? Sciences is much closer to the truth than religious gobbledegook, even if there is no apparent morality in sciences. Trakakis is on the money.

Religions assume that we should submit to various old fairy tales under the creative title of "systematic theology", or in Benjamin's case, bible-blabology (a Gus academic word for blah blah blah), rather than seek answers that are related to our animal life evolved into a stylistic context in which our understandings of nurture and nature can be symbolised and understood. 

We definitely need to free ourselves from a-priori reasoning, in which the godly premise is central, that can be proven wrong by comparative evidence between science and silly religious genesis. The acceptance of symbols is quite powerful, but no symbol is representative of truth without a strong sense of observation.

Investigation tells us we developed in a small corner of an unfathomable universe with an estimated history and a universe that has various energy levels, some stable like our planet with a limited life-span, itself due to the sun own existence and limited activity, and some unstable energy levels. 

Our morality is only a progressive symbolic invention of social interactions in which we choose to live better through acceptance of evolved stylistic limits, though some people choose crap and others choose religious values with the promise of an after-life attached. Some chose both crap and religious values and turn into fanatics or dangerous extremists. 

This means than those with religious values are no better than the others, and sometimes dangerous crap happens when the rejection of some activity under the code of religiousness become an irresistible temptation to do harm in the name of god.

It is time to understand that religion and philosophy do not mix, because they live on different planets. Philosophy is adaptable to our animalistic origins, religion is not.

Religion is wrong — and most religious people guess that much, but they still hang on like grim death for a place in paradise delusion.

Bigotry is not to think that there is no god but to think "our" god is the only one to have.

Death is not a construct of an original sin. Individual death is part of evolved nature on a circumstantially energised planet. Simple.