No. Nobody is required to humor you. I believe we may all be willing to humor you with whatever you want if you can prove Christianity is logical. If you can do that, I will give you everything I own, I swear it.
Good luck! Thumbs up!
Agreed.
Now, I don’t think that actually happens in questions of religion or irreligion with any frequency. What generally happens is that first people decide what they want to believe, and then they, if so inclined, hunt around for rational justifications.
Any explication of the argument from design includes objective evidence that is not proof.
The big bang theory is objective evidence that that the universe has a beginning. It is, as you request, not proof of God, but it provides a rational basis for there being an uncaused causer. (If rationality drives atheism, there should have been more atheists in 1900, before relativity, quantum mechanics and astronomy damaged common-sense notions of causation.)
Read Philosophical Theology by James Ross. You won’t agree with much in it. I don’t agree with much in it. But it is still rational.
Was Ross a Catholic because the rational reasons in his book? I doubt it. For one thing, his book is largely about whether God exists, and being Catholic is not necessarily linked to that. I’m pretty sure that large numbers of regular mass-goers are uncertain concerning God’s existence, even if they rarely believe it is helpful to proclaim their doubts.
An example of something many people could be convinced of through objective evidence is the relationship between smoking and lung cancer. That’s due to the strength of the replicated statistical evidence. With religion, the evidence is all tied up in definitional questions like what are God’s essential characteristics, making it quite easy for even a highly rational person to believe whatever they want.
The answer—or one of them----is in Pascal’s Wager. Really. I’m not making that up.
Pascal made, IMO, a reasoned, rational argument for faith, (and variants of that) and it is my position that it is but one of many example of a rational approach to Christianity.
But you don’t understand that fact, it would seem.
Opinion: Something that is in no way equal to or related to a fact.
“Pascal made, IMO, a reasoned…”
No, sacrificing logic to make a decision does not make logic.
Pascals Wager for an Atheist:
“I’m going to relinquish my logical thought processes and believe in God since he MIGHT be right.”
That removes logic for a different… “Logic”. Nope. Doesn’t work.
Do you believe that the earth’s core is pure, solid gold?? No? Prove it doesn’t. Right now.
That, ^, is Christianity. Something that can’t be proved or disproved beyond a doubt.
Fail.
I think you might be in the wrong thread…
I know I am!
As Carol Burnett would sing, “I’m so glad we had this time together…”
That came off to me as incoherent blabber.
So, all I’m going to say, is that you related “IMO” to “… that fact…”.
You can’t call an opinion a fact and expect to get away with it.
asked and answered - try again.
It does no such thing - it says it ‘happened’ - it does not provide a rational basis for a ‘cause’ or the ‘uncaused causer’ or anything of the sort.
[QUOTE=Big bang theory - definition of big bang theory by The Free Dictionary]
A cosmological theory holding that the universe originated approximately 20 billion years ago from the violent explosion of a very small agglomeration of matter of extremely high density and temperature.
[/QUOTE]
People may ‘theorize’ that ‘something’ caused it, may even want to make that be something ‘outside the universe’ caused it - but the ‘Big Bang Theory’ does not require a cause - just the ‘event’.
Have you ever noticed that whenever you say
nobody ever says “Yes, you do”? Your ability to not understand what others say borders on the paranormal sometimes.
raindog, is the logic/reason/rationale you see behind Pascal’s Wager “What if you’re wrong; what have you got to lose?” “Your life will not be diminished by belief in a god, so why gamble on Armageddon?”
I suppose if one believes strongly that religious affiliation has a net benefit as described by the OP such as fellowship, community, etc and/or has a deep fear of the unknown then the gamble on God is a “reasonable” option. Is that your angle?
I suppose if Christians no longer take their stories literal, and instead treat it as other literature, mythology, fables, etc, then this is a good start for being rationale. But many Christians want the stories to be much more than that, and to be literally true. If so, how could one make a case that they are being rationale for believing in such? Hume paved the way for proclaiming extraordinary claims requires extraordinary evidence. Ask for it until the cows come home, it will never be forthcoming.
That is not an answer to the question. It is nothing but an attempt at a nasty shopt.
Knock it off.
[ /Moderating ]
Well, given the anthropological definition of mythology–a story that is told to express the held truth of a people–then some number of Christians have clearly made the “good start.”
And? Based on your statement, some number of Christians have made a good start toward being rationale and some number of different Christians have not.
:::shrug:::
<twitch>
It’s being rational. Not rationale.
Being upset by someone with notoriously bad typing skills is irrational, whatever you might believe your rationale to be.
Imagine my surprise at signing in and seeing that raindog had time for the thread after all.
As for Pascal’s Wager being a reasoned argument for the practice of Christianity, I disagree.
Pascal asserts that the existence at nature of God is unknowable, but his conclusion assumes that this God rewards worship with eternal life and happiness, and punishes non-believers. By what basis can this be assumed? How is reason used to make this assumption?
How do you explain the quote from Jesus, that he told a woman(Non Jew) that he only came for the lost sheep of Israel? Didn’t mention that hecame to save the world.
It also does not say that he only came to save Israel. Mt 15:21-28. He only says that he was “sent” to the lost children of Israel.
In other passages, of course, he speaks of the house of his Father having “many mansions” while referring to non-Jews, (and, in some interpretations, non-Christians), and in a somewhat parallel passage to the one from Matthew to which you alluded, Jesus speaks to a Samaritan woman, (John 4:4-42), and talks about both Jews and Samaritans giving up their practices and worshiping the Father in the same way, then goes to the woman’s village to preach to the Samaritans for two days.
Quote mining and cherry-picking are fun, but no serious discussion is decided by such efforts.
Does he also have an explaination of who, or what, created the place for God to be? A place to exist, must be there before any being can exist. If God is a being then he would first have to be in existence. or he wouldn’t exist!