This happens now, if you know a 911 dispatcher you can find out for yourself. Things like a car / semi accident, blood on the road entrapment on rt 6 near the intersection of (x) road. A single blue SUV rollover accident, all people out of the SUV on rt 6 near the intersection of (y) road, A red pickup truck and a black prius car accident with smoke and fire visible from the truck on Rt 203 near Rt 6.
And guess what - they are all the same accident and they are all incorrect in every detail!
When God acts we are in the same state as when something like the above happens, at the time we are somewhat in awe, but when asked to recall memory of those situations is not that good, though we want to relay the information, we know what happened is real, we have no doubt, but the details get fuzzy.
Atheism strikes me as a very odd choice. I can understand agnosticism, but to say that I beleive in no God puts one in a situation that there is no good to come from it or in other words there is no benefit to being a atheist as I see it and is flat out wrong if there is a ‘god’ while agnosticism is not. It also limits your ability to accept a ‘god’ or proof of such a ‘god’ if one exists. And many religions would place someone saying that I know that ‘god’ does not exist as someone in direct opposition to that ‘god’ and is more likely to incur ‘god’s’ wrath then someone who comes and says I’m just not sure enough to beleive in a ‘god’.
On the other side, if no ‘god’ exists what does atheism get one over agnosticism? Again I can’t see any benefit to atheism.
But an accident happened. The cops don’t arrive to find nothing, no evidence of any accident at all - unless it was a prank, which is evidence of another kind. They don’t find nothing; that’s why it’s a rotten analogy for religion.
Atheists tend to believe what they believe because they think it’s right, not because it benefits them. Why would someone join the least trusted group in America if they were looking for “benefits” ? Beyond the benefit of being right.
As for agnosticism, I tend to regard it as wishy-washness. It’s an intellectual position that people seldom take in cases without evidence that there’s even anything to have an opinion about- except in the case of religion. People aren’t agnostic about goblins, just God ( even though goblins are more plausible ). In my experience, agnostics tend to be either people who are just looking for an excuse to believe in some god or another, or atheists who lack the courage to use the word atheist about themselves.
Why ?
That argument applies to everyone. No matter what religion or lack thereof you profess, some religion, somewhere is going to have a God that will supposedly punish you for it. And how do you know that God isn’t a rationalist who expects us to go with the evidence, and will send anyone who isn’t an atheist to Hell ?
Intellectual honesty. Having a spine. Being right; agnostics can’t be wrong, but they can’t be right, either.
Since you have asked twice, I will raise my hand and say that I do.
The only axiom I add to the ones held by science is “God is”. Everything else I believe about God and the universe is the product of intellectual processes and changes with my changing understanding of nature and man.
Kancibird…Why do you seem to give so much power to Demons and evil? It reminds me of a young child asking me:“How come satan is more powerful or smarter than God,He seems too make evil look good, why doesn’t God make goodness appeal to people?”
God must like evil to let it exist.Would you let a monster destroy your Children? One you created?
I’m guessing that’s what they were “hired” to do. I suppose they could have gotten a Muslim, a Catholic, and a Protestant who took a “live and let live” approach to atheism, but that wouldn’t have been “good TV.”
So wait a minute: if people don’t agree on everything, that invalidates the things they do agree on?
Isn’t that kind of like watching the Democratic Presidential debates and saying, “Let Democrats agree before they have the nerve to criticize George W. Bush?”
Your example is nothing like what I proposed and smacks of intellectual dishonesty. Was this accident reported to have happened in twenty-three different countries? Did the people reporting it say that it happened last Tuesday, a month ago on a Saturday, ten minutes ago etc.? Did all the onsite witnesses give wildly differing testimony about where, when, what and how the accident happened? Did they wait between twenty to seventy-five years before giving their statements? When the officers got to the accident scene, did all evidence of an accident totally disappear?
No 911 operator on the face of this earth would take such a call seriously, and you damn well know it.
Now, if all Democrats had to go on was that there was some sort of political party they belonged to, but that none of them could agree on what it stood for or even what what name to call it, your example might be valid.
Der Trihs already dispensed with this foolish car accident metaphor. With a car accident there is, you know, a damaged car or two and some people who may be injuried, and who say, “Hey, I was just in a car accident.”
Variations in the witness accounts don’t change the observable, tangible measurable facts about the car accident.
A more appropriate metaphor would be 17 separate people saying that they imagine that there was a car accident, and that their evidence for that car accident is not subject to measurement and came to them through an ineffable, idiosyncratic, completely inaccessible method. Other’s questions about location, cars involved, victims, skidmarks, and other indicators of the accident are responded to by those witnesses saying that these things must be taken on faith.
Atheism isn’t a choice. You can’t choose what to believe, whether you’re a a theist or a deist or an atheist or whatever.
Atheism per se does not limit your ability to accept a god if one exists. I don’t believe in any gods based on the situation now. But if circumstances change, new evidence comes to light, and so on, i’m quite prepared for my mind to change. The limiting factor is not atheism, but a stubborn refusal to look at the world that would mean no conversion; and that’s something that any person of faith could easily have too, as well as agnostics.
Might we be more likely to incur the wrath of a god (or indeed the wrath of their followers)? Maybe so. But everyone has just one religion. I may be at risk from all gods - but you are at risk from all gods minus your own one. If Zeus gets pissed, we’re both in trouble.
What benefit is there to atheism? Well, if we’re right, we have the freedom to follow our own moral codes rather than obey commands (assuming the god in question is commanding). But more importantly, we don’t believe things because we’d like them to be true, we believe things because we think they are true. I would be very suspicious of anyone who said “I believe in <religion>, because look at all the benefits I get!”. It strikes me more as wishful thinking than a genuine belief.
I get your point, and it puzzles me, too. But I have heard enough apologists for modern religions to suggest that they would gloss over the differences and concentrate on the similarities, making your point somewhat of a nitpick.
For example, all above would be monotheists. Each might say, “We worship God under a different name, but basically believe in the same God, whether he be Jesus Christ or Cosmic Muffin.” Or, as SDMBers might say, YMMV.
This broad tolerence, even reverence, towards other religions may be a modern adaptation. Sam Harris argues, in The End of Faith, that Islam alone has not progressed to that point, and is still stuck in the 7-11th Centuries, but with nuclear weapons that the Christian Crusades didn’t have.
That’s both irrelevant and not necessarily substantiated. For example, what if the vehicles and injured people had been disposed of by the guilty parties? Should we automatically conclude that no accident occurred, simply because the witnesses disagree on the secondary details? That simply does not follow. People may disagree when it comes to ancillary information, but this does not automatically invalidate the core issues on which they concur.
Heck, as evidenced by Der Trihs and Apos, the atheists on this forum cannot even agree on the definition of atheism! Perhaps atheists should learn to agree amongst themselves before they have the nerve to criticize theists.
Well said. I’m not entirely happy that a discussion of atheism would be followed by a group of only theists commenting; I mean, in pretty much every issue the discussion panels on TV programs are (if not balanced) at least representative to a degree of the viewpoints concerned. But of course theists should be able to criticise atheism.
Depends on what you mean by that. Most ancient religions pretty much ignored each other – of course the tribe on the other side of the river had different gods, that’s how you know they’re a different tribe! (And if they have any cool ones, our tribe will steal 'em and claim they stole 'em from us.)
Religion as a social concept distinct from ordinary living is pretty much a Roman invention, in part because they used religious evangelism (of a sort) to enforce some sort of social unity in the Empire. That ‘evangelism’ took the form, mostly, of equating Roman gods with whatever vaguely appropriate local gods were kicking around, saying, “Do the proper way of honoring our gods now”, and, so long as the locals behaved appropriately towards the state cults, declaring that good enough. This included making periodic offerings to the spirit of the Emperor, which was taken as proof of loyalty to the Empire. (Religious persecution of Christians in Rome was mostly of the “You don’t burn incense to the Emperor” variety.)
The “Of course they have different gods, they’re a different tribe” attitude is much less sustainable with a theology of monotheism. Even the Atenist heresy in Egypt (the attempt to establish monotheism) had to take into account foreigners and claim that the Aten made them too, because otherwise their existence was unexplained.
Since you have not bothered to explain just which shows you watched, it is difficult to treat this as a serious effort at discussion. Does Canadian television routinely provide little denominational “sermonettes” as public service announcements? (If so, how do you know that you could not ask for time as a rationalist in the same series?) Or is religious preaching done under the auspices of a denomination that pays the CBC or the local station for the time they use in broadcasting? (So why don’t you collect some money from the atheist community and put on your own show?) Who sponsored the show on which Dawkins appeared? Who sponsored the show on which the religious spokespersons appeared? Without further information, it is not possible to draw any valid conclusion about what you claim to have observed.
Were the shows actually sponsored (or broadcast) by the same organization?
If so, was it an organization that might have been promoting Dawkins’s efforts and so picked several theists deliberately to make loud but ineffective protests against Dawkins?
Were the theists picked for their outspoken opposition to Dawkins rather than their ability to discuss what he said?
Was the second show purchased by a different organization attempting to rebut Dawkins?
Is this just one more whiny rant that is pretty much baseless or is a strawman argument intended to witness against belief?
Given that you have provided no context for who paid for which show, what was the agenda of the sponsor(s) of either show, or how the participants were chosen, (as advocates or deliberately to make some look worse than others), we have nothing more than one more complaint that you do not like belief and you have a desperate need to portray everyone who is not a believer as a victim.
My impression is that Muslims claim, and always have claimed, to worship the same God that Jews and Christians do.
If theists (i.e. Muslims, Catholics, Protestants, Jews) believed in different Gods, or even if they believed in the same God but for fundamentally different reasons, the OP might have a valid point. But if they all believe in the same God, and for the same (or at least, for compatble) reasons, having people who differ in other respects and come from different perspectives agree on God strengthens their case rather than weakens it.
Yes, there are issues on which they fundamentally disagree, and where they do disagree you’re right to look with suspicion on all of them. But, in my eyes, their diversity of opinion makes the things that they do all agree on more, rather than less, plausible.
Actually, there are a large number of theists that don’t have any collection of religious beliefs. This is a growing number of people interested in spiritual events and experiences. We now have prime time television with three or four programs with spiritual themes. Not to mention talk shows, specials, and books. Spiritual churches are getting more numerous. Then there are web sites by the hundreds on spiritual themes that get a large number of hits. My web site gets almost 8,000 visits a month now and is increasing. When I started it I got 3,000 for the whole first year. I see this trend as very healthy for our country and world, stick to the love principles and dropping the doctrine leads to a much happier and peaceful existence.
