I’m gonna take the easy way out and hide behind Czarcasm on this one. He summed up my feelings a lot more clearly than I would have.
To sum up, either accept without question that it is a.o.k. to have blind faith that there are no gods, or admit to hypocrisy.
This wasn’t referring to my discussion of “possible universes”, was it? I mean, I think you’re aware that I’m an atheist, through and through, and that I only mentioned “possible universes” in the context of probability distributions, where it is a natural fit, but I just want to make sure there are no misunderstandings.
Oh, I fully realized what you meant, but I also realize that religionists misuse the term when trying to excuse why their god can’t be found anywhere.
A novel interpretation. Although I’m not formally trained in marketing, had I been around when the Lord was divinely inspiring the composition of the Holy Bible, I might have gently suggested he opt for a term other than “Lake of Fire” to describe this wondrous retirement community He’s created for all of us, and perhaps made it a bit more explicit that the “eternal torment” we can expect to endure there might actually be more pleasant than the description would suggest.
To me, this smacks of the Afterlife as a Time-share: Beautiful Fire Lakefront property (with Stygian boat ramp)! Invest now and you’ll be raking it in for all eternity; pass it up, and you’ll spend immeasurable aeons kicking yourself in the ass watching your Christian neighbors doing the backstroke in mountains of gold. Or so the evangelical telemarketers would have you believe. (Ask yourself: can you really afford NOT to believe in something that seems utterly senseless and improbable? Of COURSE you can’t!)
It’s the Gospel according to Nelson Muntz, and IMO the nadir of Christian theology.
How does the choosing follow from anything that went previously?
So passionately compassionate and fair that He killed the child of David and Bathsheba because the parents broke a commandment.
Yer kinda missing my whole point here. No one is “free to change” one’s beliefs, and no one has been “persuaded to reject” beliefs, in the sense I think you mean it.
People believe or don’t in this or that. What circumstances, information or experience led to the formation or disintegration of any belief is beside the point: the point is that whatever it was, it was not CHOICE. It’s a little like breathing… I can try to stop it, but in the end, I’m going to breathe, (barring suicide, of course). It’s an automatic thing I have no meaningful control over, except for brief moments which are actually illusions.
And in case I forgot to clarify it earlier in response to some other posts, I’m not suggesting that beliefs can’t and don’t change, only that the mechanism which brings it about is not choice.
By the way, I really wish I COULD believe in God! I am severly ticked off about the whole death thing, to a far greater degree than anyone I have ever known who wasn’t actually facing death. I think that religion is humankind’s response to the disturbing awareness of mortality. I think the best thing about most religions is that they give people some peace about dying. I wish I could embrace that, I genuinely do.
Actually, the idea of a Christian Heaven seems kind of stifling to me. If I get to have blind faith in an afterlife, I think I’d go for that Big Rock Candy Mountain.
How are we defining God, btw? It could well be that many theists don’t believe in the same kind of God you disbelieve in.
Basically, are you incapable of believing there is a guiding Mind behind it all who is deserving of your reverence and trust?
Btw, to all the rest, my “God=Fire” idea is, if not official doctrine, a view which has some hold in Eastern Orthodoxy (tho EO neither guarantees nor denies opportunity after death but does deny the mortality of the soul), and is supported in Isaiah, Malachi, Hebrews and Revelation. In fact, a study of the theme of Judging Fire from Genesis to Revelation makes me wonder how any other idea could have emerged.
Yeah.
If that was the end of the story, I’d agree with you.
If you insist that no matter what else did or will happen, nothing could excuse that, then that’s where we disagree.
But we’ve already established that it’s impossible to choose what you believe, so what’s a believer to do?
No, it’s “weak atheism”. Read up.
There are no objective results. Or rather, we don’t know for certain that there are. Give me an example of a piece of objective evidence.
Conclusively? I think you’re being illogical here.
There are plenty of example of that kind of logic, though, and i’m not sure why the example I gave wasn’t one of them. How about this; it’s suggested that God puts a higher priority on free will than on everyone being happy. Thus, it is logical to believe that he won’t intervene when someone chooses to do something that will make them (or another) unhappy. Might not agree with the premise, but it’s a conclusion that makes sense.
You seem to be assuming that such human observation of the natural world through science is the only way an atheist may answer this question. Thus, if it fails, we logically are left with only belief. I disagree. We can use logic, too, for one. That I don’t believe in God (or other gods) actually stems more from logic than from scientific evidence, as it happens. Your position is flawed.
Plus of course you don’t get to choose to believe anything. It’s something pretty much outside free will.
Belivers cannot "Know " there is a God. They can say they know there is, but it is just a belief. They want there to be a invisible being who loves and cares for them so it is desire that promps them to believe,there is no way to Know there is a god.
Monavis
Hi raindog,
Sorry to intrude on your conversation with Forumbot and others, but I have a nagging question about your post #62 and would appreciate any clarification you may be able to offer.
My question is this: If, as you say, it is impossible to employ temporal methods to establish atemporal realities, on what intellectual basis can we presume the existence of these atemporal realities in the first place? Everything we learn about the universe we learn via the consistent application of temporal methods. If atemporal realities are undetectable by conventional means of temporal investigation, then how did the believers find out about them? It seems to me that believers are insisting we accept the existence of atemporal realities purely on their say so. Is this correct?
I thought God knew all things, so he cannot be a just God and blame His created beings when He knew before they were concieved that they would not embrace Him. The maker of a bad product is responsible for the defects not the product.
How can you prove(without using the Bible) that All souls go to God or that there is a Lake of fire.
Monavis
Not really. If there are no valid responses to the problem of evil other than to change the qualities of god, then the concept of an omniscient or omnipotent god is incoherent.
I’ll copy and paste the summation of the most powerful iteration of the logical impossibility of god by my friend Corey, who is finishing up his PhD in Logic. It’s known as the Atheist Argument from Symbolic Incoherence and its principle author is William Rowe.
My belief in a Creator is not based on the Bible. My belief in the nature & identity of that Creator is. The Bible is clear that God knows all things. It is not so clear about the “Future” being a “thing” that can be known.
The Lake of Fire is the Biblical metaphor for the experience of God by those who
utterly reject Him. I think it is logical that if there is a God, that all souls return to Him because ultimately there is nowhere else to go, and that for those who will not be reconciled to Him, the experience of His unescapable presence will be
intensely unpleasant.