Because they claim to have a special source of knowledge; spiritual revelations and so on. They claim they know that there is/are God(s) because of this "knowledge, yet they can’t agree with each other on all sorts of things. That implies that their “knowledge” of God’s existence is equally unreliable.
I suppose that would be a fair inference to make for someone arriving fresh to the whole thing and viewing it from the outside, but for any given theist (who believes he is right), the existence of diverse alternate views doesn’t necessarily seem a compelling reason to abandon his own.
Diverse opinion can be found on almost any topic where humans are involved, including those that could probably be definitively determined. I don’t think the existence of diversity of opinion on a topic, on its own, provides any quality indicators on any one opinion of the many.
For example, there are many pubs that claim to be the oldest in England - they can’t all be right, so what should we infer?
That we should examine any evidence they have for their claim?
Precisely. And there is a difference; one ( or a few ) pubs has to be the oldest. It may not be practical to find out which, but we can be sure that one of them qualifies. On the other hand, it’s perfectly possible for all of the various versions of God to not exist, so we, unlike with the pubs, can’t even know that one of the claims is true.
Well, sure, but in that case, we’re evaluating their claims against the real world, not against each other, which is fine.
Again, you insist on dropping beneath the meta level. You are also making unsubstantiated claims based on your assumption of what ‘adherents’ think.
Oh honestly. Now you’re going to call every mindset, from Jim Jonesism to the Fred Phelpsites a religion? If you’re going to be silly, this is all pointless.
You may be. I’m not.
Not the point. You, too, can’t pull out to meta level. We are not, and never have been, discussing rituals. We are discussing the nature of the cause of the belief in a Divine, not how people express it. Or at least I am. People seem to be scattering about in all directions and looking for answers to questions that keep indicating that they continue to confuse the actions of the believers with the nature of the Divine.
It’s not a presumption. Explain anatman.
You can have a little boo at buddhist cosmology here if you think I’m making it up. Buddhist Cosmology
Why? People have died from hazing. The tattooing is excruciating.
Assure me that the someone elses didn’t willingly participate.
You’re back to discussing a White-Haired Old Man; a personage.
It’s really not.
Totally unrelated question, but its answer will tell me something; are you one of the people who visualizes an image when they think of time? (some said days in a circle, others spoke of seeing calendar pages, etc.)
I never meant to imply that “Jesus is the Son of God” was one of those things where Christians and non-Christians “really agree,” and just use different metaphors for the same underlying reality. I probably should have made that more clear. I believe there is both literal and metaphorical truth to calling Jesus the “Son of God.”
It gets tricky talking about Jesus: you could be refering to the human being, whose life began when his mother was (according to orthodox Christian belief) impregnated by God. (Though not through sexual intercourse, in the same way that “Zeus bonked Leda.”) It’s fair to say Christians consider this Jesus to be the literal son of God (at least if you define the word “son” in the right way), But they also consider this Jesus to be the incarnation of the Second Person of the Trinity, the Son, who existed from the beginning.
What the heck does that even mean? And why am I still getting a non-answer? I’ve never changed the level of my reference.
I don’t think you can separate the two. “The Divine” can only be conveyed in how its adherents express their belief. Also, it’s hard to have a discussion if you’re the only one doing it.
Not your convo to direct, I’m afraid. Nor can you direct how people get their perceptions of “The Divine”.
Care to explain where’s the “universal consciousness” in a state that means “no self/soul?”. Anātman is the very opposite of the deity you cite as “The Divine”. Buddha would say you are still stuck in one of the “62 views”.
QG does not have Buddha nature. wu.
Oooh, you can google! Now google me this - where the hell on that page does it in any way, shape or form address anything about my objection to your characterisation of the basic tenets of Buddhism?
I italicised some words in that sentence for a reason. Go back, reread for comprehension, and tell again that harm I do *to someone else *is the same as harm I do to myself (there, I did it again, just to be helpful)
Are you telling me it matters if someone is a willing human sacrifice or not? I mean, that it matters to “The Divine”? I mean, I realise you’re a Christian, but still, that’s taking a “All is God” approach just a little too far, no?
Not that it matters, but no, I can’t assure you that the victims of Xipe Totec weren’t willing. I can assure you, though, that the sacrifices of Tlaloc were certainly not willing or capable of informed consent. The others, I can only speculate.
Look, when I sent those questions to the TV program, I purposely chose three questions that are pretty darn basic.
I did not ask the Roman Catholic what she thought of the Muslim’s full-length beard, or what the Protestant thought of the colour of altar cloths in RC Churches.
The Muslim will tell me that God (Allah is just the Arabic word for God) did indeed write a book, that it is the Koran, that Mohammed is the “seal of the prophets” the final revelation. He will further tell me that Jesus was a good man and a prophet of God, but NOT the son of God, because the Koran explicitly says he was not. He will even tell me that Jesus did not die on a cross.
The Catholic and the Protestant will specifically tell me that not only was Jesus the only-begotten son of God, but that he is one of three persons in God, in other wods, that Jesus IS God. They will further tell me that he redeemed the human race from damnation by dying on the cross.
Now, two contradictory propositions cannot BOTH be true, (but can both be false).
“Ronald Reagan was the 45th President of the US” and “Bill Clinton was the 45th President of the US” cannot both be right. In fact they are both wrong. There have not yet been 45 presidents of the US.
So, either one billion plus Christians are living for and often dying for a falsehood about Jesus. Or else one billion plus Muslims are living and dying for a phoney book that is not inspired by God and which teaches them NOT to worship Jesus as God when in fact he IS one of the persons in the Trinity.
Or, else the third option is that thre is no God, that the Koran and the Bible are just human writings claiming divine inspiration, and therefore, OVER TWO BILLION Muslims and Christians are living for, fighting for and dying for a falsehood.
Even the best-case scenario, in which Christianity or Islam is right, is a pretty dismal option.
All of this is quite correct.
If you were to draw a Venn diagram, with a circle representing what Christians believe and a circle representing what Muslims believe, the circles would overlap, but they’d have substantial segments that were separate, and in those separate segments would reside beliefs about the nature of Jesus.
Both Christians and Muslims—and atheists too—do indeed have major disagreements with vast numbers of the human race.
Correct, if by “utterly and completely mistaken about their religion and the nature of the universe” you mean that their religion, taken as a whole, must be mistaken. It does not, however, follow, that every single individual belief must be mistaken. If one religion happens to be completely right, then any other religion or belief system would be correct in whichever of its beliefs overlap with that one.
I’m not ready to grant you both of those "most"s without seeing your extensive study of comparitive religions and your Venn diagrams.
And it might happen that if you made such an extensive study, you would find one religion more persuasive than others, or that you would find some things that most if not all of them agree on.
But I don’t blame you for looking at all the religious people in the world, seeing how much they disagree with one another, and wondering how any of them could know what they’re talking about.
But some people do in fact choose and/or come to believe one particular religion, not just by deault, but in a way kind of like how they choose or come to believe one particular political philosophy/party, and/or kind of like how they choose a career or a person to marry.
The trouble with analogies is that we cherry-pick the elements that support our position and ignore the elements that do not. In the case of an accident, we would have elements such as a wrecked car or cars, reports by reliable police who showed up on the scene, who may not have seen the actual accident occur, but certainly saw its concrete aftermath. Naturally, one would expect witnesses to a car accident to have different accounts of how such a sudden development occurred.
But here we have a Bible supposedly inspired by an omnipotent and omniscient diety who tells us that his plan for all creation is that one of the three persons of which he is composed would be incarnated as a human being about 2000 years ago and willingly suffer a horrible death by torture in order to expiate or all times the sins of humanity. If this is true, it is surely the single most important thing that ever happened or will happen.
Then 600 years later, that same God speaks to an illiterate caravan driver named Mohammed and inspires another book that contradicts almost all of of what is expounded in the above paragraph. Now, with two mutually contradictory statements there are only two possibilities. One is right and the other wrong, or both are wrong (because there is no God).
True.
Christians, for example, would agree with your second sentence.
And some of them would go on to say
A. Those Muslims are wrong, and they’re doomed and damned for their Jesuslessness.
To which they will respond in various ways:
(1) Those poor Muslims, but what can you do? shrug
(2) We need to step up our missionary work and bring them to Christ!
(3) Ha ha! [/Nelson Munz]
or perhaps other ways.
Other Christians go with a variation on:
B. They may not have as much of the truth as we have, but as long as they genuinely love God and try to do God’s will, God will honor that and reward them for it. If Jesus is God, then when a Muslim worships God he’s worshipping Jesus without realizing it.
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If they’re fighting each other, then I agree, that is pretty damn dismal. If their false beliefs are messing up their lives, that’s dismal.
But if they hold beliefs, even false ones, that make them happier, give their lives meaning, inspire them to be better people and to live lives that make the world around them better, then no, I don’t think that’s particularly dismal—certainly no more so than if those people had been atheists.
Do things become true according to the benefit they confer??? 
When I was kid almost nobody believed that the Earth’s continents had moved over the eons. Today, pretty much everybody believes in plate tectonics.
Twenty years ago we did not know that a bacterium could cause ulcers.
Ten years ago, we had no real evidence that there were planets orbiting other suns besides ours. Today we are fairly certain that planets, including Earth-like ones, must exist in huge numbers.
These facts emerged because the evidence accumulated. It has nothing to do with beneficial or not beneficial.
We’ve got plenty to go on. They get these opinions directly from a book supposedly inspired. If the book really is inspired, you’ve got a direct conduit from God. If not, the rules just reflect what the writers thought morals should be, backed up by appeals to a made-up deity. Or, more likely, the rules reflect what the writers were sure the deity would want.
Existence is a characteristic. What other thing is there that some people claim to exist without giving any characteristics of the thing?
Where fellow human is defined as a member of your tribe. Others can be killed or even eaten. Pretty much everyone defined some superhuman or superanimal entity to explain all the things they didn’t understand. They evolved into more subtle deities later. Isn’t it more likely these came from human needs - if there was a deity, and it made itself known in some way, wouldn’t beliefs about it more or less cohere, and not evolve over time?
No, God having a son and not having son are not different characteristics, they are contradictory. Many of the different traits are contradictory. Say two people are describing you. If one says you like candy, and the other says you like chocolate, then they are describing different characteristics, and I can believe them both. If, however, one says you love chocolate and the other says you hate it, and in fact are deathly allergic to it, then I know someone is misled. The latter case is the one we have with God.
Well, you were going on about evidence. However, the fact of contradictory theistic claims is certainly one good reason to not believe in any, which is exactly the point of the OP. The only way we can state this is by examining evidence and the lack thereof. Contradictory theistic claims would not be an issue if one set of claims had solid evidence backing it up. But, in fact all theisms retreat to faith and continued claims of unevidenced historical facts. Since they all seem to be about the same in this regard, we are justifiied in rejecting all of them.
As for existential negatives, we are discussing proofs or disproofs of things that might exist. Even primes greater than two are impossible by definition, just like square circles. They are not the type of claim being discussed.
You apparently do not understand the real meaning of “He who asserts must prove”. You cannot ask people to prove a negative.
“Leprechauns exist in Ireland”
“Leprechauns do not exist in Ireland.”
How do you substantiate the first claim, which is a positive statement? You bring in a skeleton of a tiny human a few inches high. You capture one alive. You convince the Little People to come out in large numbers and to speak to biologists and scientists, to go on Oprah, whatever. Just don’t let Rosie sit on them. 
How do you prove the non-existence of something? Now, in some very limited senses, it IS possible to prove that something does not exist in a limited physical area. I CAN prove that there is no elephant in my coffee cup, for example, with eyewitness testimony, with comparisons of the volume of my cup and the size of even the smallest elephant, etc. etc.
But to prove the statement “Leprechauns do not exist in Ireland” I would need to be able to see the whole of Ireland at once, under every bush and around every tree, in every cave and even underground, since one could argue that the Little Folk exist underground. Plainly, this is impossible.
This is why, until such time as someone poves that God exists, atheism is the logical default position. And until someone proves that Leprechauns exist, aleprechaunism is the logical default position.
I cannot prove that God does not exist for the same reason I cannot prove that Leprechauns do not exist.
But it is not as black and white as all that, because even when we cannot prove that something does NOT exist, we can question the assertion that it does exist using logic and our exprience of relaity.
For example, when somone asserts that Leprechauns do exist, but presents no evidence for this belief, I am perfectly justified in pointing out some illogical aspects of that assertion. I am perfactly justified in asking:
- Why has nobody ever captured one or found the skeleton of one?
- How could they be as clever as you claim and capable of speech when their brain must be no bigger than a mouse’s?
- If Leprechauns are just like human beings only much, much smaller, there are hundreds of physiological reasons they could not exist in the same shape and configuration as humans.
SECONDARY matters? Disagreement on SECONDARY matters?
God tells us that 2000 years ago one of his three persons became human and became his only-begotten son who accepted to be tortured to death so all humanity could be reconciled with God and saved from damnation. While on Earth this Jesus stated that “no man” came to the Father except through him.
About 600 year later, the same God tells Mohammed that no, Jesus is NOT his son but just a nice guy and a prophet, that Jesus did not die on the cross to redeem humanity, that he is a unitary God and not a triune one, and that the book that God is dictating to Mohammed is the true and final revelation that all must follow if they wish to achieve Salvation.
SECONDARY matters?
Fine. I’m not denying the extended meaning of son of god at all. I’m not sure they are contradictory to Jewish belief as much as orthogonal to it.
Not all elements in the set of belief get equal weight. If the nonoverlapping elements consisted of things like the day to celebrate the Sabbath, there might be no issue. But the divinity of Jesus is at the very core of Christianity. This being in the subset belonging to Christianity alone indicates that Christianity is inherently in contradiction to both Judaism and Islam.
**YES, those are secondary matters when it comes to theism. ** Those matters may be of primary importance in the Christian faith, but they are NOT intrinsic to theism itself. For this reason, it is foolish to dismiss theism as a whole, simply because theists disagree on a range of other beliefs.
As I said earlier, you folks can’t even agree on the definition of atheism. That strikes me as a much more fundamental form of disagreement than these other teachings – none of which are intrinsic to theism itself.
I’m afraid any contradictory properties deity possesses *are *of primary importance to theism, because they are pointers to the validity of the central premise - “[Deity] exists”. If attributes of [Deity] are paradoxical, then [Deity] collapses in in itself.
Unless said Deity is just an abstract concept, of course 