I would say the opposite; you’d have to know God to know Satan. He’s defined considerably by his opposition to God. You can’t know what it is he stands for and is/was without knowing what it is God stands for and is. They might think they worship Satan; they might have a particular set of characteristics in mind. But they can’t know him unless they know God. Logically only Christian or ex-Christian people can truly accept Satan under your view.
Think of it this way, since it works in reverse too; your own belief in God, providing you with knowledge of him, would not necessarily give you knowledge of Satan if the two aren’t connected in that way. By that argument you have not necessarily rejected Satan, since knowledge of one doesn’t also mean and require knowledge of the other. Either the two must be defined through knowledge of the other, as i’ve suggested, or you cannot guarantee that any Christian has truly rejected Satan, since they don’t automatically know what they’re rejecting.
This actually raises a rather more disturbing issue. There’s another way someone could come by knowledge of Satan and God without believing; through the gift of temporary indwelling of the Holy Spirit. Now, this logically means that in all cases of people who have truly accepted Satan without having been a Christian beforehand, they would not have been able to accept without that gift, since they have no other way to know Satan. The gift of the Holy Spirit is given by God alone; thus, we may lay the blame for them accepting Satan at God’s feet, since without his gift no non-Christians could accept him. Each non-Christian that accepts Satan does so because God has directly intervened to allow them to.
But feelings are not a decision, they are a reaction. You don’t think about the situation and then decide there is enough evidence to become angry. Feelings are specifically emotional and non-logical. Beliefs are not reactions, and are subject to thought and evaluation.
Shrug, you want to look at the mechanics, fine. Just as long as we get rid of the ‘okayness’ of religious beliefs. You believe what? Oh, well, its your religious belief, I guess I have to respect it, no matter how wacky it is.
This is a cop out. You can look at these things, but not these over here, they’re ‘special’. Subjective experiences can be looked at with the same tools we use to look at everything else, and if we find there is no validation for them, can be rejected just like everything else. Because of the way the human mind works, subjective things have to examined even more carefully.
I’m all for that type of discussion. IMO it’s a much more useful. For me the term god represents something not clearly defined concerning consciousness and the possibility of a transcendent other that we are still exploring. On a more practical sense it represents our relationship with each other and how we make progress in that sense. Faith, in that case, is the belief that we will continue to progress as we pursue what we hold to be true and valuable.
Many people on both sides of the god question hold beliefs that they stubbornly cling to in spite of evidence. I’d like to understand what the emotional need is to cling to those and how best to encourage people to honestly examine available evidence and not feel that it’s necessary to be combative over differences that don’t seem to impact our day to day welfare. It intrigues me to observe what a strong emotional hold tradition has on people.
That would be because children are taught religion as fact from an early age. They don’t have the decision making ability to differentiate between fact and belief yet, especially when it comes to their parents. Believing something from childhood can have a very powerful effect on a person, even if that thing is later shown to be wrong.
Until god is shown to be otherwise, it is purely subjective.
Just take a look at the polls. What percentage of (American) adults believe there angels around us?
But nationalism doesn’t have the protection religion does. You’re supposed to respect a person’s religious beliefs, regardless of how nutty they sound. The same isn’t true of nationalism.
You’re jumping around. The faith you’re talking about in this example is trust, until you start saying things like ‘certain of things unseen’. I had seen my master, and others, perform these things. I had the evidence that other people can do it, and these people had shown me how to do it, and so I didn’t need to rely on unseen things and hopes. I had evidence. Religious belief does not.
But do you base day to day decisions on the uncertain existance of Australia? Because people most certainly base important life events around the much more uncertain existance of god.
Again, ask Andrea Yates. She had a profound subjective experience. Oh, but shes insane. How do you know you’re sane? How do you know the strong feeling you have is good and should be listened to and another is bad and should be ignored? Yes its an extreme example, but it holds: subjective experience can be questionable. It is subject to all manner of interpretation and bias and other things that can distort it. It is not replacement for objective evidence.
Did you actually read what I wrote, or are you filling in the other side of the argument yourself? If you have an objection to a point I made, give a counter argument. This is just vague handwaving.
Gosh, I should copy this response down as it seems to fit so often.
Did you actually read what I wrote, or are you filling in the other side of the argument yourself? If you have an objection to a point I made, give a counter argument. This is just vague handwaving.
Wrong. Not all societies believe in God; God is a relatively recent fiction on the scale of humanity’s existence, only a few thousand years old. And plenty of societies have not believed in an afterlife.
Evolution doesn’t “care” about the survival of individuals, only about passing on genes. I expect that the reason religion has been so evolutionarily successful is via the mass murder and mass rape of non-religious tribes in prehistory. That kind of malice is typical of religion, and effective at both destroying rival beliefs and spreading whatever “religious genes” there may be.
He also said “I come not to bring peace, but a sword”. It’s easy enough to interpret Christ as calling for the death and oppression of unbelievers. Not that it matters, since Christ is almost irrelevant to Christianity.
Of course, which is why the religious constantly and dishonestly try to pretend there’s an equivalence between faith in something with no evidence, and trust in something that does have evidence. As hotflungwok pointed out, religious faith is put in a special category, which lets it slide on it’s complete lack of evidence. That category is not valid; it’s ONLY purpose is to let religion off the hook.
I doubt you’d ever agree no matter what I said. And I lump them all together because all religious belief is the same; empty, based on nothing.
It’s trust on the part of the kids, because they are kid; ignorant, trusting towards their parents and incapable of knowing better. It’s misplaced trust, however. And teaching your children lies is disgusting.
The trust of children is little different from the faith of adults, which is why both are so easily exploited and so often destructive.
Of course it does; that is what religious faith is. Fundamentalists are just that way about more things, is all.
So ? Evolution is imperfect by nature; most of it’s experiments end in death. Just because a belief may have evolutionary reasons behind it doesn’t make it right, or a good idea.
Because science has proven it’s validity again and again. Religion never has.
No, they have nothing BUT blind faith.
Because religion is an all consuming, all destroying cancer that is incapable of letting anything else live in peace. And the rightful place of religion is in history books and the trash heap of discarded bad ideas.
Driven insane by her religion in no small part, by following her faith. Of course, religion IS insane, so insane behavior is to be expected from it’s followers.
No, I have trust in the people who have studied such things, performed experiments on them, proposed and tested theories about about them. And proven their reliability again and again. Not at all the same as faith in people’s unsupported word, a word which contradicts the equally unsupported word of millions of other believers.
If there’s evidence behind it, it’s not faith.
Yes, and those are hypothesises that happen to fit what indirect evidence we have, not proven facts. Neither I nor the scientists who propose them have faith in them; they are merely a useful assumption, to either be verified or discarded when and if more evidence come in. And as said, the evidence for such things is the same for everyone. That’s nothing to do with faith.
I’m not sure I agree that to know one you will know the other. Even if Satan is defined considerably by his opposition to God, that doesn’t mean you have to even know that.
Also about the false religion ‘gods’ Satan has created you don’t have to know Satan nor the demon who animates the false god, but you get to know the fictional god as real.
It would give them a leg up in knowing Satan but I don’t think it’s required, unless you want the person to see the deception also.
Your entire post here (not just this last except) is a bit hard to follow, but I’ll try to go on, please feel free to clarify as you see fit. In my experience of believers, each is given a set of tasks by God for the advancement of His kingdom and to bring Him glory. To accomplish these goals God lets us use His power through His Holy Spirit. The Spirit Himself decides what gifts (including knowledge) a believer will receive, some believers will have very little to do with spiritual warfare, and never really develop a good understanding of who Satan is, others will actually meet the devil himself in combat in their Christian walk and understand him very much.
This is in OT scriptures, it is speculation that this still goes on, but it is possible IMHO.
I think what you are getting at here is that if someone experienced the gifts/power of the Holy Spirit for a temporary indwelling to serve a purpose then, never knowing Jesus, decides to follow Satan (In any of his forms) would be unfairly cast into Outer Darkness instead of the seemingly nicer Hell. Is this the jist of it?
Well everything that happens does so because God allowed it, but it’s also a free will issue.
So who determines which “quality of evidence” is appropriate or acceptable?
Which evidence presented by religious believers is “in principle unavailable to others”? Would you accept evidence that is “in principle” available to others?
Who is doing that?
You just made a claim. Must your claim “be proved by repeatable, intersubjective evidence”?
It isn’t just children. People come to believe as adults as well.
Well there ya go. Then there is no need to judge god belief with an objective evidence standard.
I don’t know. I asked you for some evidence to support your statement. I’d point out that there’s a difference between believing something for which we have no objective evidence, and believing something that contradicts objective evidence we do have. I’d also point out that I’d like to see how those polls are phrased before I give them much credence. How the question is worded is important to what meaning we can derive from a poll.
Do you believe there are, or could be angels among us? is a different question from “Are you absolutely certain there are angels among us?” I’d like to think most people would answer no to the second question because they’d be honest enough to realize they weren’t certain. I could be wrong though.
My point was that religion shouldn’t have protected status, but in order to look at it from the same standard we shouldn’t have a separate category for “religious” belief. Looking at belief systems in general we’ll see that the details change but the internal mechanics of a belief system and faith is pretty much the same for believer and non believer.
It still required faith for you to believe you could do it. Your accomplishing something you’d never done before was the thing not seen. You had a support system of others who made you believe. Most believers have the same thing. They don’t expect to see God. They expect to feel god and most would tell you they have. That feeling and the interpretation of it’s meaning is supported by others around them.
And have for hundreds of years with both positive and negative results. Still, mankind continues. You may believe religion is more bad than good but so far nobody has established that to be true. I’d even be more specific and say that people base their day to day on what they perceive to be right or wrong, meaningful or not, and their beliefs about god do influence that but are not the only influence.
Of course it isn’t. I’m not suggesting any such thing. The fact is no human I know of bases their life and their day to day choices on what is solely objective. Our value system is pretty subjective. Sometimes people react to feelings like anger and resentment, but also to feelings of love and compassion. That holds true for all humans. We all have subjective experiences and must interpret what they mean and how they will affect our choices.
That’s why I say , let’s look at belief systems for all people without the false assumption that religious ones are automatically inferior. There hasn’t been enough evidence offered to show that true.
This is an excellent question, and here is the answer: evidence is acceptable to the degree that it is supported by other evidence, including historical tendencies, and damaged in significantly higher proportion by evidence that contradicts it unless/until that evidence is discredited by other evidence. (Also note that internal contradictions and failures to deliver on proimises are very strong evidence against.)
In short terms, that means that if 10 sources tell you that Australia exists, and 1 source tells you it doesn’t, the descrediting source should still be given enough weight to be looked into, to look for more evidence confirming or denying.
Of course, about 99.999% of the relevent evidence supports that there’s an austrailia. (More than that if you’re actually in Austrailia.)
Now, religion. A person who is raised in a religion that does not contradict itself and is 100% surrounded by people who believe in it and who has all things happen as described by the religion happen (prayers answered, mountains moved, etc.) is entirely correct in believing in their religion, even if it happens to be wrong. With that level of evidence, they’re justified in their belief.
Most people I know don’t actually live in such a world, so they invent it themselves to the best of their ability by ignoring evidence around them and the flaws of their own apologetics. This sort of belief is not so justified.
I think that’s an excellent question as well. I appreciate your answer. The problem I see is that only a small portion of religious belief is of the objective type that can be verified or discarded by examining hard evidence.
The other thing to consider is the level of importance given to certain beliefs. There are many things we accept as true because our life operates smoothly and to our liking while we believe them. There is no reason to seriously question or seek to verify certain beliefs. We accept things all the time without making an effort to verify. Usually there must be some reason to call beliefs into question.
I don’t really see the difference between someone who has faith and someone who doesn’t. Person A has faith in God based on…faith. Person B has faith (in a way) that there is no God. Both people can be thrown for a loop if something happens that debunks their own individual faith that God does or doesn’t exist which causes them to do a 180.
In the end I think it’s something that isn’t truly answered until a person stops sucking air for good.