As for what makes me so certain that the God I know is real, my evidence is going to be worthless to you since it is entirely anecdotal. There have been times in my life over the past 30 years or so that God seemed very distant and other times when God has seemed very close. I question my own beliefs constantly as any rational person would, but in the end, countless times in my life, I have seen evidence I find certain.
You know there do exist religions without gods. Buddhism is perhaps the best known – in it if you want to worship a god, fine, but it is irrelevant to Buddhist practice. The West seems to think unless you believe in one of their gods you are an “atheist” of the materialist (such as Communist) sort. It ain’t necessarily so.
nm
That’s not what this thread was about. You can start your own thread on this neglected subject if you want.
On topic: There aren’t any other gods. It is, however, perfectly possible for someone who was worshipping “another god” to have been seeking after some aspect of the real one, and even finding something that they were looking for. It’s asking a lot for the pagans to be mistaken on all points.
I can certainly understand why personal evidence would be effective - it’s personal, after all - but in the world there are many people who would say the same as you have here about any number of gods, many of them not simply different but contradictory. Given that we can be sure that of all the people in the world who truly believe they have a personal experience with a deity or deities of some kind, the majority by definition must be incorrect, isn’t it reasonable to assume one’s own self falls into that category?
To put it another way; if you’re basing your belief on the fact - and we can happily agree that it’s a fact - that you are personally convinced, doesn’t the high likelihood of personal fallibility negate that? Even if only on an intellectual level.
Buddhism is unusual. Other religions say, here is a religious experience. This experience is caused by a being–God. Let’s try to determine His properties. Buddhism says, here is a religious experience. This experience is pleasant and useful. Let’s cultivate it. So they’re talking about the same thing as other religions, without necessarily bringing God into it. I’m not sure how Confucianism fits my definition, though.
I see no reason why I and a lot of others should bother reading or following this thread if you limit it that way. It does seem though that others are ignoring your effort to prevent any dissenting voice. We will see.
Thanks for that. Sensible response.
Confucianism is full of traditional Chinese deities, although most of the “worship” of these deities happens in Taoism. The two get along and tend to supplement each other, one being emotional and ritualistic using exciting rituals, the other being dignified and using quiet peaceful rituals. Both have a sort-of “high God” but don’t try to define him or tell us much about him. The lesser deities get most of the attention of the public.
The entire world can be right or wrong about various gods, that is not for me to say. In a world of anecdotal evidence, your ‘facts’ are at best thinly disguised subjective opinions just like mine. Mine are mine is all and I have to trust my own judgment. What anyone else thinks is essentially irrelevant.
Subjective polls are interesting, but in this case, my opinion is the only one that matters. I can still be wrong if EVERYONE thinks I am right and conversely. Thus, I will ride my beliefs as I see them with no concern to general consensus.
So when it comes to your own religion, do you believe in the existence of gods other than your own?
No, it’s not irrelevant; it’s very relevant, because if we’re attempting to determine how valuable and useful a person’s convincedness is, we only really have everyone else in the world to use as a comparative tool. It’s not a very good one, admittedly, but it’s the only one we have. And what it tells us is that it’s relatively easy to be convinced of very many differing things, things that often conflict with what other people believe, and that due to that at the very least a vast majority of the convinced world is wrong. On that basis, it’s not reasonable to use your own conviction as evidence for that conviction, because it’s demonstrably flawed in humans in general. Not, of course, necessarily wrong, as you point out; but not evidence to reasonably rely upon.
I include myself in this, by the way. I’m an agnostic with a few athiestic points as regards particular deities, but the fact that I am convinced that this is so isn’t any kind of evidence at all that i’m right - after all, I can always point to you, likewise convinced, and who am I to say that my reasoning is superior to yours, or yours to mine, or ours to everyone else? I can’t. So it would be unreasonable for me to use my own considerably conviction as evidence in and of itself.
We absolutely should not trust our own judgment. What reason do we have to, besides ownership? I own a computer, but just because it’s mine doesn’t mean I should take it over every other computer in the world.
Please tell, why should I care what you think of my convincedness? I am convinced of my beliefs; why should anyone else matter?
Because barring some way of measuring how good our reasoning is, your judgment is equal to mine, and everyone elses’. So there’s no basis for me to use my personal convictions as evidence over yours, and vice-versa.
The question isn’t why should anyone else matter; the question is why should we, ourselves, matter? Because the only difference we can reliably point to is ownership, and ownership is no basis for value in and of itself.
To put it another way; you absolutely shouldn’t care about what people think. So why are you, as a person, an exception? Why should we care what we think?
Hogwash. Pure theoretical, philosophical hogwash. I live in a practical world that causes me to suffer the consequences of my thoughts and actions. No theoretical mind game has caused me harm nor caused me to question my own mind.
I have my beliefs and they are rock solid because I believe them. I believe them because of evidences that have no consequence to anyone else and others believe what they do for their own reasons. If some absolute objective truth disproved my beliefs, I would adjust and move on, but until then, my anecdotal evidence is the absolute BEST evidence I can find.
I have a parent with memory issues. I would hope that if I get into that condition, I would realize it and adjust accordingly, but until then, I am good.
Again, why should I ever care what anyone else thinks? I didn’t come to my beliefs based on some poll of the planet. Honestly, if I am the ONLY one that believes as I do, what should it matter? My life is my responsibility as are my beliefs.
No, my judgment is not equal to your’s. It is 1000% better because it is mine. I have spent a lifetime determining my path in this life. It occupies pretty much all day every day and you believe somehow that the mere hours you dedicate to questioning it should matter?
You’re welcome to believe whatever you like. The problem is, you’re dismissing everyone else’s belief system out of hand, by proclaiming that your God is the only one that exists, and everyone else is essentially hallucinating. So I ask you again – how do you determine that you don’t have it backwards, that you aren’t the one hallucinating an image of God?
Are you certain about that? Haven’t there been any opportunities that passed you by, because they conflict with your faith and your image of God?
How would your life be different without God guiding you towards and/or away from certain experiences?
I’m not intending to harm you, if that’s the implication there.
I would like to thank you for defending the practical vs. the theoretical to me. On my side of the fence, usually i’m arguing the other side, so it’s a nice change for me. 
“It is mine” is no argument. Ownership is not an argument for value, only for how personal it is. My shoes are mine; they are not, therefore and solely because of that, 1000% better than yours. I’d probably wager that yours actually are better, since mine have holes in and I could do with new ones, if anything. But then we’re getting into valuations that we can measure, so that’s beside the point! 
Everyone on this planet has lived their life. Everyone on this planet has convictions based on their own lives. And the majority of people - with convictions, strongly held, based on those lives - are provably wrong. You and I disagree; i’d guess our convictions probably contradict. By necessity, you, or I, or both of us, is wrong. What can we learn from that? That we can’t look at a conviction, based on our lives as it is, and say that it itself is evidence. Because if we’re saying that it’s evidence for you, so is mine for me, and yet they conflict. If we say it’s evidence for me, then so it is for you, and yet they conflict. The reasonable conclusion to come to is that merely being convinced that something is the case is no argument by itself for that conviction, because there’s no way to separate out our own convictions (or anyone else’s, for that matter) at all besides who they belong to.
Either we accept all personal convictions as evidence across the board, with no levels of superiority - which we can’t do - or we accept none of them, including our own. It would make absolutely no sense to disregard everyone elses’ convictions, then accept our own - what reason do we have for doing that?
This objection isn’t just for religion. How can you know atheism is right, given that other people believe in God? How can you be sure that 1+1=2, given that everyone makes math errors? It’s irrefutable and leads nowhere.
It’s only an argument against using conviction itself as evidence. Not using evidence as… evidence. I’ve already said that it applies just as equally to my own convictions on the anti- and neutral-belief side of things. My own personal conviction that these things are true isn’t evidence; evidence is evidence.
I would tend to guess that most people would be able to work out 1+1=2, to be fair. But let’s say that it was 5894*2342= 13,803,748. Generally, I think people would find that little bit of arithmetic difficult, and any workings out down highly at risk of error. So even if it might look roughly right to me, and even if I sat down and worked it out, i’d probably still use a calculator or ask someone else to check it (improving the value of the evidence via the odds of simultaneous error matching). And of course i’d check it more if I were a NASA tech in charge of working out some vital cable length than if it was just a random person on the internet using a sum to prove a point.
So I guess what it leads to is an attempt to try and reasonably control for unforseen errors. Which seems useful enough to me. And a recognition that we can’t use a tool which is demonstrably unreliable - whether that’s our conviction as to the existence of deities, or our ability to do sums accurately, or whatever - in some persons while accepting it in others purely on the basis that one of them is our own.
There have been times in my life that people have tried to convince me that the ‘facts’ in some incident were different from what I believed. So perhaps, friend A tells me a set of facts and friend B comes along and says, no that ain’t so. In those cases, I have to weigh the relative merits of what I am being told based on a number of factors to include perhaps just how much I trust either friend.
I have never understood it, but at times, I have had people try to tell me that my facts were wrong when I was there to see it myself. Sorry, no amount of bullshit no matter how well delivered could ever shake my set of facts in that case.
The truth is that before I knew diddly about the Bible, I believed in God. It was the unquestionable experiences that I went through that convinced me that God was real. I examined the facts that I knew, the experiences I went through and in the end, I came to believe that this Jesus was precisely who He said He was. I have examined every evidence I could find. I have listened to wise men and not so wise men, the righteous and the not so righteous. I have examined many of the arguments of atheists both here and on other sites. At the end of the day, it is not a single experience that convinces me but the burden of the proofs that I have experienced over the past 30 years.
At the end of the day, my experiences are better proof to me because I was there. I have seen what I have seen.
Oh and I didn’t mean to imply any harm whatsoever. I get that this is an intellectual discussion and I enjoy that. Just understand that at the end of the day, the 20 miles I have spent in my shoes are pretty convincing and I don’t expect to change someone else’s mind short of those 20 in theirs.
I am responsible for me, for what I do, what I think and what I believe. I simply choose rightly or wrongly to believe in this Jesus guy. I have been doing just that for 30 years and have no regrets for doing it.
Are you aware that in general, eyewitness accounts are often extremely unreliable? Since it has some strong practical effect as a matter of law, there’s as you might guess reams of research on the matter, which, in general, means we now recognise that an individual’s personal account of a series of events can often be highly inaccurate, and shouldn’t be relied upon.
It’s not enough to say that you are wrong to trust your senses and your memory. But it’s certainly enough to say that you are wrong to never doubt your own senses and memory, to have such faith in your own personal experience of an event that it is unshakeable, that no person could ever make you even consider it otherwise. That isn’t reasonable at all.
Of course, here we’re talking about our opinions of evidence, rather than the worth of an opinion in and of itself, so it’s a little away from the subject.
I have no particular objection to you basing your conviction on evidence, though of course i’m sure we’d disagree on the value of that evidence, or we wouldn’t disagree on the existence of deities. I’m objecting to the idea that conviction in and of itself is valuable.
Purely for the sake of argument, I doubt whether “choose” is the right word. I could not choose to believe. Could you choose not to?
And, of course, having no regrets is also not evidence in and of itself.