Sure. I am ako agnostic about IPU
I would say no, because there are a lot more people who claim to have met God than there are people who claim to have met the IPU.
(A claim by someone that they have met God is crummy evidence…but, formally speaking, it is evidence. We get to put very little weight upon it. In many cases, we get to dismiss it. “I was flyin’ on LSD an’ I saw, like, God, y’know…” Crappy evidence…but it is a kind of evidence.)
Count Irresistible Force[sup](AKA YoungKusher)[/sup], may I present Baron Immovable Object[sup](AKA Der Trihs)[/sup].
I’m sure you two will get along famously. [sub]Much to our amusement…[/sub]
This exchange is cracking me up. 100 quatloos on the newcomer. No, 1000 quatloos. 
Right - and you’ll notice thats technically the difference between “agnostic theist” (unknowable) and the “agnostic atheist” (currently unknown in fact).
The reality here is that the theist really needs that “faith” element (without evidence) for it to work - but they don’t like to admit it.
The other aspect of the “unknowable” part is that there simply isn’t enough evidence to decide one way or the other - even after examining available objective evidence (I’m agnostic as to the person’s guilt as the evidence can be read both ways).
Ok - then not only are you consistent, I think I understand your position, and apologize for misreading it earlier in the thread.
Right - unfortunately subjective evidence is unhelpful in any form of “exists” for a physical being - we need objective evidence in order to say that ‘x exists’.
The reality tho - is we have plenty of evidence for Pink unicorns - I saw some statues of them at Walmart - Unicorns are definitely featured in ancient and modern literature - they have hoofs and I have seeen hoofprints - perhpas they are “invisible” unless you have enough ‘faith’. Similarly for Santa Clause - as a child I sent letters to him and got (atleast some of) the items I asked for.
(that is the crux of it - people say there is more evidence because of the claims - there are just as many valid claims for the other critters as well)
That’s a bit circular since delusions are based on prior experience and expectations, and a lot more people have been conditioned to believe in God.
Of course, with the right dosage of good LSD, one eventually realizes that God and the IPU are one and the same! 
Those images in our head make the IPU politically incorrect, because many religious folk’s proof(to them) of God is partially or mostly BASED on their spiritual relationship with God. That proof is not inherently comparable to an IPU because the same sort of relationship would not exist with an IPU.
The debate(and my understanding) of the IPU argument has become askew by being filtered through many posts. Der Trihs was claiming that believers would respond emotionally and irrationally to the IPU, simply because it was an accurate comparison to God. Not to mention the very first time I saw the IPU argument was in the context of people basically making fun of believers.
My quarrel with the evidence of existence in other creatures, or an IPU, being equated to God, is that ordinary people don’t think of those creatures as being plausible or think of them as being significant at all for that matter. Many religious people communicate with God spiritually everyday and feel as though there is a genuine connection. That is their proof, not quantifiable but more proof than any of the alternatives you have suggested merit.
Valid point, and exemplified by cycles in UFO sightings. There was the “cigar-shaped ship with many lighted windows” vogue, for instance, and the “saucer-shaped ship” vogue.
Our brains tend to fill gaps in our sensory fields with familiar images. A guy might “see” the ghost of his grandmother…but how often would he say, “I saw the ghost of Queen Victoria,” or even the ghost of his next door neighbor’s grandmother? Those latter images aren’t familiar to him, and so would be less likely to be the targets of hallucination.
If a whole lot of American Christians started seeing images of Fujin, the Japanese Wind God, that would be really interesting!
This really makes me want to change my name to Count Irresistible Force lol. This post made my day btw, I’m glad someones getting something out of all of this 
Just to tack on to my previous post, that faith often times comes from an observable piece of evidence. It could be confirmation bias, it could be chance, or it could be ignorance that someone would see something so profound it made them believe in God.
My Mom for example acquired her true belief when she quit smoking. She had smoked for 15 years and tried multiple times to quit. The only times she was ever able to temporarily quit were the 3 times she was pregnant. She shamefully admits that she’s not sure if she would have quit if the smell of smoke hadn’t made her sick during her pregnancy. One day a few years after my youngest brother was born, she’s having a conversation in her head with God, and jokingly saying to him that if you can help me quit smoking, I’ll believe and start going to church. She said it was the most profound thing she had ever experienced when she suddenly stopped wanting cigarettes. After many many times of trying to quit on her own and failing, she makes an deal with God and never smokes another cigarette again.
This can be explained away as confirmation bias as far as her belief, and as far as her never having another craving for a cigarette again, maybe it was her subconsciously suppressing her need because she knows it’s bad for her. God making her quit is just a way for her mind to rationalize doing something difficult that most can’t do on their own.
My point is, that on an individual level, it is very easy for someone to have evidnece enough(for themselves) of God, than it ever would be for an IPU.
Why does a debate have to be “politically correct” ? Why do I have to make the “god believers” feel “good” about their delusions?
Define how you have a ‘spriritual relationship’ with this ‘spiritual being’ that there is no evidence outside of your mind for?
The only reason you fight the concept that it is not comparable to the IPU is because you instantly see the lunacy of believing in such a being - if, as Der Tris implied, the IPU was established for you in your youth, and “GOD” was the other thing - you would have no problem with this. (generic you)
While some certainly do - that is not the point of the argument - the point is to start the believer down a path of logical thinking - or atleast to admit that the amount of objective evidence is equal - and to re-iterate the other point - they really should not care that there is ‘no evidence’ - as the entire mantra of ‘religious faith’ is that it is belief without evidence.
First - it is not being equated “to god” - we are equating the evidence for the existence of critter A with the evidence for critter B. If you would not accept critter A without evidence, why do you accept critter B?
Get rid of the emotional constraint and simply think about that very simple point - the answer may simply be irrational (because I do) or due to “religious faith” (also irrational, but thats a different debate).
Not to a reasoned mind - the proof you suggest is subjective and ‘irrational’ as it cannot be arrived at thru reasoned manners - secondly - since there is so much division in what qualifies as “connection with god” and or the “message” or who gets what prayers answered - its all to ‘random’ to be valid scientifically.
IOW - its delusional and its unhealthy in the long term - regardless of any perceived placebo affect - positive feelings are positive feelings - they don’t do shit for curing cancer, but they can help the recovery and ‘dealing with’ the issue.
Why is it that the believers in “God” get special privilege for evidence for this “being”, when they themselves won’t accept my version of invisible creatures?
Maybe GOD DID come to me in the guise of an IPU - who are you to say my perception is any less valid?
WHy is it that the person that goes on TV today and starts screaming “I talked with GOD, he told me to build an ark” is immediately assumed to be a nutter, while we accept with evidence that some dude 6000 years ago did the same thing? (heard from god, built an ark, etc) ?
(kudos to your mom for finding a coping mechanism - thats what religion and faith is in the end - )
The problem is that this point is dead wrong. Someone who had recently heard the word of the great IPU, and who was “miraculously” able to quit smoking, could perfectly well imagine that it was due to the divine intervention of the IPU. Hundreds of Muslims attribute their miraculous healing to Allah; hundreds of Hindus attribute their miraculous healing to Shiva; hundreds of neo-pagans attribute their miraculous healing to The Bright Lady. What sets any one of these up above any other?
That’s the point of the IPU: we have thousands of religions already, and you haven’t shown us any reason that yours is different than any of them. People are making up new stuff to believe in, right to this very day. I know people who have incorporated “Elbereth” into their worship rituals, notwithstanding she’s a fictional character from a 1960’s fantasy novel.
The IPU is a reductio ad absurdum on this theme. It is objectively indistinguishable from a large number of existing religions. Including yours.
Take the Mormon faith, as one example: it was made up just under 200 years ago. Or take Christian Science, which was made up around 140 years ago.
In their very first years, each was every bit as absurd as the IPU. Today, they are major denominations with tens of millions of followers.
We don’t really need the IPU as a metaphor, given that we have real-world absurdity as examples. Hell, the IPU is our attempt to be more polite, not less, by pointing to something without giving offense to anyone (just as I’ve been rude to tens of millions of Mormons and Christian Scientists.)
The IPU is very much the same as Russell’s Teapot: it’s an hypothetical, which we use to shine light on the actual absurdity of the world’s major organized religions.
Exactly; and this is where I make my break from Der Trihs. In my opinion, such coping mechanisms are either not harmful at all, or so very little harmful that it is pointless for me to combat them.
If even the great skeptic and above-average philosopher Martin Gardner could hold a personal religious faith because it helped him deal emotionally with the world’s pain, who are we to deny the anodyne of religious faith to anyone?
If they’ll leave us alone, we’ll leave them alone.
Using taxpayer money to put crosses on hilltops is not leaving us alone.
Agreed -
to the (bolded) section - there is a line however - where the ‘church’ requires such adherence to archaic traditions (birth control, doctors in general, ‘faith healers’, suicide bombers, science, etc) that it is objectively harmful to the population on whole - and its a hard line to follow when it comes to ‘freedom of religion and expression and rigth to choose’ stuff - versus when they impose those traditions on the youth - even unto death - in the name of “GOD”.
IOW, - to the degree you stated (leave me alone, I’ll leave you alone) for the adults I agree - but the youth - our future - deserve better.
Something something ‘what you do for the least’ – bible - something.
Religion and ‘faith’ is divisive - it does not breed unity - it appears to on the surface atleast in small groups that you belong to, but only when you agree blindly - as soon as you start to question you’re thrown to the outside (especially if you are at all vocal about it) - and the outsiders are always frowned upon -it’s always “get more people in OUR church” and “why did you go to THAT church” - don’t even get me started on cult like organizations…
I should point out some context here. In the love-and-peace kind of Christianity, which is the only kind I had any direct experience with, I don’t think there’s any talk of eternal damnation and hellfire, at least to kids in Sunday school. It’s pretty much all Jesus loves you stuff, and if that creates confusion and guilt in a kid, he has deeper problems than just religion. That was the context of my comment. If you’re talking the ultra-religious types who have more respect for arbitrary rules than they do for real live people, I agree with you, but their religious upbringing must have been by repressed misfits preaching fear and hate, not nice ladies teaching Jesus loves you. (BTW, I really doubt that MLK worried too much about hell, given his record of infidelity. And before anyone jumps all over that, that isn’t snarky criticism of him. He’s one of the greatest figures of our time, but he had his warts, and I’m just pointing out one of them to make a separate point.)
All I know is that I was exposed to religion directly for a couple of years as a kid, and indirectly throughout my childhood by culture, and yet at around 12 or 13, I still was able to conclude that the bible was irrelevant to me and the concept of God was false. Since then, it hasn’t been a factor in my life at all. If that’s not enough to determine that I wasn’t harmed by religion, then we can’t determine anything.
Your experience was obviously different than mine, and if you were harmed by it, I fully understand and sympathise. Parents can put way too much emphasis on religion and rely on it too much, and the kids can suffer for it. Luckily for me (and luck is all it was), I never had the misfortune of being in that situation.
It doesn’t necessarily. This point stems from the idea that the IPU was used under the guise of an enlightening comparison, when in fact it doesn’t provide any productive thought due to it’s antagonistic nature. The idea that it is antagonistic comes from the way it was being used by others earlier in this thread.
Just to be clear, I do not have a spiritual relationship with said God or SDB. But it entails a certain meditative state where an individual might bounce ideas off God in order to get advice, or spiritual guidance as it might be called. What I think might be really going on here is the person is in fact bouncing ideas off of themselves, they are just filtering the ideas to reflect what they think God would tell them. The subconscious is capable of impressive feats, and deluding yourself into thinking you are communicating with God is certainly one of them.
On a side note, I recently was reading about how instincts, or your “gut,” might actually be real. They believe that your subconscious processes complex information and it is then perceived by your conscious mind as a faint “gut feeling” of what you should do. Your conscious mind isn’t aware of why it is the right choice, but still feels as though it’s right. This has no correlation to the discussion, just an interesting tidbit I thought others might like.
This point was made before, but I still disagree because my notion of any possible God is far removed from anything that would have form. My response to this idea is that an IPU has no inherent ability to relate to human issues. How would people pray to something that resembles an animal? How would someone develop a spiritual relationship with the idea of riding it while their doing it? It’s quite different than someone having a relationship with a concept of their choosing, or at least a humanoid God like some religions have.
It’s a valid point, but then you have to state all these details upfront, or else it’s akin to the same “goal post shifting” believers do(so I’ve been told) when an atheist is trying to put their thumb on the exact definition of what God is to them.
Like I said to Voyager, under those circumstances it’s really not that big of a deal. I was essentially trying to figure out why some people could possibly think that post #12 was a productive and enlightening way to engage a person of faith when it is so clearly just a jab at silly religious rituals and belief.
I meant compare evidence of IPU to evidence of God. Sry for being unclear.
My quarrel was never with the point, just with the tactics(used by some). On a perfectly logical basis, there is no evidence, but by God being spiritual in nature, people use God to help them emotionally as well so it’s hard to try to apply cold logic to it.
I’m aware it’s subjective, but it’s not subjective to the believer. Had my Mother been monitored scientifically throughout all of that, I have no doubt they would have said something like, “Due to your Mother beginning menopause, her hormone levels fluctuated dramatically and we believe that significantly contributed to her successfully quitting. The fact that she made a deal with God and got a seemingly prompt answer to her prayer is just a coincidence,” but that’s not how she saw it.
My Mom went from being a smoker to a marathon runner, she’s much happier, and she is way less of a bitch.
Explain how it’s unhealthy please. What evidence do you have?
The placebo effect and truly believing your body can be healed might be more powerful than you give it credit for. (but that too is another debate) Simply having a support group or having the frame of mind can mean the difference between life and death in cancer patients.
This is a little different, but I was reading something about everyday people getting into fist fights, and it showed that the person who thinks they are going to win almost certainly does, and not for any obvious logical reason.
Oi… I’ve tried to show why your (and others) made-up invisible creatures don’t stand up to what people think of as God, but I guess it’s futile. You have to actually have an understanding of what people use God for.(on a personal level)
I’m the arbiter of divine validity… In that case, it’s not less valid. lol But don’t go arguing that your IPU is better than randompatterns magic Tree!
Probably has something to do with how Noah’s flood was noted across many civilizations and he was considered to be a nutter by some at the time as well. All of those skeptics are dead now, and the modern nutter is just waiting for his flood. lol
What would we do without them
Here we go again…
This point is intertwined with the fact an IPU is a ridiculous form for a deity to have. Name any one of those religions that prays to and has a personal relationship with an animal deity.
If you would please, read all the comments and have an understanding of the context before barging in.
Is that a joke? lol I didn’t know agnosticism is a religion. You obviously haven’t even read all of the comments. How can you claim I haven’t shown any reasons?
At least I got a laugh out of this.
Well… Phhhyuh… but that’s the wrong God, let alone not being the right Jesus.
Is this a joke?
There are plenty of religions that worship animals or spiritual animals.
Why are they more ‘obviously ridiculous’ than your ( generic your, just to avoid another of your condescending remarks) God who got himself executed and now becomes a cookie every sunday, to be eaten by his worshippers.
This alone reduces your argument down to, my invisible imaginary friend is better than your invisible imaginary friend.
Because a believer, and even an agnostic, has invested and worked out a fiction they can swallow. Indeed, a believer has spent years upon years building up this fiction, brick by brick with the help of others working to maintain that fiction that anything else, no matter how equivalently fanciful, truly does seem ridiculous when viewed from their god-colored lenses (which is puce, not pink).
If they allowed themselves to admit this to themselves, their fiction would crumble and their world-view with it. And who wants that when the world looks so much better through puce-colored glasses?
Again: A form of denial.
Where did these sub catagories come from and what gives them any authority as definitions? I saw somethng simialr a few monhs back when another poster tried to tell me I wasn’t really an agnostic.
Here’s my take ,
I believe in god, but I recognize that god’s existence cannot be proven in any scientific way. There is no objective evidence to establish God’s existence. =
Theist , one who is a little more open minded and less defensive about their belief.
I don’t believe in god. because there is no objective evidence that any such things exist, I acknowledge that this can’t be known in an absolute or scientific sense. An athiest,
I have no opinion on the existence of god. An apathetic. Someone who is uninterested in the question, or chooses not to be drawn into it.
I don’t know if god exists. Maybe yes , maybe no. There isn’t anything conclusive one way otr the other. I suspect this is something we can’t really know. An agnostic.
Let’s note that either atheist or theist might acknowledge “I suspect this is something we can’t really know” They have simply made the personal choice about which side of the issue works best for them.
I don’t find the sub catagories particularly useful.