bert wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote: OK Google says there are [pet hospices]- so pet loving society is developing in that caring direction. It’s not developing in the direction of doing to humans what we do to pets.

Pets don't have a say; they can't do it. They have a caring caretaker. The hospices will make it more acceptable for the caretaker to let the animal suffer for a longer period of time (albeit initially in a more limited way). The hospices are mostly for the joy of the caretaker. So, more animals can look forward to a prolonged time of suffering. They'll be more like humans in that respect. Hooray. Progress.

I’m also a bit leery of the notion of a pet hospice. But there are people with a deep love for pets and they might well have worked out a reasonable context for pet “end of life”. I don’t have a criticism of hospices and yes, they are partly there for the “joy” of the family and friends. Wouldn’t put it quite that way. The death of someone is a group event, its not just the dying that it happens to.

bert wrote:

bert wrote:

On the opposite end, you argue that everyone has the right to decide “for themselves” whether to continue living or die. It’s exactly that capacity to make a decision “for oneself” that you take as definitive.

You make exactly the same decision, for yourself, only with the opposite outcome. The difference is, yours happens to be the one corresponding according to (existing) law.

No, I say Insha'Allah.

Well, given the 100% lack of evidence for the existence of that dude, I'm not building my case on that.

That doesn’t matter I am not making the same decision for myself as you allege. I’m saying that my life isn’t my own for “me” to take away. My body also has a say. And so do my friends. Spiritually that notion is captured in the notion that life is a valuable gift.

bert wrote:

Seems the Netherlands Humanist Association is punting that idea and you declared that Christians who opposed it were bad interfering people. By the way, considering this initiative was launched in 2010, it doesn’t seem to be getting much traction. Dutch society 1 Humanists Nil. So far.

Majority rules, apparently. No room for dissenting choices. Doesn't sound like an optimum society to me.

Well if the Netherlands government said that after the age of 70 one could have oneself killed if one so chose, and the state would facilitate that- then pretty soon a lot of old people would take that exit, accepting the low value the state put on the lives of the elderly. That prospect is so likely and so awful and disrespectful of the elderly that Dutch society isn’t buying the idea, apparently. Only the humanists aka atheists are. And I have suggested why its popular with atheists is because it gives top rank to the human consciousness above everything else in the universe. It isn’t because atheists are ageist, they just haven’t thought through the praxis of their bright idea.

bert wrote:

Using this model of the “talking” aspect of the person being only part of the whole (ie the conscious vs subconscious) I have to take account that the “talker” knows things the subconscious doesn’t – e.g. he hears what the doctor might say about a progressive neural disease. I’m not going to criticise someone who decides to avoid something like that, or to spare the family financial ruin and so on for many scenarios.

I can't make head or tail of this.

It’s a crucial point of what I’m trying to say, let me try again. The first part is my acknowledgement that the self-conscious individual might well know things through talking to others- eg about a progressive neural disease- not "known" to other parts of him - that might lead him to end his life. I don’t have a dogmatic position about the wrongness of that.

In the second part I’m repeating what I’ve set out a few times, maybe that terms “privileges” is causing confusion. Can I rephrase:
What I am claiming is that the Humanist association exalting the supposed right of the individual to take “his own” life, is a sign that the atheist ranks the talking aspect of the personality above everything else in the world including his body as a biological organism, his subconscious, the wishes of his family and friends and the good of wider society.

I’m plugging away at the idea that atheism is partly an expression of a struggle for status or ownership of the person between different aspects of the mind, namely that part that uses language, and older aspects of the mind. That’s why atheists tend to treat dreams dismissively, also intuition, visions, parables, myths and so on.

bert wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote: [I’m] just expressing my understanding that religion represents human attempts to connect with the pole or generalisation of what is greater than them,

I used to have astronomy as a hobby. It is perfectly possible to deal with something greater without losing yourself in mythology.

I don’t mean physically greater than the self, I mean hierarchically. That was what I went on to say in the next sentence.

bert wrote:

what is greater than them is what can’t be experimented with. That lies in the direction from the individual towards society and towards the biosphere. That is our creator (beyond society and beyond biosphere, but realised in them) .

There is no evidence for a creator, or have you been hiding it?

Biologically, we were created by the African biomes. We have the power to damage and possibly eventually destroy those but not to experiment with them. Beyond the African biomes lies the biosphere which we can even less experiment with. If we destroy the biosphere we will know as we die that we have destroyed far more than just our own lives. We will have destroyed the creator on this planet

bert wrote: Excuse me? Did I veer off the facts? Centuries of "the jews killed Jesus" did not create a fertile ground for nazism?

The fertile ground for Nazism was created more by the notion that science had consigned Christianity to the trash heap. So now the Volk could work out its own glorious destiny, under strong leadership, free from the miserable weak story of the Lamb of God. Why Hitler got stuck into the Jews was because being religious, they could not be forced to march to the Volk’s drum. The Nazis also extirpated Jehovah’s Witnesses, for the same reason.
By the way, thanks for capitalising “Jesus”.

bert wrote: The fact that a statement by the pope in the sixties that the jews were not responsible was not significant but redundant? The document you cite would have been a good (and earlier) opportunity to say so too. But even that wouldn't have eradicated the notion engrained over centuries in an instant (just like the document didn't the effect of stopping the atrocities either).

That 1960s declaration by the Pope is often cited by atheists. It’s true there has been religious animus between Jew and Christian, running both ways. After WWII the Jews were in a very powerful position morally, that was when they could force the Pope to back down from a position that for all I know might never have been doctrinal. I don’t know that the Jews have backed down from their own position of some disdain for Christianity. According to them Jesus was NOT the Messiah, with bumps on.

The evolution of Christianity out of Judaism is a little like biological speciation envisaged in Punctuated Equilibrium, as like a branching of an American cactus. The main vertical stem was Judaism and several preadaptations produced this new branch. As I understand it, these preadaptations included an excited interest in Judaism amongst the Greek speaking Mediterranean trading societies, small radical religious groups in Israel, extreme pressure from the giant Roman society onto the stiff-necked Israelis who had this extreme vision of their destiny as a nation. Out popped the creative visioning of the Christian God, accessible to all without their submitting to Jewish laws, that has become the most popular world religion. The links below makes the interesting point that Christian theology has had very little impact on Judaism

http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/8616-jesus-of-nazareth

bert wrote: I explained the mechanism. Harvesting based on stupid mythology that had been sown for centuries.

No, the trouble caused by totalitarian dictatorships of Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin was more based on their having thrown Christian ethics into the trash can, in favor of their stupid understanding of science. You could have talked comfortably about the nonsense of Christianity with any blackshirt or brownshirt or Komsomol member of those days.

bert wrote:

Historically the Catholic Church in Europe was fighting for its life during the interwar years,

Yes (power blocks don't like other power blocks). And the pope may have feared that the german branch of the catholic church would separate. Not something a pope wants. So, he had a restraint to speak out too loud against nazism. And as he didn't like communism (rightfully so. Like religion another ideology forced into people's head, critical thinking not being allowed), he couldn't speak out against one and not against the other.

This is just empty theorising, disconnected from the real events of European history. Before the war Hitler set about dismantling the Catholic institutions in Germany and set the Gestapo onto trapping priests in compromising situations. If the Third Reich had survived, the prospects for the Catholic Church were simply nil.

bert wrote: Yes, the church did save quite a few jews. Oh, disproportionally those that were baptized. And a cardinal was not happy that they left the church once safe in south america.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conversion_of_Jews_to_Catholicism_during_the_Holocaust

Why shouldn’t the cardinal have been unhappy? The Church protects its own, Jews who converted to Christianity were particularly protected. If they converted back as soon as they were beyond the reach of the Nazis that’s very likely to have annoyed a cardinal. Not that I blame the Jews either mind you. Maybe they could have sent flowers and a little note.