What? That’s absurd. Everybody knows that cats are always girls and dogs are always boys.
Thus also proving that girls can fly.
This is what happens when you stick personal definitions into public conversations, folks.
I am an atheist, and I do not exactly disagree with the substance of the OP, but the overconfident way in which it presents such a weak argument for atheism is absurd. Any atheist who cannot give an account of how and why it was that for thousands of years virtually everybody, including many extremely smart, open minded, and intellectually curious people, firmly believed in a god or gods, and why many very smart and knowledgeable people still do, even today, really ought to desist from arrogant rantings until they have figured that out.
You can be quite sure, Critical1, that there are, and, throughout history, have been, many, many people much smarter than you (or me) who were well aware of the argument that you make, and believed in God just the same.
Yes, we’ve all seen The Dark Crystal.
I’m not asserting a fact. I’m hypothesizing (and having a chuckle). So, there is no assumption, only wit.
OK, I don’t believe that’s the only reason people believe in God.
Never mind if they’re right or wrong in their belief - your starting premise is false.
Indoctrination sure is a big part of relgious belief, but it’s not the only way people arrive at belief.
Yes it is; there’s no objective reason whatsoever to believe in God. The entire idea is derived from a particular religious tradition, not even the human tendency towards religiosity; recreate human society from nothing on another planet, there’s no reason to assume that anyone there would ever come up with the idea of God, or if they did it would become popular. Despite Christian egotism, monotheism is not some natural and superior endpoint of human religious thought.
I kinda figured but wasn’t sure.
how many of those people, given todays knowledge and understanding would hold the same views?
Who said anything about objectivity? Not me.
I’m not even claiming that people’s beliefs have any kind of basis in fact (and I said as much) - only that ‘someone told you’ is not the only way in which people arrive at belief.
If this was true, there would be no way for religion to have started in the first place, would there?
People who have witnessed miracles would disagree.
I was present at a minor miracle once. Back in the 80s when the first “Peacekeeper” 10-warhead ballistic missiles were deployed around Cheyenne, Wyoming there was an anti-nuke gathering in downtown Cheyenne. I’ve long forgotten his name, but a Reverend who headed up the SANE/somethingoruther(?) Coalition was one of the speakers. It was a rare windless day except at the exact moment he was speaking of “the wind of change”, when a breeze came up hard enough to blow papers off of tables, and died after a few seconds.
It’s significant that the only times Critical1 has used capital letters are in his handle and the word “I”.
Can you come up with one case where someone who wasn’t already familiar with Christianity, if not indocrinated, came to believe in God after witnessing a miracle? Why would they jump to the conclusion that God had anything to do with it? The indocrination comes first-any “miracles” support the conclusion, not establish it.
you mean other than the slow evolution of religion from early animalist and sun worshipers into multiple gods of this and that, to creation myths finally to monotheism?
No one has ever witnessed a miracle. And even if there were such things, what makes you think that someone who did witness it would attribute it to some being they had never heard of instead of their religious figures? That’s just Christian arrogance, the assumption that their religion is obviously true and other religions obviously false, and that deep down everyone secretly agrees with them.
:rolleyes: A minor coincidence is your idea of a “miracle”? That’s just pathetic.
you mean except for all the other capitols in the op as well right?
I mean I get it, I rarely use caps, but my handle is not something I type and the word “I” is something ingrained in the way I type. the letter “I” is a two key word when all alone.
but even a brief glance at the op shows several other caps.
and a breeze blowing papers? seriously?
30+ replies and not a single argument from evidence, or without fallacy or bias. for that matter I haven’t even seen the attempt.
I might have actually misunderstood your premise - please could you clarify?
Are you asserting that people only become religious as a direct outcome of indoctrination (i.e. being on the receiving end of parental or cultural indoctrination/pressure, proselytisation, etc)?
Or are you just asserting that when people become religious, they end up falling into one of the already-extant categories of belief?
If the former, I believe you’re empirically wrong - people do start to believe in the supernatural for any number of reasons (doesn’t even matter if they’re valid - they’re just not all ‘someone told you’)
If the latter, you’re probably right but for a handful of exceptions, but this seems a pretty banal truth.
No, and good point. Really, I spend almost no time worrying about it, one way or the other.
Because of the incoherence of the OP, the only thing I can seem to come up with as the topic is: Does someone telling you ‘God exists’ constitute evidence for the existence of God?
I would say ‘yes’, in the same way that personal testimony in a court is considered evidence for what the testimony says. And, just like the jury judges the credibility of the witness, the person hearing the story judges the credibility of the person making the claim.
That said, I’ve never encountered someone claiming ‘God exists’ who was at all credible. They’ve only ever come up with either a) logically flawed arguments, or b) their own subjective experience, with no way of testing how real that subjective experience was, or whether or not it had anything to do with ‘God’.
Duh. I think we already knew you don’t believe in miracles. One man’s miracle is the next guy’s hallucination. And no, that is not my idea of a miracle. Stop distorting what I wrote by omitting important adjectives. It was “minor miracle”.
It was a random coincidence, not a miracle.