Fair enough. I don’t live in the US, here the religious right is almost inexistant.
Well, I don’t call it crazy since to me it’s a natural human feeling. And I believe that people can be religious without becoming puppets of something else.
It’s not your obligation to prove the inexistence of a divinity, which is an impossible task anyway, but neither is it the obligation of believers to prove the existence of a divinity. It is also impossible to prove, and they may very well do whatever they want without having a proof it’s useful. They don’t (or shouldn’t) care if you think it’s ridiculous.
Of course it’s possible to prove - if it was true. It can’t be proven for the simple reason that it’s all delusional. And yes, it is their obligation to provide some evidence, if they want to qualify as anything other than fools and lunatics.
I’m not the one that has held the solid belief that there’s even a god, let alone an earthly representative of him. That’s YOUR baggage. I was raised agnostic and have always understood that we gather information and evidence, in little bits and pieces, that lead us to a previously unknown fact. Things we had no idea about will come to be common knowledge. The reason I am no longer agnostic is because I don’t believe that god’s existence is unknowable. I believe it is possible to know one way or another whether or not there is a god. But so far, there is ZERO evidence in favor of his existence. If that changes, so will my feelings on the subject.
What I was asking you, and what you DIDN’T address, was how you pick and choose which parts of the bible are the truth. That’s a far cry from “why do you believe?” I was inquiring as to what the criteria for accuracy in a tangible text are. The basis in belief in christianity lies in the bible. That was the record that was assembled and the text that all christians use, to one degree or another, to establish his existence in their minds. Did you decide which parts were accurate and which weren’t on your own? Were you assisted by clergy? Your parents? What was it about the particular points you’ve discarded that made them unpalatable to you?
There you go getting all over-the-top again. He didn’t say “they’re” dumb. He said “it’s” dumb. You’ve never done anything dumb in your life? You were never ignorant of a rule or law? You’ve never made a mistake? Get some prespective.
Fuck. Sixteen pages of ranting and at the end of it I, who gave up believing in the invisible sky-man at about the age of six, am left wondering which rock all these foam-flecked bulgy-eyed fucknuggets perpetually shrieking “you are RELIGIOUS so you must be a LYING CRAZY IMBECILE and the only way to save yourself is to listen to ME!!” crawled out from under. I never realised atheism could become an actual religion, and a particularly unattractive one at that.
Still, if I ever have to encounter any of them in real life, I suppose I can always pop into the nearest church or mosque or whatever to escape…
I’m not even looking for complete proof at this point. I’d be happy with the tiny spark that would set the investigative wheels in my head turning. Something!
Geez, I guess in the Pit a person can’t make a joke. The point to this was that it would take a lot more than this message board for me to explain how the Bible is interpreted by the Church or anyone else. The Bible is a big, big book, and it has only been 2000 years of people trying to understand it (and that’s just the NT). The catchism is about 1000 pages long. Do you really think I can boil it down to a pithy little statement? Here’s the thing about the Church. They took that big, big, book, and out of it got the catechism and the various creeds, espeically the Nicene Creed, that summed up their religious beliefs. It would be very difficult to find specific Bible verses that stand alone in supporting each line of the creed. It came through understanding the history, context, symbolism, and relationship to the OT that the Church came to their teachings. I am not a theologian, and not entirely equipped to try to explain it… I am happy, as I have said before, to try to explain individual teachings as best I can.
I am more than happy to try to do so…will jump over there when I have time later to take a stab at it. I definitely did not ignore it on purpose, whatever it was!
I don’t know that He is. He certainly isn’t to billions of other people in the world. I studied various other religions. In fact, took a year where I did this with the aim of trying to figure out your very question. And I still question it all the time. It’s very difficult to know what is right. But that’s the thing…when you are dealing with something that doesn’t have a “right” answer, you just have to go with what feels right to you as an individual. Catholicism is a good religion for me…the rituals and rules speak to me, because I am the kind of person who likes rituals and rules. Other people don’t, which is fine for them. Dob said eariler that he thought all that stuff was silly…I see it as a gift God gave us. See how people can have a different perspective? Which one is right and which one is wrong? I think mine is right for me, and Dob’s is right for him, and as I’ve said many times, I don’t think God worries too much about all those details.
The Church claims inerrancy of their Catechism, not of the Bible. That is, they have never taught Biblical literalness. They believe that their interpretation of it is inerrant.
We are all standing on the same slope if we say that we can prove God exists, that is true.
No…how would I know that? I have never been taught that Jesus doesn’t love all equally.
Sure, I can see the logic in all of it. Of course I can. Here’s the thing…it doesn’t matter. No matter how hard I try to make God go away, He doesn’t. Do you really think I come across as someone so stupid that all of this hasn’t been considered? Maybe I do. Maybe just by virtue of believing in God, your opinion is that I MUST be that stupid. That’s fine…it’s your opinion, and you are entitiled to it. I know that God exists. I have no proof. The thing is, I have no reason to worry about belief in a flying spaghetti monster, so I haven’t spent much time dwelling on it. If there proves to be one someday, that will be interesting, but I doubt it will affect me one way or another. The existance of God DOES affect me, so I have spent a lot of time thinking about it. Call me silly (oh, wait, you already did), but that’s where I’m coming from.
You are right, theory is the wrong word. But the point is that it has never made much sense to me. As I said, in the universe something exists, or it doesn’t. Whether or not I can prove it doesn’t affect it’s existance. Whether or not anyone on earth even conceives that it could POSSIBLE exist, doesn’t affect it’s existance. Man’s brain is not what brings things into being. We have conquered a lot in terms of understanding the physical universe, but that doesn’t mean that what we haven’t figured out isn’t there, waiting for us to do so.
I don’t know where you got the second part of your question. It has nothing to do with that. If you gave me data, or logical proof that God doesn’t exist, that would be a different story, but you can’t. So, does He not exist, just because you can’t prove that He doesn’t?
You know, Sarahfeena, you are reading insults into BadChad’s post that aren’t there. You’re inflating it and responding disproportionately to both his tone and words. He’s disagreeing with you respectfully.
Which is my point about civility. Since Sarafeena’s position is almost exactly as offensive to Badchad as his is to her, when she asserts that she KNOWS that God exists, she is being extremely disrespectful to his core beliefs, which state (quite reasonably in my view) that no one can know that God exists, one can only believe in God’s existence. To posit that one knows that God exists is to state forthrightly that people who don’t share that knowledge are simply wrong, or at a less advanced stage of development.
And here is where badchad has her. If she continues to condescend to him, by insisting that she has knowledge of something that she is unable to prove or share, he’s perfectly free to dish out his own brand of incivility and intolerance without upping the ante a tiny bit. He’s simply keeping the discourse at the same level of condescending intolerance (which believers don’t seem to appreciate when they’re on the receiving end, do they?) And if she backs off her ludicrous statement that she “knows” something she can’t share or prove, then she’s back to claiming merely to “believe” in something, allowing **badchad ** to resume his logical argument that Christians are free to believe whatever they like but it’s simply a personal and unsupported belief that is indistinguishable from any other delusion.
If your belief system makes you interpret that last comment as uncivil, then you should examine your belief system, because to unbelievers, religion is delusional. To describe our values (logic, rationality, science, etc.) as inherently uncivil is to poison the well of discussion, and to be particularly hypocritical and self-righteous while doing so.
