Hhmmm… in the end the issue is more about each party thinking they are superior to the other rather than the choice of words.
Still refering to Pixies and White … sorry I mean Pink Unicorns is a way of showing that God, god, gods and Pixies are all categories of Mythology for atheists like myself.
I love to compare the Christian god for example to Santa Claus when he is nice and the Bogey Man when he is angry. Its all about being good and avoiding punishment. When you do something wrong some supernatural creature will hunt you down, do good things and in the future Santa/God will reward you.
Now imagine your a regular run of the mill Christian and you start talking about the weather and the guys says "Seems that Odin is angry... thunderclouds are approaching." Can you seriously say you will respect his view if you start debating weather and/or religion ? Especially when he says that Tyr brings him good luck since he deals with commerce and that he offers Tyr (god of Commerce and War) a monthly offer of food and money.
Earlier, Diogenes called it the “Invisible Purple Unicorn,” and blowero responded “The Invisible Unicorn is PINK, thou blasphemer! ;)” Rashak was continuing the joke by saying “Still refering to Pixies and White … sorry I mean Pink Unicorns”…
You’re not going to paint the over one billion Christians in the world with the “unreasonable brush,” are you? You’ll need a whole lot of paint. (Not quite sure what the “paint” is in the real world, but I’m sure you can think of something.)
Whether a belief system is based on reality or fantasy, has nothing to do with numbers. It doesn’t matter whether there are a billion “unreasonable” Christians or only one. Obviously there are beliefs that all Christians have in common, or the word “Christian” has no meaning. The same goes for Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, or any other belief system.
But it’s not the specific beliefs that we’re really talking about here, it’s epistemology. Why do you believe what you do? What is the basis of those beliefs? What is the process by which you evaluate new beliefs?
An example is Galileo’s assertion that the earth revolves around the sun. He *proved *his assertion, based on empirical evidence and reason. The religious powers-that-were rejected his ideas, not because of incorrect facts or faulty reasoning - they *knew *that he was empirically right - but because it contradicted their superstitious assumptions. Their “method-of-knowing” wasn’t based on looking at reality and deducing truths from it, it was based on swallowing an entire belief system, and then rejecting facts of reality that didn’t conform.
The entire history of religion is filled with countless examples of this. And you’re expecting me to *respect *this?
A billion Hindus believe in reincarnation. A billion Muslims believe that the angel Gabriel spoke to Mohammed. At one time, the majority of the world believed that the sun and moon were gods. Ad populum arguments aren’t worth very much.
Allow me to discuss briefly my own life and experiences, and see what you think of them from the perspective of epstemological rigor.
I was raised to respect the ability of the sciences to describe and interpret natural phenomena and enable us to learn new ways to do things. My parents were firm rationalists. My aunt early encouraged my enjoyment of science fiction and its ability to evoke a sense of wonder while remaining within the realm of possibility under natural law. I was baptized and raised a Methodist with the idea that God works through the world He made and the laws He laid down for its operation. One element of this upbringing that was not so good was the idea that “real men” don’t have emotions, that any feelings are supposed to be locked up inside asnd never expressed.
When I was about 15, I began having doubts about the sorts of stuff I was being fed in church. So, alone in the balcony area at church, I prayed what I call the Skeptic’s Prayer, essentially, “O God, if there is a God, give me some sort of sign that you’re real.” And I immediately got a sense of inner assurance , and within a few moments, the congregation began singing “My Faith Looks Up to Thee.”
That satisfied my intellectual doubts. I believed – accepted – that God existed, and held to the attitudes I mentioned two paragraphs back, reserving judgment on miracle stories and the like.
I married and my wife and I, seeking a more liturgical and Eucharistically oriented expression of faith, joined the Episcopal Church. One key element in this decision was that the first time we entered the particular parish church we converted at, she had a classic deja vu experience – the building’s layout and ritual matched a dream she had had.
22 years ago, she and I enrolled in Lay Theological Education by Extension, a program offered by the University of the South where parish clergy are trained as mentors and laymen enrolling receive the quivalent of 1.5 years of seminary training spread over a four year span. In the course of this, in a session dealing with the bizarreries Paul addresses in his letters to the Corinthians, I encountered God in a Person-to-person way, and found my belief changed from intellectual credence that to placing one’s trust in.
Sheer honesty has caused me to examine that experience skeptically. But it was certainly nothing I had expected, hoped for, or even would have desired. I was quite content with my intellectually-oriented compartmentalized acceptance of doctrine.
But He wasn’t.
And that led to some serious changes in our lives, the seeking out for more vibrant faith experiences, and an awakening to the underlying message of the Bible, to which I had been quite blind.
Seven years after that I had a heart attack and cardiac bypass surgery. And the reading that I had been scheduled to do the day I had the surgery, which my wife read aloud in my place, was Ezekiel 36:24-28: “I will give you a new heart and a new spirit. I will take away your heart of stone, and give you a heart of flesh, and I will put my spirit within you.” I was supposed to read it; instead, I experienced it.
Ten months later, one of two boys, cousins, whom we had befriended and who did odd jobs for us, told us that the other one was homeless; his parents had thrown him out for scandalous doings. And I heard my own voice saying, “He’ll need friends to stand by him after that. Tell him to come see us.”
That led to both boys and the best friend of the one who’d told us what had happened moving in with us in a very impromptu, extralegal, family-by-arrangement relationship. And the only accurate description of what happened between the last-named boy, the best friend, and me, is that we fell in love. In a very Platonic, non-sexual way, to be sure, but in every other way the epitome of a one-on-one need-him, movie love affair.
And what we discovered as we explored what this relationship meant was that we each were given the gifts necessary to reach out and heal the hurts in the other. The hurt and anger that his broken and self-centered family had caused him, and the locking away of my emotions, were things each of us had the talent to fix in the other. And, quite literally, we grew to be able to read each other’s thoughts, and I found myself equipped with the right words to say to him, without conscious thought, in a very mystical, Marcan way. And I have seen him and his love as one of God’s great gifts to me.
This in turn led to a healing of my own marriage, an ability to show and be shown love between me and my wife that had not been there before (she’d had much the same hide-your-feelings upbringing). And together we were able to help that boy and his wife through the inevitable rocky road that the first few years of marriage often bring – in a bit of inevitable irony, he married the sister of the boy whose homelessness had started this whole train of events – who, in turn, first dated the boy who loved me’s sister and then married their cousin. And we all see God’s hand at work in causing this sequence of events, and working through the free will and personalities of the participants to everyone’s greater good.
Now, it is quite possible to see all of the above as a series of chance events, to interpret it phenomenologically without reference to God. But I consider that He has demonstrated His existence and goodwill adequately to me to take my experiences of Him at face value, as really what they purport to be, and not as self-delusional wish-fulfillment – particularly since insofar as I can tell, I had absolutely no desire, either consciously or subconsciously, to be drawn out of the comfortable barriacades where I dealt with the world intellectually and did not have to risk emotional bruising.
Given this, do you consider that I am operating on an irrational basis? I grant some parts of it are non-rational – interpersonal dealings often are. But I am addressing the world on the basis of Ockhamic methodology – accepting that as accurate description which most simply explains the phenomena under consideration and does not require assumptions beyond those necessary to explain them.
I would contend that reasonability has little or nothing to do with validity. The Hindus and Muslims cited (at least a great many of them) have reasons they believe the way they do.
Thanks for your sympathy, Topaz. It’s good to know that most Christians wouldn’t slap a vegetarian in the face with a meat product if slightly offended.
Hinduism -1,500 BCE -The Veda – 786 million -13% -(stable)
Sorry Diogenes, but I thought for a moment reincarnation was really working.
I think we should demand a recount, Florida style.
I certainly don’t think that all Christians are unreasonable, but it does seem to be a widely prevelant characteristic. To be fair, though, it’s not confined to them. And of course, the most unreasonable Christians are the ones I notice the most, so there’s a selection bias. When I said “The implication of the term ‘MSP’ is that belief in God is no more valid than any other superstitution. The fact that Christians take such offense at this shows the unreasonableness of Christians”, what I meant is that a Christian who takes offense at the implication that there is nothing special about their religion is exhibiting unreasonableness linked to Christianity, not that all Christians are unreasonable.
I wasn’t commenting on the reasonability of those beliefs, I was only rebutting the argument that a large number of believers lends any inherent proof that the belief is true.
I think I confused the number of Hindus with the population of India (which is now over a billion). Obviously not all Indians are Hindus, though. Thanks for the correction. I don’t really think it changes my point, though. 800 million people is still a lot of people (and it will be a billion soon enough) and they’re not the only people who believe in reincarnation. If I throw in Buddhists, we get well over a billion folks who believe in reincarnation. The fact that a billion people believe it doesn’t prove it’s true. That was my point.
We can also flip the as populum around and point out that two thirds of the world is not Christian (and the population of Christians is shrinking while Islam grows). Does it prove anything about Christianity that two and out of three people reject it? Of course not. Popular belief simply doesn’t prove anything either way.
I am sorry to report some bad news: your mind reading seems to be a little bit off. To make your assertion true, wouldn’t we have to assume some qualitative distinction between christian belief and all of the other belief systems out there? Christianity is just one more of the seemingly endless supernatural beliefs which has failed to produce compelling evidence. Why should it be set apart from any other? The pixie remark may be evocative language, but using evocative language as a rhetorical tool hardly qualifies as a sophomoric straw man.
With respect, I think yes, you are operating irrationally. I contend that your interpretation does indeed require a huge assumption. That is, a belief in God. To the atheist or even agnostic, none of your worthy experiences would constitute any (let alone compelling) evidence that anything supernatural has been at work. There is no Ockhamic methodology in positing that a series of events or unusual circumstances can be explained by the deliberate intervention of an unseen, discretional force, at least in my understanding of Ockham’s Razor (…that the simplest of two or more competing theories is preferable and that an explanation for unknown phenomena should first be attempted in terms of what is already known). Your argument appears only to be valid if you assume that ‘existence of God’ is already known. If you were to start with the assumption that ‘the MSP exists’ your conclusion may have been different.
As panache45 has so eloquently illustrated, history has seen the continual erosion of belief systems based on indoctrination and superstition. The evidence is that with time, real-world experience and intellectual reason, such systems are ultimately exposed for what they are. Atheists consider that if there weren’t real-world communal and personal benefits, Christianity (and religions in general) would be slated to join the growing pile of flat-Earth myths. It is generally accepted (although not proven) there is no such thing as a Magical Sky Pixie, principally because the only evidence of their kind is in fictional tales, usually designed to entertain and instruct children in some proverbial manner. Real-world evidence is so far conspicuous by its absence. Using the term MSP as a synonym for God seems somewhat appropriate to the atheist.
Somnambulist, you are distinctly entitled to your opinion, but the point of my telling my story at length was to suggest a series of events (my own story) in which the persence and existence of a personal God was in fact a reasonable inference from the data at hand.
I do not propose from it, though it does remain my personal view, that the objective reading of my account suggests anything in particular about the characteristics of the aforementioned deity.
I completly concede that my own identification of that which I experienced with the deity of Christianity is in large measure my own presuppositions. I deny categorically your inference that it is therefore merely “superstition and indoctrination.” I have reported it using the terms that I myself use in attempting to grasp it – but feel free to substitute whatever you like for the phenomenological other of my admittedly subjective experience. I am prepared to analyze it skeptically – but I am not prepared to make the presumption that “Because there are obviously no such things as Gods or personal conversion experiences, I must have experienced a self-delusion.” That is as much begging the question as the reverse would be.
Polycarp:You must realize that when you ask atheists and skeptics to evaluate your anecdote, you are asking us to do so objectively and taking into account many likely explanations for what you experienced.Many of these rational explanations you yourself will not likely consider with the same objectivity as we will.For example:I know all to well that human beings are VERY capable of convincing themselves of a patent falsehood such as Martians attacking when all that has happened was a live radio broadcast of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds by Orson Welles’ Mercury Theatre troupe.Despite the fact that not a single alien spacecraft had entered our atmosphere, eyewitnesses reported monuments and landmarks being “disintegrated” and neighbors being killed by martian death-rays and the like.
From MY perspective, it is FAR more likely that you, as a human whose mind I cannot read, have convinced yourself of the validity of a falsehood.If you can attempt falsification of these more rational hypotheses(i.e. delusion or that pesky belief mechanism at work for example) and are finally left with “God exists and I met him!” then yes, the inference would be warranted
As things stand, you have given us just another anecdote to which we must conclude there are a mutitude of rational and quite natural explanations.Even the hypothesis that [ b]Polycarp** is LYING must bge considered as more rational than “Polycarp met God”(though I do not assume you are a liar…quite the contrary actually).
