J: Okay then. We'll see how it goes.
a.) Not by science, but by poetry and theology and the like. Basically, via the arts and philosophy. It is in that area that science is blind. You see, just because something falls into natural law doesn't mean it can't be observed. There is a tendancy these days to rationalise everything into natural law, and yet there are still aspects of poetry and literature and all this which fall into a category which, though they do indeed exist as part of natural law, nevertheless are outside the boundaries of natural science. And that's how one can understand God, or at least a part. However, in some small part even a God indistinguishable from the natural world is knowable via natural science. Considering that the natural world is God's creation, it is logical to assume that God is in some measure knowable through it. We, of course, cannot distinguish exactly what we are looking at because we are a part of it, but if we work under the assumption that all this is the work of God, we can understand something of God through it. Of course, from the scientific viewpoint, to begin under such an assumption is flawed. Technically, if we WERE to prove God through other means, and to find out beyond a shadow of a doubt that He does exist, then the natural world and natural science could tell us quite a bit about Him, because being indistinguishable from it it would be an aspect of him. Thus it doesn't work as a proof, but can work as a way of knowing God, if the existence of God is otherwise proven. This is because the nature of science is to provide information, and not reasons and meaning - even the 'reasons' it does provide are in fact only causality, which is a system of information but not reasons in and of itself. God, however, is not something that can be proven via information but only via reasons, because information, based on the whats and whens and wheres, are by their very nature things that are constrained by the dimensions of the universe. God, whose nature is outside the universe, cannot be defined by these, and only a small aspect of Him can be known through them via creation.
Now hang on a second. You keep harping on about how poetry and literature is beyond understanding by science, but you're missing the point. You acknowledge that was is contained within poetry and literature is fictional, correct? It doesn't exist?
Yet you also consider God to be part of poetry, a metaphor so to speak. So is God the poetry book, or is God in the poetry?
Because science can understand the existence of the poetry itself. It can understand why it came to be, describe it. The contents are irrelevant from this viewpoint because they do not describe something that actually exists. What matters is that the poetry itself exists, as a written set of words. So if God is in the poetry, is described by the poetry, then you're saying that God is fictional.
But if God is the poetry book, then He can be observed and explained.
b.) Because God himself is at the very core of the universe. To understand God is to understand the universe. The study of theology is, in fact, understanding one branch of the universe. Basically... think about it this way. The who/what/when/where/why of the universe. Well, the Natural Sciences tell us three of those. They can tell us the What, and the When, and the Where. But they cannot tell us the Who or the Why, or rather their 'instruments' come up null, with a zero. But inability to register anything doesn't imply non-existence. Just because science cannot tell us the Who or Why doesn't mean there isn't any meaning to those questions. Instead, what you require is another form of instrument, that which is supplied by the Arts: by poetries and literature, and by theology and philosophy. While the Natural Sciences try and tell us those first three, the others look for the answers to the last two.
I'm not sure where you're getting this idea that science does not try to answer questions like why...indeed, that's the whole bloody point.
Also, you once again try to define this part of the universe that is somehow unexplainable or unobservable by science as though science was separate from reality, when it isn't. It's the observation of everything that exists, everything that we can perceive, be it through our own natural senses or the various tools we've created to measure that we cannot by our own selves.
So I'm not understanding why you can keep saying there must be something that is completely unobservable yet still affects reality. If it can affect reality, it can be measured, quantified, and eventually understood! Science is not separate from reality: it IS reality.
And so far as I am aware, we haven't run across anything that completely defeats all of our senses, our equipment, and ability to understand. We've come across quite a few things that are hard to observe, but nothing that is completely impossible to observe, because something like that would be extremely huge news indeed.
And this is just what I've been trying to tell Kyronea all along here is mistaken with an entirely Natural Scientific approach to the world. You'll only ever get 3/5ths of it! The only way you can ever begin to try and understand the world as a whole is to address all aspects of it. Now, let's make the assumption there is no God, and no purpose, and indeed the Who and the Why are meaningless. The only way we CAN come to that conclusion is through those things that can study it. To say that the Natural Sciences aren't proving God is merely stating the obvious; if you wish to really make a statement about that, you have to apply the pertinent 'instruments.' To apply Natural Science to the Who and Why is like trying to measure lumens with a microphone - of course you're going to find nothing! That is why I find it rather mistaken to bring science into this question. On the same note, however, to application of things Philosophy and Theology to the What, When, or Where causes problems as surely as the other way around does. Oh, you can use the When to create a basis for Philosophy, but only in so far as you are trying to explain the Why or Who - it will tell you nothing about the When. This is why you need both the Natural Sciences and the Arts, and that one without the other will always yield an incomplete picture. And why using Natural Sciences to address God, the Who, is about like measuring light with a microphone. I'm not surprised the answers are inconclusive. But that doesn't mean it's not sunny out.
So this is why it enhances our understanding of the universe, because the universe is more than just the simple What, When, Where that the Natural Sciences investigate. The 'Who' is important,
Oh, I see. You're not utilizing Why as meaning "Why does this particular event happen in this particular way" but "Why do we exist?"
Thing is, science can answer that question just as easily: we exist because we have evolved from a prior species. We exist because our parents had sexual intercourse that resulted in reproduction. We exist because that's what life does: it propagates itself.
Now, if you're asking why life itself exists, science hasn't really answered the question fully yet. It certainly has yet to answer the question of abiogenesis: that is, how life first began. Evolution, of course, does not concern itself with such questions(despite the vast amounts of misinformation coming from those who promote literal creationism and "Intelligent Design" and all that garbage) but simply what happened with life once it was already started.
As for the Who...what exactly do you mean? If you mean "Who created the universe?" then that is an invalid question because no one created the universe: it just came to be through the process of the Big Bang, which may very well have been part of a cycle of expanding and contracting universes, but we're straying off topic if we go in that direction.
Now Kyronea, again you say 'on the universal scale.' Your scale is still too small. Don't think so limited. Think on the infinite scale. At that point NOTHING is too small or irrelivant. That's the nature of God.
Wait, what? What the bloody hell does that mean? Do you even understand what scale is? Placed on an infinite scale, we are even MORE meaningless--if that's possible--because we're still finite. We don't become infinite by virtue of being on an infinite scale.
Furthermore, you just made a rather large mistake.
Speak for yourself, lad, not me.
You said 'The scale is ridiculous! Even the absolute worst we could do--destroy the entire species--means absolutely NOTHING on a universal scale. Earth would recover from the resulting devastation. Life--not human life, but other life--would continue to exist. Sure, our own species would be gone, but so what? On the scale of the universe, right now, our loss is--while tragic--irrelevant to the universe.'
Yes, that's what I said. I'm glad we can agree on that.
What qualifies you to say this? Nothing. You are assuming that mere grandeur of scale is the measure of importance, which is a flawed assumption. Yes, we might just be one sentient race amongst many (or we might be alone, it doesn't matter), but how exactly does that lessen worth? Tell me, does it lessen the worth of a child when there are two rather than one? Is a country like Russia worth more than... oh, Guatemala, based solely on its size and population? Certainly not. But this is the argument you are bringing forward. The is even more poignant when you consider things from a less human scale (you're still thinking in very human terms to say that things have measures of importance... that assumption alone is based upon an artificial scale); Tell me, relative to infinity, which is the bigger number, one or one million? Relatively speak, both are equally the same. To an infinite God, all these things you're talking about don't matter, and indeed what the result is that we DO end up mattering. Whilst, I think, you are priding yourself on taking the 'big picture' approach and looking at humanity as miniscule, in fact you are still only looking at the small picture. In the real big picture, humanity really does matter.
Bull bull bull bull bull, and you once again twist my words into your strawman.
I was speaking of the potential evils a human could do(using it in the sense of assigning specific values to an act from a particular perspective, not that a specific act is always evil, because as I've said before, good and evil do not truly exist), not assigning worth. Philosophically, from the simple standpoint of life's rarity, I am all for protecting sentient life. Sentient life is, in my eyes, priceless, because I recognize that once it is dead, it is completely and totally GONE. There is nothing afterwards for it...it's just gone.
But from a purely logical standpoint--especially considering that, though we have not interacted with it, there is bound to be much more sentient life out there in the universe--the loss of the human species means nothing to the universe. We're one tiny species on one tiny planet orbiting one tiny star in one tiny quadrant of one tiny galaxy in one tiny cluster of galaxies in one tiny supercluster in one tiny corner of the universe. We are extremely tiny, and with our current capabilities, we simply don't matter. The rest of the universe will not be affected by our loss at this point.
Now, if we had the technology to, say, build galaxies, we'd certainly be far more valuable. But we can't exactly do that yet, can we?
Also, your logic is rather flawed. To an infinite God, as you said, one and one million look the same, and both are equally SMALL. They are both equally tiny and undeserving of such attention. Yet some how, because they're equally small, that somehow makes them worthy of attention from an infinite being? Are you even listening to yourself? Your logic goes against everything it says! "It's ridiculously small and unimportant, so it must be important." How does that work?
Plus, you misinterpreted why I said all of this to begin with. I was speaking specifically of the acts a human could do in such a tiny amount of time on such a tiny scale to influence what would happen to them after they are dead. You still haven't answered that. Why does anything we do on such a scale cause us to be punished eternally? Do you not understand what eternity is? The entire life span of the human species is barely a beginning of a cosmic blink of an eye, yet religions would damn humans for eternity. Eternity is eternal...it's a pretty damned long time, and far too long for any sort of punishment for some act a human does on such a scale.
Secondly, you probably should study your world religions more. It's rather useless to say 'all these religions focus on earth.' Oh yeah? Well guess what: pretty much all literature focus on humanity! Whoop-dee-doo. Why do you think that is? Maybe because literature examines humanity's place in the world? Same thing with religion. Like literature, it examines what our place is. Little wonder that it's focussed solely on earth, because that's where, to this point in time, we've been. It actually makes no sense to critizise it from that standpoint.
Ooooh yes it does. Yes it does, and it's rather hilarious that you're not seeing it. You're trying to justfy God's existence based on human religions, on human attempts at explaining that which they could not explain at the time. You are focusing only on US! You are missing the fact that in the big picture we don't matter! You then try to weasel out of understanding this by some convulted logic that says "Because we don't matter, we matter" and you ignore the fact that because religions focus on only humanity, on only Earth, they cannot possibly describe the truth! They focus far too small.
To use some of the examples you've been tossing about in ways that actually don't justify your argument, it'd be like medical scientists only studying how AIDS affects, say, New York City and ignoring the entire rest of humanity. It'd be like vulcanologists only studying the Hawaiian island chain, or geologists only studying the Grand Canyon. It's taking a few minor little things and trying to make them into the whole of the picture. It's like taking twenty pieces from a three hundred piece jigsaw puzzle and trying to assemble the entire picture from that.
You're still arguing from the basis of human religions, specifically your interpretation of Christianity. You are still missing the big picture, and that is why I am criticizing you from this point of view, because it is valid, no matter your attempts to weasel out of it.
The only other thing that could be said about the universe in terms of religion is how the universe relates to us and God, and that it DOES do. After all, the sentence 'God created the heavens and the earth' does not focus solely here.
Really? Looks to me like you're trying to reinterpret the words written in the Bible, which is what people have done all the time. That's another reason that humanity's religions are bogus: they're never consistent. The religious texts are constantly changed and altered based on what is convenient at the time. Can't convert pagans who "practice witchcraft"? Write a passage saying that witches are evil and must be burned. Can't stand the Roman Catholic Church? Create Greek Orthodox, or Russian Orthodox, or the various Protestant sects.
And that's just Christianity. How about the various Muslims sects, like the basic Shia and Sunnis? Or how about the various Hindu sects, the Tao sects, the Shinto sects, the Buddhist sects, the Jewish sects...I could go on and on, but I think you get my point.
What makes it even more hilarious is the fact that though they're not consistent, they ARE consistent on not being willing to change when new evidence is given to them in the form of science. See, science changes as more information is introduced. They do not make an assumption---as you are by saying that God MUST exist--then gather evidence to try to prove that assumption and ignore everything to the contrary. As I've explained previously, they create a hypothesis, test it through experimentation, use the information gathered to alter the hypothesis and repeat until the hypothesis is born out again and again through the evidence, at which point it becomes a theory.
Meanwhile, religions don't pay attention to contradictory evidence. They simply state a "truth" and declare that it MUST be true.
That's why I keep saying that even if God exists, It cannot be any human God we have ever defined, because they all focus purely on Earth and ignore the rest of the universe.
You're not forced to worship God. You can choose to be seperate. Up to you.
Right, just like if you're poor and unskilled you can choose not to take that janitorial job, or you can choose not to take that migrant farmer job. But the thing is, the choice to not do so is a really bad one, because it damns you to something absolutely horrendous. In my examples, it would prevent the poor person from being able to purchase food, clothing, shelter, and so on. In your example, it means eternal damnation of my soul.
So it's not really a choice, is it?
It's just choosing your sides, I guess. Or, actually, not even that, because you can't choose God.
Make up your mind. Which is it? Is it that we choose sides? Is it that we have a choice to make? Or is it that God chooses us?
God chooses you, and chooses everyone. All you can do is step away. I mean, it makes a lot of sense. How can God damn you for not worshiping him? Uh, if you have just died for someone to keep them from falling off a cliff, and they say 'I don't want to believe you did that for me', and walks willingly toward a cliff again, is it exactly damning the person to say at that point 'alrighty, if that's the way you want it, go ahead, I'm not going to stop you. I tried.'
Bull. That's a wacky excuse to justify the worship made by those who created Christianity--not God, but men, like Constantine--the Roman Emperor who ruled the practice of Christianity legal in the Roman Empire because he saw it as advantageous to his own position--, who saw it a way to control the masses--for those who bother to try thinking about it. They think "Hey, wait...why SHOULD we worship God?" then you create this excuse of "Oh, wait, he did something that can absolve of us of our "sins" so that's why" and it placates those who don't bother to think further.
God damns you because that's what free will demands.
Uh huh. Sure. Okay. That's fair.
If he just saves everyone, well, that would annull free will, now wouldn't it?
...what? Again, are you listening to yourself?
According to you, free will means we must be sinful and thus we must worship your God in order to absolve us of these sins. We could choose not to, but to choose that would be to damn us eternally, which isn't exactly a pleasant option. Sounds fine if you believe it's all real.
But to me it sounds like a method of control, because that's exactly what it is. The Church and Church authorities use to to placate and control the masses, a "Bread and Circuses" plan so to speak. They tell them if they don't worship they'll burn eternally, so they keep the masses in the church where they can spout whatever propaganda they wish to keep them under control and keep them doing what they want. The Crusades are a great example. "God orders us to cleanse the Holy Land of the evil Muslims!" was the excuse justified for what was really just a land grab and resource grab for the wealthy and the controlling rich.
Why do you think various Kings, Emperors, Shahs, and so on have altered the current religion to suit their purposes? England's Anglican church is a classic example of the King at that time(and I'm probably remembering the specific one incorrectly, so do please correct me if I am). King Henry VIII perverted Catholicism and altered it for his own purposes.
Now as for those things that you mentioned being sins, they are sins because they break order.
Whose order? Who defines it? You? Me? The ruling body?
It might not seem like it to you, but they cause one to fall prey to oneself, turn one inward, etc. Even non-Christian groups like Stoics would say the exact same thing and argue against those things, not for the cause that they're contrary to God, but because they are a lack of self-control and ultimately detrimental to oneself and society.
Oh? I think not.
As I've explained before, things that people would see as "sinful" like sex before marriage, greed, lusty thoughts, and so on are not going against order or unnatural. They are natural, because they're extensions of the base instincts of every life form: survive. Propagate yourself, your specific genetics to the rest of the species. Hoard resources so you can keep surviving. Make yourself look as good as possible through accumulation of resources so you attract better and more mates so you can continue to propagate. Please yourself and keep yourself happy, because a happy life form is a healthier life form, and the healthier you are, the more you can survive.
That's why we're greedy. That's why we're lustful. That's why we enjoy sex and so on and so forth. It's instinct. It's not against order. It's how we bloody evolved.
Furthermore, the idea of "sex before marriage" or homosexual relations being sinful is absolutely ludicrous, especially since marriage is not religious but simply a secular ceremony humans have invented--due to our sentience--to give more meaning to mating, as a way of making clear to others that "this one is MY mate and is not available to you!"
As for homosexual relations(I actually don't know if you consider this sinful...given you being you, you probably don't) as we can see in nature it's just as natural. We still haven't fully explained it...there are ideas ranging from embryos not being fully masculinized in the womb(since they're all female at first) to brain chemistry being affected just after birth, to a purely genetic cause...all have merit, though they haven't had enough research--mainly due to religious people interfering with the research because homosexuals are all "mentally ill, sinful beasts" or whatever other justification they used---but we do know it's certainly natural, and not a choice. (Besides, the idea of it being a choice is rather idiotic. "Hey, I know! I'm going to choose to be gay despite the fact that most people on the planet would hate me for it! I'm going to choose to ostracize myself from the rest of society! I'm going to choose to have years and years of hate, ridicule, and vitriol spit upon me by everyone!")
The other sorts are ones that deal with focus on the self, like pride, and those are considered sins because they are essentially the same as walking away from God and trying to do things one's own way. That might seem a bit harsh, but if you were a ruler overseeing some construction or project, would you really like the people that are doing this labour do things however they like? In the end, it's going to be ruin for everyone involved.
Pride I'm not going to say anything on, because pride can definitely harm a person if too much of it is had. (Though a little is not a problem, and is indeed beneficial because a lack of pride means a lack of self-esteem, a lack of self-confidence, and a worsened emotional state.)
It's not a thought unique to the religious. 'Sins' are usually things that are harmful to oneself or society, and there's nothing surprising about that.
You begin to have a point here in some ways when it comes to society. Murder is detrimental to society. That's why we have guilt and morality--which, by the way, are both evolutionary instinctual traits for the purpose of keeping the species alive--and why we have laws. But the question becomes, what is truly detrimental society? Sex before marriage doesn't harm society unless those having sex don't take the proper precautions to prevent pregnancy(presuming heterosexual couple here, of course) and are unable to care for the resulting child, but being married doesn't change this one bit.
Now, non consensual sex would harm society, because rape has a serious affect on the person raped as well as those near them from an emotional standpoint and can harm productivity, because an unhappy person is an unproductive person. (That's look at it from a purely logical standpoint, mind.)
But you're confusing the "sins" of religions--usually chosen to try and control the populace's actions--with laws, which, thankfully, do not usually follow religious beliefs in these modern times.
'once we reach the necessary technological requirements' - Kyronea, this is the very sort of thinking I have taken issue with from the first. See what I've written in reply to RD. Your very basis to your question is flawed in that you are going into this assuming that you can analyse God with technology, given it is good enough. What sense does that make? Imagine a group that's hearingless building better and better light sensors saying to themselves 'well, eventually we'll really figure out whether this thing 'sound' exists.' Not going to happen, because they've gone into the investigation in the wrong direction with the wrong set of assumptions. If you really wish to examine the issue of God, you have to do it through poetic, theological, philisophical means. This is why I've said that Natural Science is limiting you. You're looking for your answer in a place that you'll never find it, not because it absolutely doesn't exist, because even if it does you're looking in the wrong place.
Incorrect analogies and misunderstandings again!
Bull. If God exists and affects the universe, It can be observed and quantified, researched and understood. God being the deity that it would be, with the powers It is capable of, we would require much more technological progress to be able to observe It, but I do not see why it couldn't be done unless you're trying, once again, to define science as being separate from reality, which as I've said many times, is ridiculous.
The question here is not whether science could do it or not, but what part of science and what technologies would be required. As you said, beings incapable of perceiving/understanding sound would accomplish nothing if they focused on light sensing devices. But if they focused on sound sensing devices, they would be able to understand sound more and more. The same is true here. We would simply have to figure out what we need to use to pursue our goals, then once we've found what we need, we use it.
Hmmm... can't be observed, eh? Well, what do you call observation? Can you recognise it? That is a tough question, and at the moment I've been writing way too long to get into this particular one. Of course I do not believe in a Deist God, but one that does actively interfere, but those interferences, of course, are difficult to judge. Bah, miracles are useless for that very reason, because a genuine miracle would at once be dismissed as something that must in some way be natural. We couldn't recognise it because we'd ascribe it to something natural. It's the way our minds are natually structured. Except for, of course, divine revalation, but this all is a very long topic that requires a post by itself.
You know what observation is. It's the study of anything that exists, through whatever method you have available. You could observe a source of light with your eyes, or a source of sound with your ears, and so on and so forth.
Therefore, if you do not believe in a Deistic God per Radical Dreamer's definition, your God can be measured. As you said, it's DIFFICULT to judge and observe, but NOT IMPOSSIBLE.
By the way, something I missed before, but you said something along the lines of science in the days of old having religion and theology as part of it? Has it occurred to you to consider why that is no longer true? It's no longer true because we no longer blame God for something we cannot understand. Instead, we do whatever it is necessary to understand that which we cannot understand yet. We build radio telescopes to study the stars. We build computers to use to analyze our findings in any number of fields. We use chemical testing to see if a certain pollutant is in a certain body of water, and so on and so forth. We don't need theology in science anymore because it no longer has a purpose.
Heaven or Hell? Oh, yes, quite well. Heaven is where God is; Hell is where God isn't.
Simple, precise...but it wasn't what I was after, and I suppose I should have explained more clearly. I was asking how Heaven and Hell could exist if we have been unable to measure from any dying person something like the soul leaving their body. We've never seen any evidence of it. (Now, mind, it's quite possible we simply have been unable to measure the energy or whatever it would be, but I find that unlikely, as by now we can detect any form of energy, even if we don't understand what the energy is. Lord J, a bit of clarification here, in case I am incorrect.)
Maybe then you want to be in Hell, if you don't want anything to do with God, though.
Now that's just insulting. If God exists, I would want something to do with Him, because as I said, any real God would not be the Judeo-Christian God or any other interpretation, and would most likely not be something that would damn me for eternity because I questioned His existence.
It's not this 'place of fire' thingy. Good grief, that's just borrowing of the Roman version of the Greek Tartaros, the place where sinners are punished. All metaphorical, and really not believed (or shouldn't be.)
Well, you might want to explain that to your fellow Christians then, because so many of them seem to believe this. As for why? Simple, really...it was part of the controlling tool for the masses as I explained earlier.
In the end, it's just that distinction that I set out. Now, of course, in our beliefs, existence itself is due to the will of God, so in some sense Hell is really non-existence, and utter seperation from that which makes life possible. Heaven is, well, a state of reconciliation and grace with God, I suppose. Sort of a return to Eden, but where it is impossible to sin. Because there is no more conflict with God, because we are no longer under the Law, the punishments that this causal world inflicts on us don't exist anymore, and as such what we say to be suffering wouldn't exist. It's not exactly a 'reward' as one would think of it, but in fact a return to what it really means to be human in the truest form, unencumbered by everything else.
Uh huh.
Now you asked 'how' it could exist, and that is pretty much the natural result of the sorts of things
Sure, if such things exist, even though we've never seen a shred of evidence towards it, despite the research that has surely been conducted.
I've mentioned before. They can exist because the Law draws a line between people and God. I mean, think about God like a perfectly just king who obeys all His own edicts. His law: punish anyone who breaks the peace, who breaks his word. The punishment is something must die and be sent away from his city forever. In Christian thought, Jesus is a great high prince who stands before God and basically, by His own death, fulfils the requirements of the law and allows us to remain in the grace of the king. This is heaven. Hell is outside the city, we left to our own devices. I'm not sure how else to explain this, but I suppose it depends on exactly how your question was meant.
But who says what God's word is?! Humans have. Humans have always claimed to be speaking for God as justification for everyone listening to what they say. There has not been a single bit of evidence to show that such interpretation and claims are true, no matter what people claim, because--surprise surprise--all of the "evidence" is written by the same people making the claims.
What exactly did you mean by 'how?'
I explained up above. Basically, how can they exist if we've never been able to measure something like a soul leaving the body? (Unless you want to say that the soul stays in the body and that Heaven and Hell are states of the soul's mind or what have you, which would actually be quite the interesting interpretation.)
Keep in mind, though, that my original argument was not one particularly arguing for God, but was merely pointing out the fallicy of your own position. To bring up the analogy I was talking out before, I was critisising you for merely looking at the What, When and Where, and closing yourself to the possibility of Who and Why simply because your mindset doesn't allow for it. I was admonishing you to keep the possibilities of Who and Why open, not particularly arguing for anything in particular but saying that you've limited yourself to 3/5 of understanding. Even if you don't at all find anything in the rest that I've written, this at least is still pertinant. It's not an argument for God, but merely that you mustn't, and indeed absolutely cannot, use Natural Science for or against God. If you choose to examine the issue, you have to be prepared to use other tools to examine it. Don't leave the Natural Sciences be, of course, but leave them at the doorstep. Better yet, intigrate it all together... but that's a tough thing to do.
And I am criticizing your interpretation that science is separate from reality, when it IS reality. I am criticizing you for assuming that the question of "Who?" is relevant and your interpretation of "Why?".
Oh, and heya Lord J. I was wondering when you were going to show up. Honestly, I don't mind if you speak your mind here. To be honest, I'm rather overwhelmed with the volume of what's being said, and as such am not able to address it all, or even half of it, so it won't make much of a difference if you say your bit. It's not going to compel me to go onto some massive writing spree to try and answer everything. Indeed, I'm not sure yet whether all these points are answerable or, even if they are, if I alone am capable of answering them. I don't know everything, after all.
I think he's staying out because he knows that if he enters the argument everyone will stop paying attention to anyone else arguing his side, and he wants to give the rest of us a chance to let our own voices be heard. Besides, I need the challenge anyway, and you definitely provide it!
