Ummm…Kanicbird, can you show proof of the existence of a god of any kind? After such a definitive statement on your part, you must have the inside track on something that humanity has been wondering about ever since we climbed down from the trees and lost our tails. Please share.
I am not the only one who has stated that God exists. Proof is not my job, but God’s, I suggest you ask Him. The instructions on how to find Him are printed in the Bible, if you don’t follow the instructions that God provides how can you expect to find Him?
So what, the lunch counter is free? The writing paper is free?
No. Only people can be free, or oppressed. IT’s entirely a human idea. It makes no sense when applied to anything else.
And how about love?
And the idea of God could be changed by external circumstances. It happens all the time. People have a tragic event happen and it changes their faith. It strengthens it, or weakens it.
If “God the idea” doesn’t grok, how about “God the fictional character”? Does that go down a little easier?
Necessary? That’s not easy to determine.
Let’s talk “useful”.
If the idea of God is useful… if it provided hope and comfort to people and gives them a sense of connection to the larger universe and to their fellow humans, and if said idea can be divorced from much of its worse aspect by simply stating, right up front, that this is just an idea, and no more real, or less real, than any other…
… then what’s the problem?
Or do people feel the need to attack the idea of God no matter what? Even a God who is not real?
Destroying humans would cause freedom to cease to exist because freedom is a relation between an intelligent being and its environment. Because something depends on humans for its existence, it in no way follows that it merely exists in the human brain.
Besides, God is in important ways different from freedom. Freedom is a human-centric concept; it is more appropriate that freedom exists primarily in relation to humans (or intelligent beings generally). But God, if He is to be God, must exist independently of humans; He can’t just be an idea in our head. Freedom that is human-centric is still real; a God that only exists in our heads is not real. And if it ain’t real, then there’s a limit to how much you ought to care about it or how much you should be willing to sacrifice for it.
Bingo. Well put!
You are conflating two different things here (maybe three).
- X is a human idea (i.e., it is something humans thought up).
- X only applies to humans.
- X is *only *an idea (i.e., it has no external reality).
Freedom can be 1 and 2, but it in no way follows that it is 3. As I said, freedom (in the political sense) is in large part a relation between a human and his environment. If you are not permitted to sit at the lunch counter, you are not free, and that is a fact. It’s not *just *an idea (although it potentially *also *an idea–something can be both.)
Again, the idea of something =! the reality of the thing. Of course the idea of God can be changed by circumstances, but that is not the same thing as God being changed by circumstances. Which brings us to…
That is fine. But as I have argued above:
(a) Freedom is not a fictional idea, even if it is a concept that refers only to humans (or intelligent beings generally).
(b) A fictional God isn’t worth worshipping, any more than a fictional rainbow unicorn is worthy of awe.
Well, that was my point, actually. That the idea of God is quite powerful, but only AS an idea. I can see how that got lost, though.
There’s a lot of very, very angry ex-theists in the world. I know this intimately because my mother is one of them. She had the Catholic upbringing with the psychotic and sadistic nuns and the patronizing and abusive priests and this gave her a lifelong implacable hatred of religion of all kinds.
So for them, it’s not merely disagreeing with theism. It’s hating it for all it has done to them, a position to which I am not entirely unsympathetic.
And personally, I think some atheists are angry at God for not “being there” for them and punish God for it by not believing in Him. A little like an angry child screaming “I hate you and I hope you die!” to their parents.
Well we need something new. Obviously trying to preserve him in a randomly assembled anthology of myth-stories that gets translated many times between somewhat incompatible languages and then trusting all that to a firmly entrenched priest-class doesn’t work well. 
I think if you expand on this we’ll see that that to many God is an idea that does have a corresponding reality or realities. I don’t mean a separate omnipotent being who rules the universe. I mean to some God represents compassion. Ask those who are in dire need and being ignored, and those who are in need and being helped. To some God is the idea of brotherly love and equality. Ask those who fought and suffered for civil rights.
Sadly, to others God represents control and power over others. To some God represents a rigid system of rules that must be enforced. God represents a various ideas to various people. Some good , some bad.
Wrong! Then mother nature would be free of us and our screw ups. 
Great screen name! Anyhoo…
I disagree. I think that there’s a great deal of what people get from religion that doesn’t require a “real”, interventionist, old-man-in-the-clouds god. One more, I refer to fictional characters. There’s people who have drawn a great deal of strength from fictional characters, from Shakespeare’s Prospero all the way down to Ash Ketcham from Pokemon. And (apart from a few sad souls) nobody considers these characters to be “real”. They are just ideas.
And none of them have the potential power of the idea of a God who is always with you, always understands, always sympathizes, always takes your side, and always, always, loves you.
Sorry to snip out a chunk of your reply, but I’m trying to keep things flowing smoothly in this debate.
Firstly, thank you for pointing out that “god the idea” and “god the fictional character” are not quite the same thing and that I should be careful not to try to use them interchangeably.
Secondly, why isn’t a fictional rainbow unicorn worthy of awe? I might well be reading a fantasy novel, and experience awe when reading the description of the rainbow unicorn contained therein.
You can worship a fictional God. In fact, why not? Worship all you like. God isn’t real, and therefore it can’t hurt, and might even help you through some rough patches in your life. Make life easier to take.
There’s people in this world who build shrines to their favorite giant anime fighting robot. Is drawing strength from the idea of God any worse?
:shrugs: If that’s what floats your boat. But I suspect for a lot of people, that won’t be enough for them.
If a loved one dies, how much consolation can you take from the fact that they are in imaginary heaven in the bosom of the idea of God?
If you experience dark times, how much consolation can you take from the idea that you are loved by someone imaginary?
How inspirational can you find the exploits of someone who doesn’t really exist?
I think you are right that fictional characters can provide inspiration and guidance. But what is more inspirational and educational–the story of someone who faces the problems humans face, and overcomes them despite weakness, frailty, impotence, temptation, and overpowering odds? Or the story of someone who never needs to doubt the outcome of anything, and can make anything right with the snap of His finger?
I appear to live in a world in which intentionality exists, in which in some meaningful sense of the word activities are deliberately taken part in, outcomes of some sort and in some contexts are directed, where it is an oversimplification or even just plain wrong to say absolutely everything that occurs is simply the mechanical deterministic outcome of prior causal circumstances. I appear, in fact, to possess that kind of intentionality myself. Whatever and whoever the heck “I” am. I know, both from various courses I’ve taken and books I’ve read and from my own observations and analyses that a lot of what we tend to think of as “ourselves” would more accurately be described as “the local individual-human level on which various long-range thought processes under consideration by the culture as a whole are played out, with ideas being absorbed via socialization, reinterpreted through the matrix of personal experience and the search for gratification, and reexpressed hermeneutically to other people in new terms and/or with new associations and connections to other mutually shared ideas, thus exerting a modulating effect on the ideas as well as perpetuating them”. With me so far? Any questions?
Clearly the location of identity, and consciousness, is not the matter-of-fact self-evident matter that we tend to think it in our everyday affairs.
Nor is any reconciliation of causal determinism with the postulate of genuinely existent intent a simple matter of assigning priority, temporal or otherwise.
If intentional actors do exist anywhere on this stage, something has happened on purpose.
If you find this conversation interesting so far, I will at this time warn you that I do utilize a set of interwoven concepts and intuitions to which the term “God” has been used, and I do use that term myself, finding it useful and historically honest in at least a limited subset of the historical usage thereof.
Hope that answers your question in at least a casual starting-point fashion.
Then where else does it exist? Show me where this freedom is.
I’m usually the one asking which God, but in this case I think the OP is correct. When someone claims that God is existent, then it is reasonable to ask which, but if the idea is important, then whichever version of God works for a person is fine. People will sort through the gods offered by Religion, Inc. at the religion bazaar and find the right one for them, which is how it works today, except that all booths claim their god is the only real one.
I’d hope that no one would be dumb enough to buy into something which is acknowledged as just an idea, but I rather suspect they would.
I went to the address provided, but found an empty lot. Looks like you’ve been scammed, guy. As for me, I have grown away from the concept of God very nicely for the past 40+ years, so your claim has been falsified.
Can barely follow that, but it seems that it doesn’t matter if you believe your God exists or not. If it did not exist would you do anything differently?
I have two answers; the simple answer, and the eye-glazing philosophical pedant answer. The simple answer is that if you focus solely on someone’s mental state, you cannot distinguish a free person from a non-free person. Freedom doesn’t ‘supervene’ on the brain of a person. Freedom is essentially a matter of the relations a person bears to external relations. Whether I am politically free depends on whether I am allowed to vote, hold office, sit at the lunch counter, at the front of the bus, etc.–and these are entirely matters of how the external world are arranged. They are not matters of how my mind or brain is arranged.