Yonder Alonso may get a real shot at LF this spring

I can say without a doubt that I couldn’t do it now.

has him ranked as the 2nd best centerfielder of joe’s lifetime (born 1967)

i think he used Fangraphs WAR, Baseball Reference WAR and win shares.

It pains me to admit that Edmonds was a great player, maybe even HoFer, but I hated that dude for turning routine flies into spectacular diving catches and leaps and slides and everything else. Plus, I basically just hated him.

But you were too busy enjoying the penus.

otherwise i get wildly inappropriate and make children cry after i shout things at the St. Louis Bullpen.

I think you are arguing from the perspective that Christianity has done a great deal of progressive, wonderful things in history. I won’t and can’t disagree with that (I will disagree one what specifically those things are, but that’s neither here nor there). But I think these goods did not come from the Christian philosophy of “God must have a plan”, but rather from the Christian philosophy of “love God and thy neighbor”.

This is not to say you are wrong, but I don’t see why its necessarily true that positive ethics had to have come from humans due to their concept of God. This seems like too much of an ad hoc hypothesis to me. Just the mere presence of their coming up with these ideas and the mere presence of them being Judeo-Christian does not imply causation. Philosophers for generations have seceded themselves from God and still been able to philosophize on how man ought to act in given situations.

As far as the debate is concerned, my intuitions have always been that whether there is a God or not, God has not had an impact on our day-to-day lives. From what I can tell, what happens to us has solely been in our control (free-will, if you will). If that assumption is to be taken seriously, then indeed it was human will to want to treat each other in good manner and develop positive ethics toward each other, and God was merely a vessel for people to use to come to those conclusions. Therefore, it was indeed human thought that led to these good things you’ve mentioned, though the invention of God (or, more correctly, the defining of what God would want) was a primary part of it.

I’m also hesitant to include things such as marriage and hospitals in this group, as I wouldnt think it crazy to say that societies outside of Judeo-Christian ones have likely had official unions and/or healers. Also with slavery, while it can and has been extremely evil in certain cases, would you find it unjust if we were to use violent criminals to do some sort of hard labor as punishment? So long as it wasn’t over the top, I would almost call that just to make them our “slaves” temporarily.

To further on my earlier point, I am concerned that some people tend to “put” God into their lives artificially. For example, people constantly use the word “miracle”, like say if their family member survives a plane crashing. While the likelihood of it happening was very slim, it wasn’t zero, so in some cases it will occur. People then look to God as if it were a miracle, when it was only chance that was at play. I am not implying that you are guilty of this, but I would hesitate to solely credit our belief in God to the things you mentioned.

If God is indeed all-powerful/all-knowing/and so forth, but also refuses to exercise any of these powers for the sake of our free will, what is the whole point of God then?