Yes, of course. I’ve always said that our moral journeys are entirely subjective. None of us can live the life of another. But that’s true of our experience of anything, not just God.
As I said, that’s where faith comes in. We are called to test our faith, and I do. Even discussions like these are tests of faith because, for all I know, you or someone else could say the very thing that triggers in me the destruction of my faith. But I welcome such discussion because, believe it or not, I have no desire to be delusional.
Absolutely. I’ve always said that the claims of atheists are as valid as the claims of believers. But what isn’t valid is for someone to call me delusional based on his own frame of reference. That’s why I don’t attack the faithlessness of Czarcasm or Der Trihs, but only their childish tactics.
They aren’t at all the same. Science can’t examine God for the same reason it can’t examine unicorns; there aren’t any. You can’t examine gravity with prayer because prayer doesn’t work.
Faith isn’t a test.
Which is a problem science deals with all the time. There are any number of phenomenon that scientific instruments can only examine through their causes. That doesn’t mean science can’t study them.
No, it’s not “as good an explanation as any”; it violates Occam’s Razor.
In other words, they are untestable, and foolish. And there’s zero reason to believe any such claim. There’s zero reason to believe that any of your “metaphysical claims” are even possible, much less real.
You are just claiming that your God is conveniently untestable, and belongs to a special category of things that can’t be tested or detected. In other words, you’ve just added another layer of implausibility to something that was already utterly implausible. And you’ve been patting yourself on the back over how enlightened and superior you are the whole time.
I see no reason to think that your God is anything more than an ego driven fantasy. One so empty that you can only defend it by demanding that others treat it as true because you say so. You can call me names all you like, but that won’t make your fantasy any more real.
Jesus! Seriously, I do NOT remember him acting like this in past years. Conservative and a fundie, yes. But this wacky? No. If you do a search for his past posts-even over religion-they’re conservative, but not like this.
It’s almost worry-some.
And guys, lay off of Liberal, would you? All I got from him is that not ALL religious people are asshats, and that some non-religious people are. (And yes, Der Trihs is one of them.) Polycarp, Duck Duck Goose, Jodi, Sarafeena, etc. Not everyone is like Kanicbird, mmmkay?
I’ve a question on this, if I may. I agree with you that all our experiences are subjective. But for me, that is reason enough to say that personal experience is not a good reason for belief (or lack of). I am convinced that there are no gods, or at least, no gods actively interacting with the world. There are people, yourself included, who are just as convinced if not more that there are. That people can believe such opposing things, and to the same extent, means to me at least that personal experience and journeys aren’t good reasons to think a certain way. I am convinced there are no gods, but that conviction, despite its existence, is not worth anything in terms of whether I should believe or not. I don’t have any more reason to trust my experience than I do to trust what I know of yours - they’re equally subjective, or as near as that it doesn’t matter.
NB: If anyone thinks this constitutes a thread shit, I apologize in advance; however, I really feel like putting in my .02 cents worth here…
While I’m as down with hating on Christianity, organized religion in general, and obnoxious online prosthelytes in particular, as anyone else here, and while there’s no way in Hell (so to speak) that I’m ever going to see eye-to-eye with kanicbird on anything I can imagine, he does strike me as one of the more benign specimens of God-botherer to be found on the SDMB or most other message boards I have experience of. And coming from an unrepentant heathen and Bible-basher like me, that’s saying quite a bit.
For one thing, the impression I get from my admittedly cursory reading of his posts is that kanicbird’s take on Christianity is very much an idiosyncratic and mystically oriented one which has very little to do with churches or organized theocracies. I have a strong respect for personalized mysticisms, individualistic spiritual paths, and the individuals who walk them no matter how wrong headed or even vile I find the starting points to be, and besides that, people who aren’t involved in organized religious bodies do not tend to be actively oppressive of nonadherents in the same threatening manner as those who are so involved.
Also – and again, it’s not like I have been paying any particular mind to the individual in question’s posting history – from what I have clocked of the k’bird’s style and take on his religious beliefs, he strikes me as being considerably more gentle and good-natured in his beliefs and dissemination of said beliefs than most of the believers on this board, past and present. Instead of incessantly roaring about Revelation and brimstone, gleefully sorting all and sundry into sheep to the right and goats to the left (with all the veiled or naked “And then you’ll be sorry!” schadenfreude that accompanies such) or smug-puppy baying of “Gawd sez it, I b’leeves it, and that settles it!” like you get from the more vehement species of Christer, his attitude seems to me like more of an easy-going albeit sincere “This is what I think/feel/know, and this is me saying it, *you *can take it or leave it,” which I find a lot easier to let slide than the aforementioned religious effronteries. Especially since I don’t see him as being one of those bust-it-out-on-ya-at-zero-provocation zealot attack dogs who are all to common online and in the flesh, but as someone who just chimes in with his opinion when he thinks it’s appropriate, as indeed do we all.
But that’s just me.
You may now return to your regularly scheduled dogpile.
I don’t think so, but you’re expressing something that sounds complicated to me. And that might be because of how I backed into my belief. It never occurred to me that I need a reason to believe. I just believe. For me, it was belief first and then confirmation by trial each day. As I’ve explained before, my whole worldview changed at once. That’s literally the case. In the time I looked down and looked up, everything I understood as an atheist no longer made sense to me. All my understanding was new. It truly was as if I had been born again. It wasn’t as if I said, okay, A implies B, and B implies C, and now I believe. It was more like, okay so this is God, and now I understand that A implies B, and B implies C. I didn’t believe for any particular reason. I had an epiphany, which is a revelatory epistemology.
As to subjectivity, I think that applies to all our experiences. It’s the nature of electromagnetism and time. You and I cannot occupy the same space at the same time, and therefore cannot have identical sensory experiences. You will see things from at least a slightly different vector, and depending on your acceleration, from at least a slightly different time. These small divergences will add up to significant differences, and will multiply by the times and places where our experiences greatly diverge — like when you go to Paris and I go to London, or whatever.
I think I do take exception with this from your post: “That people can believe such opposing things, and to the same extent, means to me at least that personal experience and journeys aren’t good reasons to think a certain way.” At least, if I understand it. You can believe, for example, that jazz sucks while I believe it’s great, and those are sufficient reasons for us to think our certain ways. I don’t need to convince you of the beauty of jazz for your thoughts to be as valid as my own.
If someone lived my life exactly the way I’ve lived mine in every particular, they’d believe exactly as I do. They would, in fact, be me. We don’t know how our lives are yet to unfold. We don’t know what’s around the corner. You could become a believer tomorrow, and I could lose my faith. In either case, it wouldn’t be because of some choice we made, but because we were compelled by our experience. For you to profess belief right now, or for me to deny my faith, would require each of us to deny the particulars of our experience that have made us what we are.
I cannot NOT believe. I wish people like Czarcasm and Der Trihs would realize that and stop attacking my faith. I’d sooner they called me Dumb Injun than to say that I’m delusional or to mock the God I worship. While my faith is not a choice for me, the way they treat me is a choice for them. I’m always disappointed with the choices they make.
Let me add, if I may, that I realize that there do exist recreational believers — people who profess a faith that is manufactured for a purpose. Perhaps it’s to join a house of worship for the networking opportunities. Perhaps it is a fear of not believing. Perhaps it is an emotional response to a drug or ritual. Whatever. But that is not the kind of faith that I refer to when I refer to my own.
If that’s what they want to do. They are chosen because what they want is to spend eternity with Jesus. It would be cruel to force people to do what they don’t want to do.
The point i’m trying to get at is that epiphany in and of itself is not consistent to one particular school of thought. That is, i’ve heard from people who’ve had epiphanies that caused them to believe, and from people who’ve had ones that caused them not to believe. And more than that, I can point to you as an example of a person convinced of a certain view of the world, and to myself just as convinced, but of something else, and to kanicbird, convinced of yet another version of reality. We can’t all be right, but more than that, that we are each equally convinced shows that people can have strong convictions yet be wrong, because logically at least two of the three cannot be correct - for whatever reason, be it misinterpretation, or a lack of particular experiences, at least two of us are utterly convinced and yet entirely wrong. So my thought on the subject is; why am I to assume, if someone is right, that it’s me? All of the problems that might occur with your or kanicbird’s experiences hold true for me, too. If your experiences can be a misinterpretation, so can mine. So why, out of the three of us with our equally potentially flawed experiences, should I go with mine? I shouldn’t. There’s no reason to select mine as being more likely to be true, no more than there is to select someone else’s. That’s the point i’m trying to make; my personal experiences are contradicted by many, many people’s, so I should not accept them as good evidence. Clearly, in this instance, humans are immensely fallible.
My point is that that isn’t sufficient reason for us to think our certain ways. Because my thoughts and yours on the matter are equally valid, there’s no reason for me to accept mine over yours.
I do deny those experiences as valid reasons for me to profess or deny faith.
I would argue that their responses are as much not a choice for them as your faith is, but then i’m not a believer in free will. Still, I can hope that kind of thing stops too.
But this is supposed to be about Kanicbird, dammit. I’ve had my beefs with Lib, but he’s never been a fundy, or an asshole about his religious beliefs. Not ALL theists are assholes or nuts. (I’m not a Christian, exactly, but I do believe in God, and I don’t think I’m an asshole about it.)
Kanicbird, however, happens to be a nut and a dick about it. Let’s stick to the subject. Kanicbird=moronic dickbag.
