Let Theists agree before they have the nerve to criticize atheists!

[Der_Trihs]

[QUOTE=Mangetout]
Assuming atheists are all singing from the same unhymnsheet, why does it need to be the case that theists need to all get aligned with each other?

Certainly if it were the case that people were saying “all of us theists are right, and because we’re all in agreement, you guys - the atheists - are wrong”, there would be a need for consensus, but as far as I’m aware, that isn’t the case. Why should any given theist have to be in agreement with all or any other theists in order to present and argue their own viewpoint?
[/QUOTE]
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.

[Mangetout]

[QUOTE=Der Trihs]
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.
[/QUOTE]
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?

[Latro]

[QUOTE=Mangetout]
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?
[/QUOTE]

That we should examine any evidence they have for their claim?

[Der_Trihs]

[QUOTE=Latro]
That we should examine any evidence they have for their claim?
[/QUOTE]
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.

[Mangetout]

Well, sure, but in that case, we’re evaluating their claims against the real world, not against each other, which is fine.

[Quiddity_Glomfuster]

[QUOTE=jjimm]

I have read your arguments in this thread with increasing irritation. By asserting the similarities, you are in direct contradiction to a huge number (possibly the majority) of adherents of those very religions you seek to defend. You don’t realise that yours is a fundamentalist view, too.
[/QUOTE]

Again, you insist on dropping beneath the meta level. You are also making unsubstantiated claims based on your assumption of what ‘adherents’ think.

Your appeal to a search for common ethics fails. Where’s the common ethic between Islam and the cargo cult that worships Prince Philip? Prince Philip is not divine, and I suspect even the Queen would agree with this.

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.

IMO in actual fact, with your “honour the Divine”, you’re actually acknowledging a human frailty that ascribes that which cannot be comprehended, to something magical. As the cargo cults prove. What you’re seeing there is the birth of a religion. “What’s all this crap falling from the sky? Must be magic.” All else follows from there.

You may be. I’m not.

[QUOTE=MrDibble]

This is a non-answer to my question - what does their worship have in common with JudeoIslamiChristian worship?
[/QUOTE]

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.

You know nothing about Buddhism and are speaking out of your ignorance - there is no “Universal Conciousness/Oneness Principle” AS A CENTRAL TENET of Buddhism. If I was still a Buddhist, I would find your presumption quite insulting. No,scratch that, even now, I still do.

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

I’d submit to you that flaying someone else alive hardly equates to submitting yourself to hazing or tatooing

Why? People have died from hazing. The tattooing is excruciating.

and that no worship that embraces human sacrifice can be said to have “be good to others” as its other central tenet.

Assure me that the someone elses didn’t willingly participate.

[QUOTE=Der Trihs]

"Unlike a claim to the existence of something external, a purely internal experience doesn’t require external proof. " That’s external as in a god, as opposed to internal like an emotion.
[/QUOTE]

You’re back to discussing a White-Haired Old Man; a personage.

It’s a picture of what a thought is on the hardware level; not a very good picture, because our scans aren’t that good yet. It doesn’t look like a thought because we don’t know how to translate it. That doesn’t make it not a thought, any more than a paper with unreadably coded orders isn’t a set of orders because we can’t read it.

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.)

[Thudlow_Boink]

[QUOTE=Voyager]
Sorry, Jesus has to be the literal son of god as well as whatever metaphorical role you want to make up. If Mary was a virgin, then half of Jesus’ genetic material must come from god - since it can’t all come from her. Yeah, the writers of the NT were ignorant of genetics, but God isn’t. Zeus bonked Leda and God bonked Mary. Same thing.
[/QUOTE]
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.

[MrDibble]

[QUOTE=Quiddity Glomfuster]

Not the point. You, too, can’t pull out to meta level.
[/QUOTE]

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.

[QUOTE=Quiddity Glomfuster]
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.
[/QUOTE]

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.

[QUOTE=Quiddity Glomfuster]
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.

[/QUOTE]

Not your convo to direct, I’m afraid. Nor can you direct how people get their perceptions of “The Divine”.

[QUOTE=Quiddity Glomfuster]

It’s not a presumption. Explain anatman.
[/QUOTE]

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.

[QUOTE=Quiddity Glomfuster]

You can have a little boo at buddhist cosmology here if you think I’m making it up. Buddhist Cosmology

[/QUOTE]

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?

[QUOTE=Quiddity Glomfuster]

Why? People have died from hazing. The tattooing is excruciating.

[/QUOTE]

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)

[QUOTE=Quiddity Glomfuster]

Assure me that the someone elses didn’t willingly participate.

[/QUOTE]

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.

[Valteron]

[QUOTE=JThunder]
And by the same token, all theists agree that there is a god. That is the sum token of theism. So what’s your point?

Various theists may hold to a number of other beliefs, but none of these are central to theism itself.
[/QUOTE]

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.

[Thudlow_Boink]

[QUOTE=Pochacco]
But all this has drifted far away from my original point – namely that Christians and Muslims define very different relationships between Jesus and God. In Christian theology the Son is begotten by the Father but both ARE GOD. In Muslim theology Allah caused Jesus to be born, but Jesus is NOT GOD. Either the Nicean creed is TRUE and the teachings of Mohammed are FALSE, or vice versa, or (as atheists believe) BOTH are wrong.
[/QUOTE]
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.

But no matter which of the three situations holds, a substantial chunk of theists are utterly and completely mistaken about their religion and the nature of the universe.

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.

The fact that most theists are wrong about most things suggests that we shouldn’t put a great deal of stock in their claims as to how the universe may or may not be structured.

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.

[Valteron]

[QUOTE=JThunder]

Moreover, while theists may differ on the particulars of God’s characteristics, I fail to see how this implies that God does not exist. Seventeen witnesses to a car accident would quite likely differ in their accounts of the precise events. Does this imply that the accident did not occur? Not by my reckoning, it doesn’t.

[/QUOTE]

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).

[Thudlow_Boink]

[QUOTE=Valteron]
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.
[/QUOTE]
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.
[/QUOTE]

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.

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.

[Valteron]

[QUOTE=kanicbird]

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. . . . . . .
On the other side, if no ‘god’ exists what does atheism get one over agnosticism? Again I can’t see any benefit to atheism.
[/QUOTE]

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.

[Voyager]

[QUOTE=Quiddity Glomfuster]
They could well be. We don’t have much to go on.

[/quote]

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.

I am discussing the existence of, not the characteristics of.

Existence is a characteristic. What other thing is there that some people claim to exist without giving any characteristics of the thing?

Well, here’s the interesting thing; seems pretty much all cultures came up with the notion; most independently of each other, at least at first. And interestingly, the folks who have done more extensive studies of world religions, and I who have done a study which was not as extensive but was still a survey study, discovered that the most basic principles of them all boil down to the same thing; honour a Divine and treat your fellow humans well.

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?

Isn’t it fair to say you saw different characteristics in the Divine? Six different people might describe you differently; who’s ‘right’? Only you really know you. Everyone else is just guessing.

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.

[Voyager]

[QUOTE=JThunder]
I suspect that you’re severely misrepresenting their views… but if you aren’t (which I doubt), I will heartily agree that they’re speaking fallaciously. Theists and atheists alike are often guilty of sloppy thinking.

Perhaps… but once again, that’s not the subject addressed in the OP.

[/QUOTE]

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.

[Valteron]

[QUOTE=JThunder]
The statement “God doesn’t exist” is every bit as much a definite claim as “God does exist.” If someone’s going to claim that either statement is definitely true, then it’s only fair to ask them to substantiate that claim.’
[/QUOTE]

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.

[QUOTE=JThunder]
Moreover, as has been pointed out several times in the course of this thread, that’s not the topic under discussion. The OP claimed (incorrectly, IMO) that disagreement among theists on secondary matters (e.g. choice of scripture) somehow invalidates theism. The question of WHY someone should believe in God is an interesting one, but irrelevant as far as this issue is concerned.
’
[/QUOTE]

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?

[Voyager]

[QUOTE=Thudlow Boink]
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.
[/QUOTE]

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.

[Voyager]

[QUOTE=Thudlow Boink]
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.

[/QUOTE]

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.

[JThunder]

[QUOTE=Valteron]
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.
[/QUOTE]

**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.

[MrDibble]

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