i was just gonna leave this post un-posted until I cleared my browsing history and lost it forever, but caprefeather asked about it so, this is what I had going on:
saintly atheists, saving people from religion
anyway ima nitpick ur post capefeather because I feel it omits a few important points. I actually mainly agree with your post in a broader sense, but I actually would make the same point in a much ruder way, cause I disagree with religion just as I disagree with much of modern philosophy.
Counter-arguing a list by picking out the least meaningful, nitpicking detail (and even calling it the most important) is a trend that I see depressingly often from a wide variety of people.
In this spirit then...
The fact remains, the Bible makes several claims along the lines of God being able to do anything, showing that the concept of omnipotence existed back then. Maybe someone really smart for the time, like a Greek philosopher, saw problems with the notion of a completely unrestricted being, and thus perhaps did not have a word for it. But all that's completely beside the point, anyway, because the post you replied to was discussing the notion of omnipotence as used by modern philosophers of religion. There's this entire categorization concerning logical possibility versus causal possibility versus physical possibility.
See this whole paragraph is very confused, imo. What does it mean to be 'able to do anything'? This may seem to be a question about the logical possibility of a thing. I do not know any reason to suppose that anyone, at any point, that had a word for omnipotence or not, understood 'essentially' or universally what it 'truly' means to be omnipotent. Rather, 'omnipotence' requires some definition and description that has always been up for debate. As a metaphysical attribute of a supposed thing, its philosophical description is a pretty masturbatory task imo, and I think from what I've seen in your posts, you would agree that it is pretty masturbatory to debate the logical possibility of the omnipotence of something when no one has any idea what omnipotence is. It seems obvious, then, that in so far as 'omnipotence' has meaning primarily in relation to discourses about the possibility of God, it is 'surely' the case that God is omnipotent.
Several years ago, I had an interesting discussion with an evangelical Christian on the ethics of justification by faith. I promise you this will be relevant eventually.
I argued that it is unfair for God to restrict entry to Heaven to Christians alone. After all, 99% of native-born Ecuadorans are Christian, but less than 1% of native born Saudis are same. It follows that the chance of any native-born Ecuadorian of becoming Christian is 99%, and that of any native born Saudi, 1%.
I do not see how this follows. This is an unresearched proposition couched in terrible logic. It is in no way the case that, "Because presently 99% of ppl born in x are y attribute, that future people born in x have 99% chance of being y attribute."
So if God judges people by their religion, then within 1% He's basically just decided it's free entry for Ecuadorians, but people born in Saudi Arabia can go to hell (literally).
No, because heaven may not admit every single person who is called a Christian according to a wikipedia-esque census of demographics, this is the stupid presumption that the dumb theist friend didnt notice or something idk. Cmon, is this critique that hard? the 'it follows that' cannot be the case!!!
My Christian friend argued that is not so: that there is a great difference between 0% of Saudis and 1% of Saudis. I answered that no, there was a 1% difference. But he said this 1% proves that the Saudis had free will: that even though all the cards were stacked against them, a few rare Saudis could still choose Christianity.
It is unfortunate for one to have dumb friends or to be dumb oneself (referring to the atheist in quotation), since there is actually a great difference AND a 1% difference between 0% and 1%, these descriptions are both true, especially in the context of a percentage as population statistic. 99/100 people in one place go to heaven, but 1/100 in another. One significant difference is that in many iterations a 0/100 'chance' will never allow even a single Saudi person in heaven, but it is probable that on a 1/100 chance many Saudis will eventually go to heaven. What is not true is that any of these numbers could prove that a given person or group of ppl possesses free will. which leads us to the next thing, which we at least agree on:
But what does it mean to have free will, if external circumstances can make 99% of people with free will decide one way in Ecuador, and the opposite way in Saudi Arabia?
Yeah free will is meaningless, congratulations atheist for telling us this, even though the logic was shit the conclusion is at least looking right.
And as mattj's naivette reminded me: it is as 'random' to believe in secular liberalism and its many variants as it is to believe in christianity, which is why I find it especially offensive when people only attribute their analysis to a critique of christianity, because neo-liberalism wears all the guises of christianity without the God, and that was also part of colonialism, genocide etc. Nor can we ignore science's own role in slavery, the holocaust, nuclear war. I find arguments that posit christianity as a significant cause of imperialism and slavery are quite incomplete without an acknowledgement of the intimate historical connection between science and faith.
Further, the historical actions attributed to Christians in no way relate to the validity of various theisms, which is why I did not like any of the posts related to such discussions, as such posts are logically off-topic. Nor were such discussions related to anything more interesting, ie more urgent, such as the neo-liberal political climate of america, in which an organized religion's conscious is deemed a more central legal right than the right to life of an individual body and corporations have more freedom of expression and access to institutional support than living bodies do.
It is simply not the case that causality can be attributed to nominal cultures, neither is the body of thought given the name "Christianity' homogenous. That grossly misunderstands the particularity of context, which is the foundational myth of universalizing historical analysis.
keep in mind that I wrote a lot of this in not a state of sobreity and also Im not sure whats on-topic for this thread anymore, so i kinda rescind those bits