Ah, now we hit the wall on what exists, and what does not.
I can experience God. I have. And I do love Him. I have no evidence to show you, but that does not mean that I have no evidence myself. I simply do not have proof. I understand how dissatisfied that argument leaves you, but it isn’t an argument.
You say above, "As for love being “proven”, I’m not sure why it requires “proof.” This is pretty much my point. I am not sure why God requires proof. Now, in the world we live in, if I want my faith to be a set of rules for you to live by, I would need proof. But that is not the case.
I can, and must witness to the world that My Lord is. But that does not involve intellectual exposition of evidence. To quote Francis of Assisi, “There is no point in walking to witness, if our walking is not our witnessing.”
I am sad to learn that you do not feel you have it in you to love God. But, I have faith that if you do your best to love everyone else, He will take care of that for you. “For as you have done it for the least of my children, so shall I do it for you.”
Yet Jesus did all those miracles. Why bother, if not to convince people? Why not just tell them to have faith? In the Exodus story, God was pretty obvious. This faith is better than evidence stuff only seems to come up once God didn’t show the way he was supposed to.
But there is no evidence therein that they ever succeeded in knowing God, or that there was even a God to know. What do you consider the myths about made-up people of which the first parts of the Bible are made of? Perhaps they are fables. Fine, but Aesop is not considered as a prophet.
Forget about proof. You don’t have anything resembling evidence either. If you go into court as an expert witness and give as evidence that something came to you, you’d possibly get fined for contempt. I won’t list all the people with similar “evidence” to yours, always contradictory and sometimes downright dangerous.
The only thing you are witnessing for is illogic.
I can’t speak for anyone but myself, but I only love those who exist. I love my wife and my children, but not a character in a movie or novel.
What if I told you that I know that all other gods were false, and that I know that Jupiter is the only real god? How do I know that? Because I know. I experience Jupiter. I love him, and I know he loves me.
You would tell me that I am wrong, that Jupiter is made up, and that your god (the one who blesses America) is the only real god. How would you convince me? By saying that you know.
But I know Jupiter is the real god. It’s like we’d be arguing about something that only exists in our heads.
I understand how dissatisfied that argument leaves you.
[QUOTE=Triskadecamus]
I can experience God. I have. And I do love Him. I have no evidence to show you, but that does not mean that I have no evidence myself. I simply do not have proof. I understand how dissatisfied that argument leaves you, but it isn’t an argument.
[/quote]
That’s all well and good. Without getting started on the ever-present “evidence vs. proof” argument, I’ll just say that I’m not dissatisfied with your faith so much as I don’t understand it. You, of course, are welcome to it. I don’t comprehend. I am not required to.
[QUOTE=Triskadecamus]
You say above, "As for love being “proven”, I’m not sure why it requires “proof.” This is pretty much my point. I am not sure why God requires proof.
[/QUOTE]
I suppose in a way I was responding to the OP as much as you. He remarks on an atheist trope that, if there were a God, He’d do something to demonstrate His existence. Not an argument I would rush to make, really, but that is beside the point. Implicit in the assertion is the idea that God might want to be known for some reason. Possibly to receive love from His creations.
My way of tying that together with what you said about God’s love is quite simply to say that I can’t love something if I can’t experience it. God “mak[ing] Himself known”, as our hypothetical atheist demands would allow me an experience on which to construct my love for God. It seems to me that God, knowing this, either doesn’t care whether I reciprocate His love or is being coy for some reason only known to Him.
God only “requires proof” if He wants my belief or trust or love. Without it, I lack the ability to offer any of these things to Him. I acknowledge the possibility that He just doesn’t care one way or the other.
I don’t argue the first point. If that wasn’t true, my statement would have been meaningless. As to the latter, religious experiences have been replicated through chemical means, by people teaching entire different religions about entirely different and possibly even conflicting gods, and even by produced by people who know themselves to be charlatans, spouting nonsense to some mark.
If you want to toss away the possibility that the warm fuzzy feeling is entirely unrelated to psychology then go ahead, but I don’t know that you want to actually voice that action on the SDMB. I can go out and find any number of reasons (read, peer reviewed studies) to show why it’s more than plausible that we’re talking brain chemistry and psychology here. That I can reproduce an effect through non-magical means, of course, doesn’t mean that the original wasn’t magic. But on a skeptics site, that’s really sort of the default position: Proof of magic requires some extraordinary evidence, not just a random assertion of ones personal feelings.
[QUOTE=Apollyon]
And the kicker: if we assume an omnipotent deity who has engineered the universe in its present form, and all of us within it, then my (and your) being wired to be unable to subjectively experience God and reciprocate love is all part of some plan, isn’t it?
[/QUOTE]
Not perhaps in your case Triskadecamus, and as such this empirical agnostic is very amenable to a live and let live arrangement.
Unfortunately you may be in a minority of believers (or perhaps it’s just that some believers are very vocal), as there are those that want their faith to form the basis of rules for the rest of us.
And if that is what they want, then I want evidence.
I also find the whole ‘faith’ thing to be extreme fan-wankery by religious types to explain why God doesn’t have a kiosk. After all, Moses, one of the dominant religious figures was himself somewhat skeptical and it took God appearing directly as a big burning bush for Moses to be convinced. If even such a stand up guy as Moses wasn’t required to have faith why is the average Schmoe?
If there was no God, what would the world be like?
Well there’d be no proof of God.
And there isn’t.
Add to the mix the fact that either Judaism or Christianity is completely wrong over the divinity of Jesus, plus all the different ‘laws’ that the many religions claim we should follow and I’m surprised you’re surprised.
I believe in gravity.
So does everyone on the planet.
It’s not difficult for God to prove His existence.
Well, I stipulate my lack of qualifications as an expert witness in the contemporary legal sense. And I have evidence, but I cannot give you more than anecdote, which falls short of evidence.
Although I am not attempting to witness on behalf of logic, I have not been illogical. I simply don’t think logic applies. The wrong tool for the task at hand. I witness for the Love of God. My witness cannot be by logic, and must therefor be by demonstration. Sadly, I am under qualified for that as well.
An you love all those you can, I have no stone to cast. Well, actually, I am forbidden to cast stones in any case, but I don’t find fault with you.
But, I love Sam Gamgee, and Hazel-rah, and many others who do not exist. They do not exist, yet my love does. I love my Lord as well. I know you don’t believe He exists. I think that convincing your that He does exist would be a disservice to you,but can you see that despite that, my love for him might exist?
I would ask you if your Love of Jupiter exists only in your head, or in your heart. If it was only in your head, I would choose to give you fellowship to place your faith in your heart, and live as your heart directed. But I feel no dissatisfaction, other than a lingering intellectual doubt that your faith in Jupiter may be hypothetical.
The Lord has not given me the authority to rule the hearts of others. Nor the ability.
I have far more vituperative arguments with some Christians than anything I have experienced in this thread.
Yes, If you want to order my behavior in this world, you better trot out your authority, up front, and in undeniable fact based evidence.
To influence my heart, you must convince me that what you espouse is worth living, without your justifications. I don’t see the world becoming better if we burn all the witches. I do see the world becoming better if each of us restricts our judgments of our fellow man to compassionate limits, based on a fundamental belief that love can always be the answer. On that, I don’t need proof, and to abandon it, I would need a great deal of proof.
But, I do believe that Jesus Christ is the living son of God. I have been delusional, in fact, and recognize delusion in myself. This isn’t one of them. I got better. I didn’t come to faith while I was crazy, that happened later. I am not fool enough to believe that God’s existence can be proven or disproven. Because I do believe He exists it seems obvious that He chose to make that path to Himself unavailable.
So, I follow the path I think will keep me with Him. Love every soul you meet, as if that were God Himself. One day, it will be.
I haven’t experienced God. To me, there has been nothing to feel, nothing to see, no target for any affection. At best I could only love the idea of God, not an actual God, because for an actual God I lack a referent.
Not to speak for Tris, but you’ll probably get the same answer: there is no “now what?”.
At least for him, he doesn’t care if you believe in God or not. Some other religious people might not answer the same way Tris answers, but then you should argue with them, not him.
There’s such a vast range of gods to chose from I would think proof of some sort would be required even for believers. I mean, how do you chose between Zeus, Jupiter, Thor, Yahweh, Allah, God, Buddha, Xenu, etc etc? The followers of each of those gods are just as passionate about how their god is the one true one. But their belief systems are often quite varied and contradictory. Even the followers of the same basic religion often can’t agree and will kill each other over the differences (Catholic vs. Protestant, Shia vs Sunni, etc). If nothing else, I would expect the god to clarify the differences to his own followers so they don’t kill each other.
If god exists and he wants me to believe, he’s going to have to flip some switch in my head for it to happen. When I hear people talk about their god, it’s like they are talking about how they believe in Santa Claus. The more they talk, the more I disbelieve in what they’re saying. There certainly are valuable moral lessons in religious teachings, but that just doesn’t translate into me being able to believe that some god is the cause of all of it. The extraodinary proof is necessary in order to flip that switch in my head.
