Faith, religion, and the afterlife: A form of denial

What part of invisible don’t you get? :smiley: As for the Western god, things are not clear. While later versions have no corporeal form, Moses saw his backside. And then there is Jesus. Clearly God can make himself physical if he wishes to. In any case, no one has wasted too much time doing IPU version 2s the way they’ve done Jehovah V2.
I agree that giving money to the IPU would be stupid. So is giving money to the Western God. God needs neither a starship or cash. Those whose career involves the claim that they know what god wants on the other hand …

It would intellectually valid, but it would also be trolling. Atheists hold themselves to a higher standard. (I’m sure some atheists troll theist groups - none involved in those though.)

First, I’m assuming he knows what he will do from the very beginning. Even before the moment of creation, in fact. That comes with omniscience. But he can’t change anything without violating omniscience, so there goes omnipotence.
And multiple universes don’t help. He still can’t do it in a given universe. If I claim to be able to control a die, and force it to a 6, I don’t get to throw down 50 die, pick out a 6, and say I’ve proven my power.

No, he must know in one universe. Say his omniscience lets him know which horse wins the sixth race at Belmont one day. In some universe, every horse in the race wins. How is that truly omniscient?
Good try, though - that is a better counterargument than I usually hear.

As usual, it depends on your definition of God. Some gods science has made absurd. Some are invisible and unfalsifiable. But no humanly defined God with any supposed interaction with us has stood up to scientific or historical scrutiny.

George Adamski, in the '50s, claimed that he got a ride on a UFO and visited Venus. He described it quite well. Venus as he described it of course bears no relationship to what we have found with our probes. We now laugh at him. But if he were in the God biz someone would be writing about how his description of Venus was of course not literal, but could be interpreted as being exactly correct.

As a believer I see fortune and misfortune much the same way an athiest does. I just believe that life was created by god using evolution as his method of choice. I also believe that we have some form of energy that will live on after we dies and that it has some purpose. I admit that I pray and meditate often even though I am not sure anyone is listening I feel like god is listening and I often feel like prayers are answered.

No different from a theist claiming that God is the truth and rather obvious at that. This has basically become a battle of you reasserting your opinion over and over again while I ask you to demonstrate some sort of verifiable proof, so I think this has just about run it’s course.

It’s a red herring, it doesn’t even merit a response.

I’m not pretending anything. You are obviously just a pretentious jerk when it comes to this topic. You strawman me at every turn, put words in my mouth, and can’t provide any significant proof to back up your own claims…

God is inherently incomprehensible. Are you so arrogant you would presume to be able to comprehend something of that nature, if it exists? That’s kin to a microbe comprehending our existence.

Strawmanning me again

Comparisons? Those are simply examples used to illustrate a point, not comparisons to ANYTHING. And they are true. Is this what you consider a productive discussion? Where you bend my points and meaning to whatever suits the thought you are typing at the moment?

How is it not mysterious that history claims the Great Pyramid of Giza was built in 20 years, even thought that would mean that they would have had to lay a giant brick about every 14 seconds? How is it not mysterious that modern experts honestly don’t have the foggiest idea how ancient Egyptians built it? It’s all speculation. How is it not mysterious that we don’t understand why water functions the way it does? Water is fundemaental part for all life on Earth and we would not exist without it afterall.

Strawmanning and red herring

You have perpetrated more logical fallacies than you have claimed God’s existence has. lol

None of those supernatural beings have any relevance in this conversation. What is your reasoning for claiming that if someone believes in God, then they must also believe in fairy tale creatures?

I can only take this to mean you actually don’t have any idea what specific laws of physics God would have to break to exist. You seem to like to snip my statements to suit your responses generally in a misleading way.

Just saying’ “The laws of physics,” is akin to a theist saying, “Because the Bible says so… somehwhere in there.”

Our laws of physics aren’t even all that sound. Quantum mechanics and Einstein’s Theory of Relativity both contradict each other. QM only applies to things on a quantum level, and ETR only applies to things in the macro-world. Not vice a versa

So, are you going to validate your argument by providing an explanation? Or are you just on the atheist bandwagon? It seems to me, from what I’ve seen so far, that all you have done is spend some time on message boards where you learned about the debate against theists, and now you’re just regurgitating cliche arguments that don’t even fit the scenario very well.

I think there is another message board that you may be more suited for. It’s called IMHO…

I’m just making a point. There is no sense in making a claim either way. It might have been a necessary evil to get us to where we are now. And now, that we have all of this knowledge at our fingertips, we can shed religion, and evolve as a civilization.

Huh, well why were sharing random, irrelevant facts, I’ll add this, my Mom quit smoking, became an extremely health conscious person, and stopped being a bitch when she became religious.

Now to my real point, which you also strawmanned, you are essentially accusing every single person who is religious in any way, of having a stupid belief, and perpetrating evil across the globe. That’s discrimination bud.

[QUOTE]
No, because “God” is purely religious concept, and because we are all really just talking about the Christian god anyway.

No were not. You just want to make it about the Christian God so that it is easy for you to bash.

I admit the Christian God has been the basis of certain sub-levels of this discussion, but has generally been specifically referred to in those instances.

Those are negative things that have happened under very specific circumstances, not something that the average religious person partakes in on a significant level. I’ll add that those people must have been predisposed to committing evil to do so.

So basically, you want to administer some sort of new mass form of control over people, because religion is silly? Some form that doesn’t give people the moral license or ability to commit evil acts? Huh, you’re a revolutionary. Maybe you can call it g o v e r n m e n t or something. Good Luck! :smiley:

That’s a blatantly ignorant response. Do you know what the definition of perceived is? Here I’ll help you.

per·ceive
pərˈsēv/Submit
verb
1.
become aware or conscious of (something); come to realize or understand.
“his mouth fell open as he perceived the truth”
synonyms: discern, recognize, become aware of, see, distinguish, realize, grasp, understand, take in, make out, find, identify, hit on, comprehend, apprehend, appreciate, sense, divine; More
become aware of (something) by the use of one of the senses, esp. that of sight.
“he perceived the faintest of flushes creeping up her neck”
synonyms: see, discern, detect, catch sight of, spot, observe, notice More
2.
interpret or look on (someone or something) in a particular way; regard as.
“if Guy does not perceive himself as disabled, nobody else should”
synonyms: regard, look on, view, consider, think of, judge, deem, adjudge

To perceive something is uniquely in the eyes of the beholder.

Admirable? what’s your point? And besides, almost every moment of solace someone has is fraudulent in some way. Who cares how they got there? Just be happy there not all up-tight and a spaz.

Thanks for reiterating your opinion about your abrasive debate tactic.

Oh my God, I better stay away from churches with all of those dangerous people that live in a fantasy world. I might get killed, or worse they will try and socialize with me! Bahahahahahaha

What’s a better place to meet a new friend or a date, a bar or a church?

In my experience, you run into a more dangerous and hedonistic crowd at a bar than you ever might at church.

Your statement has no practical application to an average religious American whatsoever.

It’s just you voicing some discriminating opinion once again.

No, you must not be paying attention. Or you’re so biased you jump to the first fantastical conclusion you think of. I was asking where are all of the theists in this discussion right here, right now with us?

Like I said, religion is based on money and power. So is nearly any other organization that you can compare to a religion.

I suppose you are right when looking at it that way, but God would have to be infinite to exist under these pretenses right? So in your scenario and others like it, God would have an infinite loop for this and simply be able to say, “well I knew I would change that,” then, “well I knew that i knew I would change that,” and so on and so on. Even if he did alter something, it would already have been part of the preordained plan.

Or maybe, once God had created everything, God then temporarily took away it’s own omniscience to the level of “almost omniscience” so that they could enjoy the dabbling on a lower level of consciousness. Kinda like how people get drunk to forget about their problems. lol

This is helpful, thank you.

It shows that their are modern forms of believers, not all of them or even very many of them are radicals or extremists.

:dubious: What is the world would be “verifiable proof” for the IPU being a valid comparison to God? God showing up and telling you to stop insulting his buddy the unicorn?

Because you don’t have one.

Yet another rhetorical handwave that essentially no one believes. Virtually no one believes in an incomprehensible God; that’s something that only comes up in discussions like this one. Outside of such discussions God is very comprehensible, with his followers telling everyone exactly what he’s like, what he does, and what he wants. And that he’s male.

But none of that is true. And none of that is the utter denial of physics and logic that God is.

Oh, they do. You just don’t want to address them because like Santa Claus you have no answer to the question “If God, why not them?” You want a special standard to be applied to God, but you don’t want to even try to justify it.

No, I just didn’t want to produce a long list of them. God breaks everything from the speed of light to all of quantum mechanics. Arguably thanks to omnipotence he breaks all of them.

Compared to the total baselessness of religion they are extremely sound.

No; you just want to justify the Christian God around without admitting to the baggage of the Christian religion. But you are referring to the Christian god; you are describing the Christian God, not Zeus or Anu or Set. The very fact that you use the Christian term “God” helps show that.

As does the fact that you refuse to even address anything supernatural except that God; you aren’t agnostically reserving judgement due to a lack of evidence, or you’d apply the same standard to them. You are clearly looking for away to justify believing in capital-G God, and only that God.

I do call it govenrment. Government works, where religion fails.

I do. Preying on grieving people is disgusting.

No; religion is based on faith, on the denial of reality and of logic. And on spreading the religion that dominates the people it has infected. Money and power are simply the tools religion uses to spread itself with.

I just want to acknowledge here that the response by Trinopus very nicely delineates exactly what I was saying, and the challenge of “how are you going to persuade the organized churches today?” was well answered in the reply by simster.

In brief:

Organized religions at various points in history have been been either political forces, cults, or businesses – or combinations thereof. And they have mostly (though not always) been harmful, and very often dangerously so. The history of organized religion in human affairs is a mostly violent and most unpleasant one.

The only point that I wanted to make here is that personal spirituality is a different concept altogether and should not be attacked on the same basis.

There’s always self control.

If it takes the threat of hell to make you a moral person, then you are not at all moral, you are just a coward who responds well to threats.

Write back and tell us when you’ve had a treesome.

Then again, maybe not. Sex with innominate objects was never what it was hyped to be…in any event, I’d imagine you’d have to be careful with the branches.

Wear…a Kevlar cup?

It DOES have a knothole in it.:wink:

I think we have read the data differently. Setting anecdotes aside, where is the data that has conclusively proven that hot water freezes faster than cold water and can be replicated by others?

Cecil’s column that commented on Jearl in the article in Scientific American was this:

So the evaporation causes the hotter water to be of lesser volume. If you took a drop of water, a pint, a quart, a gallon, all of the same temperature before setting in the freezer, the smaller amount will freeze faster. When the water vapor was contained with Saran Wrap, the freezing rate was “greatly diminished.” It doesn’t give numbers here, but again, I just don’t think any of this is a big mystery. Cecil only concluded from this that very hot water freezes more slowly than VERY hot water.

lol Oh I’m sorry… Are you missing the point again? I guess you will just hve to figure this one out on your own.

What do you mean “virtually no one believes?” Do you have any idea what you’re talking about? Any religious person has absolutely sat down at one point or another in their life, and pondered and conceptualized what God is like. There is also many spiritual people who have done the same thing. Of course the human mind is going to fabricate some sort of relatable, imagined form so they don’t blow their mind every time they think of God. That doesn’t mean that they believe they can comprehend or understand the magnitude of God. Most people consider God to be the Supreme Being, which inherently has all of the attributes I have been talking about.

You are simply trying to funnel the discussion into an area we both already agree is absurd.

You do understand this is an agnostic arguing with an atheist right? The discussion is definitely going to encompass a different area of thought than a discussion between an atheist and a theist.

I can understand why that might take you out of your comfort zone, someone telling you why your atheism is just a belief, not a proven fact.

It is true to the exact extent which I have stated, although apparently as of 2013 they have developed a new, promising theory as to why hot water freezes faster than cold water. It is still not perfectly clear how the pyramids were built either. My point is that there are many basic things that we haven’t figured out yet. It is premature to conclude that God can not exist based on our current knowledge and understanding of the world.

What does “the utter denial of physics and logic” have to do with it? Like I said, those are not comparisons. They illustrate the point that we don’t know diddly squat compared to what we would need to know about God to make the assertion that it does not exist.

Since you can’t prove that God does not exist, you are just assuming it, you also are a believer in a sense.

Ask’s Der Trihs why he won’t provide an explnation.

LOLOLOL so you get to have a special standard for your argument now? lololol

It’s not even a special standard in my case. IT IS A RED HERRING. It is simply a way for you to distract from the real point by bringing in some convoluted non-sense. I’m sure I could put together a precise list of reasons why other mythical beings are inadmissible in this discussion.

You keep trying to take the discussion to a place where it has no need of being.

It’s not unreasonable or uncommon for believers to think that science and God go hand in hand. They are rational people who understand the Bible is antiquated and it’s exact words are merely an accurate representation of the time they were written, not an accurate representation of what God is like or what God wants.

I have already said that I have my own thoughts about what God would have to be like if it existed. Whatever similarities it shares with a Christian God are of no significance because it has been altered so dramatically.

Also, you are flat out wrong that using the word “God” is a representation of me implying the Christian God. It’s a neat simple word based on words that predate Christianity, but it obviously has a totally different meaning to you.

So, I’ll start using supreme divine being or SDB so that you can shed all of your religious biases.

What do you mean apply the same standard to them? Whose to say I wouldn’t apply the same standard and those mythical creatures would all reach their destined conclusion? All of those supernatural beings have a corporeal form… something that SDB would not have unless it was somehow temporarily conducive to the situation. They would all need detailed explanations as to why each one is different, which is doable, but really pointless as there is not much to gain in this discussion.

I am NOT looking for a way to justify believing in God. I am simply trying to show that to assert that SDB does not exist, is equally as presumptuous as claiming that SDB does exist.

lol It’s a work in progress… Government allows for just as many evils to be perpetrated as religion.

Preying? WTF are you talking about. Do you consider telling someone that “everything will be alright,” when you know it will probably not be “alright,” a form of fraudulent preying?

According to these assertions, you would rather tell them to “suck it up” than to comfort them?

What I meant to say and have already said before is, religion is ABOUT, not based on money and power.

The rest of what you’re saying here is slanderous nonsense. Money and power are the GOAL, not a means to simply proliferate religion.

So basically, it’s the person, not the laws or the religion that make them do the things they do?

Why would religion bear any of the responsibility at all then, if a moral person knows when it is okay and when it’s not? Maybe it’s because many of the flaws religion has, are actually reflections of the flaws we as people have had all along regardless of religion.

Up until recently, the exact explanation for this phenomena was not known. When Cecil says “greatly diminished,” that’s not exactly definitive and there were other competing theories that went along with the one he presented. Such as: mineral deposits in the water, the container you freeze the water in effecting the results, and other variations. I found this article showing exactly why it occurs. But from what i gather, this is a fairly new discovery. I can’t find anything pre-2013 with this explanation so I suppose I’m using an out of date example.

Even with this new theory, it is not a 100% sound explanation. It still requires further verification on a different level to be deemed valid. It’s kind of like solving a math problem with the wrong method, because that method is not able to solve other related problems it should be able to.

This, as much as any wall of text you’ve posted in this thread illustrates quite well that you are quite the advocate for the God of the Gaps argument. If history and science shows us anything it’s that god is running out of places to hide in the universe. But you believe otherwise. Furthermore, you believe this without the smallest shred of evidence in support of that belief.

You go further to suggest that atheism is simply another belief system - different from yours. Here is another place you are deeply mistaken. Atheism is the absence of a belief system. An atheist is one who understands that there is no evidence for god and therefore has no intrinsic need to believe in such a being. He or she doesn’t hedge bets or hold his breath or cross his fingers while making that statement. An atheist is typically more likely to accept the fact that there are questions to which he or she may never have answers but there is no reason to think that god must be the explanation for the, as yet, unknown.

IMO there’s quite a difference between “Is there a God?” and the specifics of different religous traditions and doctrine. The Bahai teach that all religion is man’s imperfect attempt to understand and commune with God. My approach in the lasty few years to discussions with believers is to point out the obvious and undeniable differenes and contradictions in belief and how beliefs have evolved and changed, not to challange their basic gtod belief, but to point out that religious tradition is something entirely different and okay to question. Many believers already understand that.

I still find these arguments somewhat frivilous and essentially pointless. It seems to me that no matter how it’s framed these arguments are applying our own limited perspective to something proposed to be limitless and all encompassing. In that way the foundation of these arguments is flawed and illogical. For example, in your sparrow one you try to hem God in with time, when God is said to be timeless. These arguments only work when they start by applying some finite human measure and perception to a proposed being that is beyond them.

The biggest flaw I find in these arguments is: Look at all this stuff we don’t know and science can’t explain, therefore, god.

Yup, It’s a process that will take generations of effort. Still, IMO the approach that stands a better chance of progress and success is to not challange God belief, which is something that can’t be proved or disproved anyway, but to challange and point out the difference between religious tradition and the individual spiritual journey. IOW, to remind people that they doon’t have to abandon spirituality or belief in in questioning the details of certain dogma, and in fact, seeking the truth requires that they do so.

which is something I never said or even implied.

I see. My response was half jest Why would I be agnostic about IPU since it’s acknowledged as a created argument rather than proposed as an actual thing.
My point was only that there are plenty of things that I am unsure of thier existance and am open to any new evidence. In the case of a supposed God , I have doubts anything could be actual evidence. Any unexplained events could be just that, rather than God.

I apologize. I misunderstood what you were saying earlier.

[quote=“QuickSilver, post:149, topic:677713”]

pay attention, it was not about a friend of mine but another poster. My response was not a personal defense of a friend as you seem to have read it.

Again, pay attention, I acknowledged that in my response to you so there was no need to point out the obvious. Nobody claimed she was perfect. You seem to have missed the point in your desire to make one of your own. for over 20 years the poster saw her as a great human being without ever knowing she was a believer. That means she didn’t preach her faith to others buut merely practiced it in what appears to be a positive way.
That in no way applies that an atheist can’t be an equally good person. The point is that for some people their faith is their vehicle that results in their life being largely positive for those lives they touch. Who can say if they, or we, would be better off if they didn’t believe? Nobody can. You commented that she’s spreading ignorance. Again I ask, what ignorance do you propose she’s spreading?

Some people hold the opinion that the world would be better off without religion and God belief. They are welcome to hold that opinion but should be aware it is only idle speculation and something they themselves have no realisitic way to establish. Personally I find it humorous and ironic when those who complain about the illogic of God belief want to defend an opinion they cannot really prove in any way.

This is pointless speculation since neither you or I know what class she teaches or her approach.

Apology accepted. this seems to be something of a habit with you in this thread.

There are some people who believed God had sides, and was not invisible, Moses was said to have been told by God he could only see his backside, that no one could see his face and live!