- Sep 20, 2021
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Here is the post.
There is a maxim in Latin: Qui tacit consentire videtur - loosely translated as ‘Silence gives consent’, or in the case of formal proceeding ‘No objection noted’. It was demonstrated in the play A Man for All Seasons. A play by Robert Bolt about the trail of Thomas More during the reign of King Henry VIII of England, religion played a significant part in the events of the time, the play was based upon real historical events.
Thomas More when accused of speaking against the kings annulment (Taking sides with the then Pope) to his first wife despite him never having spoken to anyone about the matter or having given any written opinion contends:
“The maxim is "Qui tacet consentire": the maxim of the law is "Silence gives consent". If therefore you wish to construe what my silence betokened, you must construe that I consented [to the annulment], not that I denied.”
He was countering the argument made by Thomas Wolsey (Cardinal) that… if he made toward a victim with a dagger from behind, anyone witnessing such an event would be guilty under the law in part for any injury to the victim if they did not speak out against such an action.
If you read the play and have some sympathy for Thomas More and his plight, it might behove you to read his history, he tortured and burned people for ‘heresy’ when he had the power of the king. He denied it, saying he only imprisoned Protestants for their safety. No-one imprisoned for being anti-Catholic in those days when Henry VIII was rabidly Catholic and for such given the tile Fidi Defensor by the Pope (A title still used by British monarchs) was spared torture, no-one.
You believe you have faith in an omnipotent omniscient, prescient god who at times spoke directly to humans and gave them written words either in the form of stone tablets, or divine inspiration to write sacred texts? He knows all, the past the future, everything. Why is it that not one of his solutions in the original Hebrew texts ever worked out?
So…
Why did your god stay silent about germ theory - a simple explanation and admonition to boil water, clean down surfaces after soiling with biological decaying matter, a divine design for a microscope? …and wash your hands with soap made from a divinely given formula of easily obtained ingredients would have saved the suffering and needless death of literally millions of babies and children. Even if he only gave such secrets to his ‘chosen’ people? Why the silence on the matter? Silence gave consent to millennia of needless suffering.
Why did your god not speak openly and plainly against the use of violence against children? Why did he test Abraham by asking him to terrify his child into believing he would be offered as a burnt sacrifice? He is tolerant of psychological trauma, or is he ignorant of human psychology? If you are honest with yourself, you know if you saw an old man talking to an invisible being, tying up a terrified child, getting a knife and building a pile of wood to burn that child on - you would call the police, the psychiatric services and child welfare services and you would be very unhappy if that man was ever allowed near a child again - yet if you read it in an old book you were taught not to question you don’t look at with a modern sensibility and credulity.
You would not respect any person who said that such behaviour was reasonable in todays society, so why insist that a believer in such an event should have their views respected? An omniscient being pretends to order a child sacrifice by his father? If you really believed that happened, that alone should tell you that this god is a dangerous insane individual who would be locked up permanently in todays society.
Why would he mandate on his own divinely written stone tablet against taking the life of another human being, and then order his chosen people to go killing a whole race of people without any explanation of why he countermanded his own commandments? Why do you as reasonable person today denounce genocide, and yet laud ‘historical genocide as ‘divine’? Do you really believe it as truthful historical account? If so wouldn’t you be ashamed to ally yourself with such actions?
Why does he not explain why it is that you must ‘turn the other cheek’ at any offence against you and give unconditional forgiveness even if it causes you bodily harm - and yet he could not forgive the stealing of some fruit by a long forgotten human ancestor without the necessity to torture to death another human being? Which reasonable society would hold the child guilty for the crime of a parent, let alone all future offspring. We would consider that notion of inherited guilt insanity.
Why would an omnipotent omniscient being see a human tortured to death as the only remedy to an offence that could in no way hurt him or anyone else? If you took some vegetables from my garden, and I said the only way I will let you off and not torture you forever is to wait until another man is tortured to death and then you can ask for my forgiveness and I might change my mind - You’d say I was batshit certifiably crazy, and you know it. Why is he silent about why you must do what the omnipotent seems incapable of doing himself? ..and even then you have to beg forgiveness every single day or else be tortured yourself for eternity. You offer silence in the face of such insanity?
If I ask you today, do you truly believe that anyone should be tortured for eternity for ANY crime, and if a man said such a thing while standing in front of you and showed he intended to carry it out, what would you answer - truthfully? Would you stay silent?
Why did your infallible ‘loving god’ stay silent when his church leadership was burning people alive in the middle ages?
Why did he stay silent when his ‘followers’ were making rules about taking slaves and beating those slaves to death, or injuring them? Forcing women who had been raped to marry their rapist, or to put the woman to death if she was raped within the city walls and thus ‘could have cried out’ to stop herself from being defiled? You really adhere to such logic?
This is what a dispassionate outside observer sees of a biblical theist - you don’t really believe what is in that book, you don’t follow it’s tenets and you would not tolerate living in such a society. We don’t endlessly forgive violent criminals in a reasonable society, and we don’t spare murders because we might have ‘sinned’ once that wise logic is fallacious and we know it, we would not consider any society that did ‘wise’.
We don’t as a reasonable society require anyone to be tortured to death for any reason, and if you say you do out loud you would be rightly decried for it by your fellow man, and yet believers proudly wear the symbol of torture and murder around their necks. If I took your children and told you they were going to prison for life because their great-grandfather stole some bread - you wouldn’t countenance such a notion.
People who say they believe, don’t really believe at all. Example: you don’t believe that those with psychological problems are possessed by a crowd of demons - Jesus apparently did. You know that modern psychology and medicine is to be trusted, not biblical canon. When someone is sick or in pain you don’t take them to a priest or a prophet, and if you were crazy enough to do that you know you would be condemned by atheist and believer alike as a fundamentalist.
The vast majority of it you ignore and the glaring omissions you don’t even question. Soap. Why no soap? Why no instruction to boil water? Why not give his followers a map of the world as he knew he had made it, it would have saved countless lives of people lost at sea if he had shown them what magnetism was, and how to make a compass.. Indeed if you read any part of that book critically you realise this omnipotent omniscient being knows no more than the average superstitious goat herder about the real world, and what is in it.
You know this really, but your silence gives consent to the proliferation of backward attitudes, monstrous human behaviours in the name of religion and hundreds of years of suffering you accept without question. you know that even with your level of knowledge today gained outside of religious doctrine, if you could go back 2000 years and you saw children dying of dysentery you would tell everyone who would listen - boil the water before you give it to children to drink. When will you accept that your ‘loving omniscient god couldn’t be bothered to do even that for ‘his people’ - or did he just not know? The wonderful sermon on the mount would have been a lot more wonderful if it had included a 20 minute demonstration of how to do CPR.
“I don’t really know much of anything” is not a defence when there are those of us fighting the avoidable suffering caused by superstition and ignorance.. you are either for rational reasonable human behaviour or you are not. Let me remind you what your preferred text says about being lukewarm - it is not an option, it won’t save you. You have to choose… are you really prepared to choose a god who doesn’t know what causes disease, or didn’t care to share that information if he had it?
There is a maxim in Latin: Qui tacit consentire videtur - loosely translated as ‘Silence gives consent’, or in the case of formal proceeding ‘No objection noted’. It was demonstrated in the play A Man for All Seasons. A play by Robert Bolt about the trail of Thomas More during the reign of King Henry VIII of England, religion played a significant part in the events of the time, the play was based upon real historical events.
Thomas More when accused of speaking against the kings annulment (Taking sides with the then Pope) to his first wife despite him never having spoken to anyone about the matter or having given any written opinion contends:
“The maxim is "Qui tacet consentire": the maxim of the law is "Silence gives consent". If therefore you wish to construe what my silence betokened, you must construe that I consented [to the annulment], not that I denied.”
He was countering the argument made by Thomas Wolsey (Cardinal) that… if he made toward a victim with a dagger from behind, anyone witnessing such an event would be guilty under the law in part for any injury to the victim if they did not speak out against such an action.
If you read the play and have some sympathy for Thomas More and his plight, it might behove you to read his history, he tortured and burned people for ‘heresy’ when he had the power of the king. He denied it, saying he only imprisoned Protestants for their safety. No-one imprisoned for being anti-Catholic in those days when Henry VIII was rabidly Catholic and for such given the tile Fidi Defensor by the Pope (A title still used by British monarchs) was spared torture, no-one.
You believe you have faith in an omnipotent omniscient, prescient god who at times spoke directly to humans and gave them written words either in the form of stone tablets, or divine inspiration to write sacred texts? He knows all, the past the future, everything. Why is it that not one of his solutions in the original Hebrew texts ever worked out?
So…
Why did your god stay silent about germ theory - a simple explanation and admonition to boil water, clean down surfaces after soiling with biological decaying matter, a divine design for a microscope? …and wash your hands with soap made from a divinely given formula of easily obtained ingredients would have saved the suffering and needless death of literally millions of babies and children. Even if he only gave such secrets to his ‘chosen’ people? Why the silence on the matter? Silence gave consent to millennia of needless suffering.
Why did your god not speak openly and plainly against the use of violence against children? Why did he test Abraham by asking him to terrify his child into believing he would be offered as a burnt sacrifice? He is tolerant of psychological trauma, or is he ignorant of human psychology? If you are honest with yourself, you know if you saw an old man talking to an invisible being, tying up a terrified child, getting a knife and building a pile of wood to burn that child on - you would call the police, the psychiatric services and child welfare services and you would be very unhappy if that man was ever allowed near a child again - yet if you read it in an old book you were taught not to question you don’t look at with a modern sensibility and credulity.
You would not respect any person who said that such behaviour was reasonable in todays society, so why insist that a believer in such an event should have their views respected? An omniscient being pretends to order a child sacrifice by his father? If you really believed that happened, that alone should tell you that this god is a dangerous insane individual who would be locked up permanently in todays society.
Why would he mandate on his own divinely written stone tablet against taking the life of another human being, and then order his chosen people to go killing a whole race of people without any explanation of why he countermanded his own commandments? Why do you as reasonable person today denounce genocide, and yet laud ‘historical genocide as ‘divine’? Do you really believe it as truthful historical account? If so wouldn’t you be ashamed to ally yourself with such actions?
Why does he not explain why it is that you must ‘turn the other cheek’ at any offence against you and give unconditional forgiveness even if it causes you bodily harm - and yet he could not forgive the stealing of some fruit by a long forgotten human ancestor without the necessity to torture to death another human being? Which reasonable society would hold the child guilty for the crime of a parent, let alone all future offspring. We would consider that notion of inherited guilt insanity.
Why would an omnipotent omniscient being see a human tortured to death as the only remedy to an offence that could in no way hurt him or anyone else? If you took some vegetables from my garden, and I said the only way I will let you off and not torture you forever is to wait until another man is tortured to death and then you can ask for my forgiveness and I might change my mind - You’d say I was batshit certifiably crazy, and you know it. Why is he silent about why you must do what the omnipotent seems incapable of doing himself? ..and even then you have to beg forgiveness every single day or else be tortured yourself for eternity. You offer silence in the face of such insanity?
If I ask you today, do you truly believe that anyone should be tortured for eternity for ANY crime, and if a man said such a thing while standing in front of you and showed he intended to carry it out, what would you answer - truthfully? Would you stay silent?
Why did your infallible ‘loving god’ stay silent when his church leadership was burning people alive in the middle ages?
Why did he stay silent when his ‘followers’ were making rules about taking slaves and beating those slaves to death, or injuring them? Forcing women who had been raped to marry their rapist, or to put the woman to death if she was raped within the city walls and thus ‘could have cried out’ to stop herself from being defiled? You really adhere to such logic?
This is what a dispassionate outside observer sees of a biblical theist - you don’t really believe what is in that book, you don’t follow it’s tenets and you would not tolerate living in such a society. We don’t endlessly forgive violent criminals in a reasonable society, and we don’t spare murders because we might have ‘sinned’ once that wise logic is fallacious and we know it, we would not consider any society that did ‘wise’.
We don’t as a reasonable society require anyone to be tortured to death for any reason, and if you say you do out loud you would be rightly decried for it by your fellow man, and yet believers proudly wear the symbol of torture and murder around their necks. If I took your children and told you they were going to prison for life because their great-grandfather stole some bread - you wouldn’t countenance such a notion.
People who say they believe, don’t really believe at all. Example: you don’t believe that those with psychological problems are possessed by a crowd of demons - Jesus apparently did. You know that modern psychology and medicine is to be trusted, not biblical canon. When someone is sick or in pain you don’t take them to a priest or a prophet, and if you were crazy enough to do that you know you would be condemned by atheist and believer alike as a fundamentalist.
The vast majority of it you ignore and the glaring omissions you don’t even question. Soap. Why no soap? Why no instruction to boil water? Why not give his followers a map of the world as he knew he had made it, it would have saved countless lives of people lost at sea if he had shown them what magnetism was, and how to make a compass.. Indeed if you read any part of that book critically you realise this omnipotent omniscient being knows no more than the average superstitious goat herder about the real world, and what is in it.
You know this really, but your silence gives consent to the proliferation of backward attitudes, monstrous human behaviours in the name of religion and hundreds of years of suffering you accept without question. you know that even with your level of knowledge today gained outside of religious doctrine, if you could go back 2000 years and you saw children dying of dysentery you would tell everyone who would listen - boil the water before you give it to children to drink. When will you accept that your ‘loving omniscient god couldn’t be bothered to do even that for ‘his people’ - or did he just not know? The wonderful sermon on the mount would have been a lot more wonderful if it had included a 20 minute demonstration of how to do CPR.
“I don’t really know much of anything” is not a defence when there are those of us fighting the avoidable suffering caused by superstition and ignorance.. you are either for rational reasonable human behaviour or you are not. Let me remind you what your preferred text says about being lukewarm - it is not an option, it won’t save you. You have to choose… are you really prepared to choose a god who doesn’t know what causes disease, or didn’t care to share that information if he had it?
