If I say I spent the weekend having ?¬?ish experiences, you’re in no position to say “Well I find that unlikely in the extreme” unless you have at least some sense of what I meant when I said it.
If I say I spent the weekend having ?¬?ish experiences, you’re in no position to say “Well I find that unlikely in the extreme” unless you have at least some sense of what I meant when I said it.
In other words, we’re again back to “define your terms”. Or at least qualify them. If you preface your previous assertion with “If we understand ‘God’ to mean ___ and ‘to meet God’ to imply or necessitate ___”, I might withdraw my objections.
Simple inaccurate statistical analysis shows that those that speak to God and see God are typically on the crazy side. They may not dangerous or malfunctioning, but crazy. To counter that, far too many people of Faith to be ignored lead lives that are normal, successful and rational. Way too many, better than I have achieved. Therefore, while I do not understand their belief, in most cases it does them no harm and in many cases it seems to help them. Those that wish to push their beliefs on others are the ones I fear and loathe. I do not believe this board normally tolerates such people. Neither the religiously inclined nor the atheistically incline have a high tolerance for such reprobates.
I can and do get along with people of Faith, I just do not understand, nor do I actively work at understanding their faith.
Maybe all this does a better job of explaining my stance. I am not an Atheist. I neither believe in, nor disbelieve in God. I just find, him, her, or it no more likely than unicorns, dragons or the FSM.
Jim
Sorry, I do not have a clue what you are getting at here. I am clueless to what God might be or what you think God is. See my prior posts and maybe you will see I lack the framework to answer your objection.
As I believe in the postulated theory that infinite universes very likely exist, it is very likely that somewhere unicorns exist, as they are not that much of a stretch. However, if we are talking about the Omniscient and Omnipotent God of the major Western Religions that cares about individual humans, then I cannot comprehend the stretching and warping of physical laws that allow such to exist.
Jim
And acting as if they don’t exist is very appropriate, just like with god. The reason I’m bringing this up is that many theists, when hearing someone is an atheist, say “you can’t prove god doesn’t exist, so hah hah.” We shouldn’t have to. We can just say that we don’t believe any god exists (quite justifiable) and if they don’t like that statement, they can bring some evidence.
I’ve raised two atheist kids, both now adults, and the way I did it is to respond with “what do you think?” The older one reasoned that there was no Santa - the younger one never believed. It is much better to let them work it out then to tell them. Builds logical skills also. So, I treated everything exactly the same way.
Now you’re talking. Perhaps you regret a threat titled “God doesn’t exist?”
When people used to ask me to disprove god (it doesn’t happen here very much) I always ask “which god?” The first thing they need to do, which they usually cannot, is to define the characteristics of the god they believe in. Some, like a bi or tri-omni god, are logically inconsistent. Some, like a god who created the world 6,000 years ago, go against scientific evidence. However some, like a deistic god, are unfalsifiable. Most theists believe because they got indoctrinated at home or at church, and have never thought it through. many will refuse to do so, and will retreat to faith or the benefits of religion.
Next time you chat, ask him if P=NP.
Do you think we are in no position to evaluate the likelihood that a person had direct and personal communication with a space alien?
lekatt and your friend can justifiably say they believe they met god/saw a panther, or had that experience. They have a lot less justification in saying they actually did meet god or see a panther.As for me, I’ll believe the report of their experience, but not that there is an entity behind it without more evidence.
This is exactly like believing that people have NDEs without believing they actually ever left their bodies.
I think I understand what you’re saying, but I don’t think it works - for my friend who really believes she saw a panther, there’s no difference between believing she met a panther, and believing she actually did meet a panther. Perhaps you could help me understand it by writing it both ways from her point of view? - because at the moment it sounds like one of those things where people say “you’re not really enjoying X, you just think you are”.
OK, so we’re starting out of the same page. You have therefore no reason to believe the God of whom I speak exists, nor any reason to believe otherwise, lacking sufficient info at this point.
I appreciate the qualification. I am of course familiar with those institutions, and I’m inclined to agree with your statement as worded.
Suppose I said that I had encountered a UFO.
I am justified in saying I met God, if, in fact, I did meet God. Now it may be easier for you to believe it, if I said I believe I met God, but that would not be correct.
As for people who have NDEs, we know they left their bodies because we have good, solid evidence showing they did.
I remember a news anchor that was interviewing a near death experiencer. The experiencer said, “I saw a light and was in the presence of God.” The anchor said, “so you believed you were in the presence of God.” The experiencer came back with, “no ma’am I didn’t believe I was in the presence of God, I was in the presence of God.” This rather unnerved the anchor and she went to commercial, on coming back from commercial the experiencer was gone. Why people are so frightened of God I can’t understand, unless it has to do with the teachings of heaven and hell. Or maybe it is just not cool to believe in God, or maybe . . .
So you DID meet God, but you don’t BELIEVE you met God? That sounds more like my experiences than yours. 
Removing the word “believe” does not make your conclusions more reliable or more true. It might specify what you think about them, but that’s about it.
Right. Because interviewers have no experience in dealing with people who believe stuff.
I don’t know about the “most” tag. I have been brought back to life twice. Once in a drowning incident and once in a traffic accident. Didn’t see a thing either time. Maybe I’ve just had bad luck. :smack:
Well, some people don’t have the experience, and then some do but don’t remember it. Some only remember much later, even years after that they had such an experience. Can’t really tell you why, but I think it has to do with how long they were actually dead.
Belief has to do with faith, when you know, then faith is not necessary. My statement was simple, I said what happened. It was not my intention to make it more reliable or true to anyone else. It was truth to me. You are free to believe whatever you want, of course.
Since enjoyment is internal, there isn’t any difference there. But say you are in the desert, and see an oasis in the distance. Since the oasis is persistent, you can be darn sure you are seeing what looks like an oasis. Deserts being deserts though, you won’t know for sure if you are actually seeing an oasis or just an illusion until you go and check. If a helicopter swoops down and rescues you, you may never know.
So my reaction would be: I saw what looked like a panther, but I’m not sure if it really was a panther or a large black dog or something similar. And the circumstances do count. If you are looking at the panther enclosure at the zoo, and see a black streak, you can be pretty confident it’s a panther and not a count. If you are in your backyard it would be the reverse. This isn’t to say it couldn’t be a panther - just that I wouldn’t call the newspapers or animal control without some more evidence.
A UFO or an alien? Lots of people have seen UFOs, but no one as far as I can tell has seen a real alien spaceship. As Arthur C. Clarke said, I don’t believe it’s a spaceship until I see their Mars license plate. He has seen UFOs, btw, but has been able to figure out what they were.
Carl Sagan noted that no one who claimed to have talked with an alien left with an verifiable information. No, not quite - Adamski claimed to have gotten lots of info about Venus, all of it wrong. I should say no verifiable, as yet unknown, and true information.
It’s pretty tempting to dismiss the OP with some measure of ridicule because all it is is a short, simple declarative statement made about a subject that has produced untold trillions of pages of debate both on and off the SDMB.
But I must admit, I am tempted myself sometimes to make statements or perhaps start threads just like the OP. I think his/her OP should be taken quite seriously–misspellings or not–because it is a healthy reminder that the existence of god debate really need never get any deeper than:
**Dude #1: ** There is no God, just as there are no unicorns.
Dude #2: You can’t prove that.
**Dude #1: ** No, but you can’t prove my statement wrong.
**Dude #2: ** God exists because I believe it to be so.
**Dude #1: ** So it is not God that exists but actually an abstract idea of his existence that exists, and insofar as your definition of “God” certainly differs from any other individual’s definition, this abstract idea exists uniquely in your mind (though, of course, you can explain your idea to others and therefore introduce abstract ideas similar to, but not quite identical to your idea into other minds).
Dude #2: But isn’t the entire world around you; that tree, that house, your own hand, extant only as an “abstract idea” in *your *mind?
**Dude #1: ** Possibly, but if so, it is an idea that can be collectively and similarly experienced by different individuals when they are present together in the same physical space/time. Conversely, until and unless unicorns and Gods are discovered to exist somewhere outside of an individual’s mind, then they remain merely unique abstract ideas.
**Dude #2: ** Nonetheless, it is useful for me to believe in God.
Dude #1: That is your prerogative, as it is mine to believe in unicorns. But I don’t expect others to react to my belief as though the unicorns existed anywhere but inside of my mind. I will treat your personal abstract idea of “God” in just such a matter.
OK, so my “argument” was a little longer than the OP’s. My point is the same old non-theist one: why is so much “credit” given to the existence of a god, and so little given to the existence of the IPU, FSM, Saturn Teapot, etc.?
Yeah. We’ve been over that before, haven’t we? But since logically, there seems no reason to treat god existence any differently than IPU existence, the OP’s terse assertion that “there is no god” is perfectly acceptable, and further, completely true until and unless there is some evidence of some god-being within humankind’s objectively shared reality.
And how do you know? I’m pretty sure this is recursive, so I’m going to skip it.
Then why make the distinction between meeting God and believing you met God?
That was exactly my point; you were expressing certainty. You said it would be incorrect to say you believed you met God, meaning - tell me if I’m wrong - “I don’t think I met God, I know I did.” From the standpoint of an outsider, the statements “I met God” and “I believe I met God” are equivalent.
In our culture, unfortunately, it is considered impolite to call bullshit on such claims. You can get tarred with the epithet atheist. You would be quite correct in saying you believed you saw god whether you did or did not. When Tweety said “I tought I taw a puddy tat” he didn’t contradict himself (or herself?) when he said “I did, I did see a puddy tat.”
But what distinguishes your experience from a purely internal one? Did God tell you something verifiable about the world that you did not know? Next time you see him, you can ask about P=NP. After all, the Lord of the Universe, who knows all and sees all, can say something a bit more verifiable than “You should love one another.” The scriptwriters for Oh God could come up with that one without divine guidance.