I agree. When logic and reason conflict with religious belief, why should we abandon logic and reason?
I realise that the OP resitricted his examination to christianity, but there are religions that accept an evil god. (Those that require human sacrifice, for example.)
This is the reason why foks in this thread got confused (where evidence must equal proof) when you must statements like that.
Folks have stated that they believe that they have felt god’s love in a emotional and subjective manner.
You wave that off as non-evidence, since it’s not potentially attributable to something else (post #28, you ask for evidence attributable “to God and not chance?”, which requires it to be non-falsifiable), despite your assertion that you would accept evidence that doesn’t have to reach the level of proof (post # 30 & 33).
Because, in some cases, we are discussing what that person’s emotional states and feelings. A person can’t show evidence of how they felt during a religious experience.
(Bolding mine.) You have turned being emotionally illogical into a hateful and spiteful act. Grats.
How can you type that and not expect people to sense hostility?
How can you claim that this is an honest attempt at understanding the subjective experiences that some people claim to have had?
Can you now see why some folks have declined to elaberate on their “evidence”? Can’t you see how some foks (who feel that they have had some profound emotional experience) suspect that in doing so, their very personal and profound feelings and evidence is just going to be used as a target dummy?
Well, folks have claimed to be inspired by god to do bad things, as the readers of this board are reminded of quite a bit by someone pointing out the bad side of religion.
But the OP asked about god’s love, not god’s wrath.
Hmm. Well, logic is not the only tool (well, maybe for you it is) that people use to evaluate their experiences in this world. Lacking a clear cut easy (or logical) reason for some action or decision, folks substitute emotion and intuition.
Maybe not hate, but definately kill.
“Logic” is not good. It just is. (A self checking tool for deduction and reasoning.)
When you deal with things with subjective values, logic and reasoning can lead to different conclusions based on how you weight those subjective values. (Or variables, if you will.)
Using Darwinian logic, we could justify killing the weak, old, and handicapped among us (presumadely to strengthen the gene pool, or reduce the drain on limited resources). But that would also be seen as hateful by those of the more compassionate bent.
To quote the old and wise Obi-Wan Kenobi:
“Luke, you’re going to find that many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view.”
Superb.
I’m suddenly afire to write a book called The Divine Reacharound, but so far all I have is the title. It’ll either be a theological treatise or a biography of John Waters.
Who said that love involved smothering every second of the day? But I didn’t love my kids in the living room and beat them in the dining room. If someone does that then I think it is fair to say there is no love there at all. Now, some mental illnesses might involve love turning on and off without control of the person. If God is mentally ill, it would explain a lot.
Many things are side effects of properties which do provide an advantage. If finding intense colors pleasing used to lead to getting food or escaping predators, then enjoying sunsets would be a side effect. Far more plausible than goddidit.
I’ve heard evidence for, but I haven’t heard the refutation of evidence against, except that we should ignore natural evil or that it is for some unknown purpose. I particularly refer to natural evil since human evil can be explained better with free will arguments. I don’t buy them totally, but natural evil is cleaner, in that humans don’t benefit at all.
But rejecting logic entirely is not very satisfying either, and leads to bad things. There are plenty of people much nastier than believers who work on emotion - the bigot for example. If you were trying to convince a bigot that his views were wrong, and he responded that it was just emotional so you didn’t understand, would you then go away? Our emotion is wired into us, but our civilization comes from rejecting the easy emotional answers. When I read in the paper about a rapist/murderer my emotional response is to want to bash his head in, but where would we be as a civilization if we didn’t repress that for logic?
And no, I am not equating religious people to either bigots or rapists. I’m just saying that when you swear off reason for something that might be neutral or even beneficial, how do you justify using it for things where emotion is harmful?
Actually, what we are doing is looking at the world, and then deducing the characteristics of a God based on them. We certainly cannot say that there is no God based on suffering - many Gods in history happily cause suffering. I think we can argue that any god can’t be omnibenevolent, since we can construct worlds the same as ours where fewer suffer.
Now the very topic of this thread, God loving us, assumes that God has the human property of love. That’s not at all clear. Can we love an ant in any meaningful way? Religionists, not atheists, assign human characteristics to God. As always, atheists can only react to the characteristics of Gods that theists propose.
Perhaps God has some emotion where it makes sense to punish those who love him, reward those who don’t believe in him, and randomly kill many. Call it blurfel if you wish, since it is impossible for puny humans to understand. Don’t call it love.
Excellent! Since we know flowers were “created” by evolution, you know where that puts God.
And logic and reason have what to do with Communism and Fascism? Any single minded system, religious or political, must reject logic, since they’re convince they have the correct and final answer.
I’m unaware of any Crusades made up of scientists or philosophers myself.
And while the Bible says all things are possible with God, flying, instant communication to the other end of the earth, and space travel doesn’t seem to be included. They only became possible when science, which ignores god, got into the act.
We can? How many worlds have you constructed?
Which, come to think of it, isn’t that much different from what God said to Job.
Actually, I was trying to demonstrate the flimsiness of the “cherrypicked evidence” approach, by demonstrating that it works equally well at supporting anything. An evidentiary approach that supports everything actually supports nothing.
And I’m afraid that I’m not going to feel guilty for attempting to debunk invalid evidentiary techniques in a thread about whether there is evidence for something. If such debunking makes you uncomfortable…well, I’m not going to tell you to get out of the frying pan, but don’t be surprised to see a little sizzling here and there. 
From my personal experience with religious types. A moderately recent conversation with my mother: “You should be thankful to god that you were able to get and hold on to your job.” My mental response: ‘Gee thanks for thinking that I’m so bad at what I do that it takes an act of God to get and keep me employed.’ :mad:
Kudos to you!
Well, since you’re willing to give people credit for their good deeds (and thus they’re not inherently tainted), let’s continue on with that and assume that people are responsible for their bad deeds as well; that we only give God credit for things that are not mankind’s fault.
However, if you’re going to give God credit for sunsets, then he gets credit for earthquakes too, right? Landslides? Volcanos? Lightning? Diseases? Plagues? Genetic disorders? Deformities?
Sure, in some cases, some of these things are somewhat influenced by man; if we rip out all the trees on a slope above a city; the resulting landslide is not an act of God. However, a lot of times, these nasty little events are much man’s fault as the sun setting is. And so, one has to wonder why only the good natural events count as evidence of God’s emotions towards humanity.
I don’t understand what you mean by this.
It actually is pretty easy to answer the questions satisfactorally; if you let go of the unfounded premises and work forward using only, and using all of the available evidence in the natural world, things come together without contradiction. The reason that this doesn’t generally work in religious analyses is that they included various traditional beliefs that unfortunately contradict with reality. (This of course means that the beliefs are not true.)
The problem with this of course is that a lot of people like their traditional beliefs: these traditions tell the believer that they are special, that they are protected, that they are superior to their neighbor, that they are loved, that they can control or influence things around them in ways beyond their normal means. Even if these beliefs have no basis in reality, they’re still quite comforting, and people quite understandably don’t want to trade them for the comparatively cold comfort of what truth is available.
Oh, and recognizing the inherent resistance of people in imagining their comforting beliefs (not to mention the scores of other impediments to world wide socio-utopia and unification), I accept your apology on humanity’s behalf for the delay.
That in mind, though, could you ask them to hurry it up a little? We’re going to look really bad if we haven’t got our act together by the time the aliens show up to interview us for membership in the Galactic Socio-utopia and Unification Club.
If I expected my spectacular personal power of charisma and enlightenment to reach forth to touch all believers and cast the dark film of religious self-delusion from their eyes, that they could gratefully crawl out into the light of truth and atheism, then that would be arrogant of me.
Of course, I don’t expect most religious folk to be swayed by my arguments; they have some very deeply-entrenched beliefs they’re very busy defending, after all. Plus, I’m not even providing any positive arguments for anything; I’m merely attempting to provide negative arguments, to undermine false beliefs that have no real foundation in reality anyway. So I’m not even offering new “truths”. Not much of a sales pitch, is it?
I hadn’t thought that my particular post was particularly offensive. (At least, not that post of mine. 
) Still though you seem to have found fault, so I ask you: how does one go about trying to show someone that their beliefs and assumptions are flawed and false without seeming “disrespectful of other peoples views”? No matter how polite I am about it, I can’t possibly be respecting the things I’m trying to point out flaws in.
It’s all well and good to play devil’s advocate, but it’s still fair to rebut the position you’re presenting, even if it’s not one you actually hold, right? All in the name of fighting ignorance and all.
I just want to say that this is the best discussion I’ve read in GD for some time even if it is about a topic with tons of miles on it.
However, I disagree on a major point that many nonbelievers feel is their justification for their own somewhat righteous crusade :
This is not true. Many wars are justified later with formulated logic and reason to combine with emotions to absolve them of guilt, however, simple competition over limited resources to ‘logically’ protect ones offspring and overall community historically has often led the average man down the path of murder. Consider a Native American tribe without enough meat for the winter.
Sure. Did every baby have to die in the tsunami? If not, this is not the best of all possible worlds.
Meh. I’m not uncomfortable.
But it’s my overall impression that, based on the threads I have read, nothing new is seriously expected to be discovered in/from them, but they end up merely as opportunities for some folks to “recreationally bash” the deluded ones.
I would have had a similar reaction.
Thanks. Um. I cannot tell if your being sarcastic, but I did not mean to look like I was looking for a pat on the head.
Sure. Some folks do. And as Thudlow Boink points out in post #26, even the faithful struggle with the question “Why does god allow…”
Assuming god has a plan, the faithful hope that these things have an important purpose, a non-evil purpose, that we don’t or can’t understand.
Again, let’s take the parent/child relationship example.
A parent is assumed to love their kids. If a parent uses a swat to get a child to stop doing something dangerous, is that swat the indication of the type or level of love the parent feels for their child? Answer: No. The swat has some other purpose.
As far as what purpose does god have in swatting us with an earthquake, I really have no idea. I can only wild-ass-guess. Maybe god is hoping that humans will eventually learn to band together, show compassion for each other, learn how to deal with adversity and grief, and so on. But again, I have no clue.
Logic and reason (the abacus) fail to provide answers to questions when there is a lack of empirical data, and some folks turn to philosophy (religion).
So, my male pattern baldness is not a curse from god?? Hallelujah! (Joke)
“Pretty easy”? Heh.
One of the questions that religion, as I see it, tries to answer is: “what is the purpose of my life?” and “Is this all there is?”
As far as the “purpose” question goes, some folks don’t like to hear the answer “There really is no purpose, we are a happy accident of chemistry”.
From their line of thinking: “Well gee. All this hard work, all this suffering I go through, in the end, does not matter one wit? This seems to belittle all that I do and strive for…”
That is why they start from the (what you call unfounded) belief that there is some purpose to all this, this everthing we see and do.
I agree that this applies to some folks.
however, if that illusary comfort gives people the will to go on with life past devastating grief, to struggle to better themselves, and so forth, then I have no problem allowing folks to dwell with that illusion. However, again, there are folks who are not satisfied with leaving them be. They feel a duty to butt-in, as if somehow someone living in a “state of delusion” is an intolerable situation.
It’s only the evil human habits I would like to see an intervention for.
Cool.
I tried. I was put on hold. For a really long time.
Looking back, the only phrase I can snatch out as potentially being offensive were “In any other discipline this is the height and depths of dishonesty. In religion it’s the general order of business.”.
If you wish to win the hearts and minds of a religious believer (to convert them to atheism), being a little more sensitive to the fact that this “closely held ignorance” is kinda (even profoundly) important to them, and not sounding casually dismissive, would be my advice. YMMOV.
Absolutely. I just wish I didnt feel like I was making a hash of the other side. 
You did, when you stated that, in your opinion (post #49) I’d think that God’s love would permeate all of creation, not be turned on and off like a faucet.
So, if there is any natural evil/bad events whatsoever in the universe, it must mean that god hates us. That’s what I got out of that.
Hmmm. For some reason, that didn’t occur to me. Thanks.
Please see my “logic” post at the bottom of post #62. I do not assume that logic = absolute truth (and goodness). Logic based upon evil premise, or “point of view”, is just as valid as the more traditional logic I assume you have framed in your mind.
We do not have to accept that evil premise as one we wish to live under, but without using some type of “moral” value system, an evil system can be logically valid.
Haven’t there been spiritual societies that weren’t evil?
Religion has it’s good and evil points to it, IMO. I think that instead of throwing out the baby with the bath water, we should instead reinforce whatever positive effects religion may have, and work to mitigate (or eventualy remove) the bad ones.
I don’t. And my religious friends and coworkers that I know do not try to, either.
But again, people have used all kinds of different rationalisations to do what they realise other folks won’t like, not just religious ones. IMO, evil acts are wrong, no matter what the source.
In the U.S., we agree on a lot of what might be considered “evil”, like murder. There are some things we don’t, like extra-marital sex. As long as we agree to work out our differences peacefully, and be willing to compromise (or be tolerant of) to some degree on the lesser disagreements, I think that thats the best we can come up with, and still value personal freedoms and individuality.
Well, I didn’t make myself clear. I love my kids and my wife in every room of my house and all the time, not just when I’m hugging them. Love permeates my house everywhere and all the time. But I don’t think I could say that if I had randomly hauled off and slapped them or punched them in the den. And I don’t mean punishment. If I build in the midst of an area that gets fires every ten years, and I get burned out, I’m not going to blame God. (Especially if I was playing with matches.)
I think natural evil shows that God is at best indifferent. If he hated us, he might not let us enjoy life as much - but Czarcasm has a good point (which I first saw in a big philosophical justification of atheism) that just as some say evil lets us enjoy the good, we can argue that allowing some good lets the evil hurt more. However, indifference fits the facts better than hate.
Logic itself is amoral. I think logic leads us closer to the truth, which is good. I have no idea what logic based on a point of view means. Perhaps you mean starting with different premises?
An ethical system is based on certain premises. One based on the premise that the state is all powerful can be evil and consistent, yes. The reason I don’t believe in a universal system of ethics is that each of us weights things differently, and those who impose ethical systems based on their weights oppress those with other weightings. Religiously based ethical systems always seem to have God support the weighting of the founder of the system - thus Paul’s aversion to sex created a system where celibacy was a good. Joseph Smith’s non-aversion to sex created a system where celibacy was not an ideal. Which one is closer to God? Beats me. In the system I grew up in godly men were expected to marry, and were considered good catches - though the appeal of Rabbis seems to have moved to Doctors.
All societies are both spiritual and practical. The point isn’t that all spirituality is bad (clearly not the case) but that we must evaluate what spirituality tells us to do outside the domain of spirituality, using logic. We might, and often do, find that spirituality is telling us to do something that is great for both us and others. But we can’t blindly do what spirituality tells us to do without the check.
That’s the crucial point. How do we know what the bad ones are? If we believe in God, what he tells us to do is good by definition, whether it is to aid the poor or slaughter the tribe down the road. If God is truly God he is the source of all morality. If we think there is another way of evaluating morality and actions besides what God tells us, then we get into the realm of logic and ethics.
Now, since most of us don’t chat with God, we must go by supposedly inspired writings and supposedly inspired people. How do we evaluate their claims? Again, logic and ethics.
So, we do agree. You may not realize it yet, though.
I will concede that I’m here for my own entertainment, though it’s more for the fun derived from “can I make a clever, solid, and possibly even coherent argument?” rather than “Whee! Let’s play whack-a-mole with helpless christians!”. If I was actually here for the express and sole desire of “converting” people to atheism, I would have left long ago. Talk about a low return on investment for effort!
However, all that aside, I do believe that there is a small possibility that, if the right bit of blatant illogic in a person’s belief system is shown to them, it might crack that shell of arbitrary belief, and perhaps one day gradually lead to them “converting”, and thus make the world a (slightly) better place.
I wasn’t being sarcastic. I actually toyed with the idea of expanding that, to say something like “Congratulations, you don’t give God the credit for people’s good actions; however, I know from personal experience that a lot of religious-types do, and so such a point is often one worth arguing in a discussion like this, and is a justified response to the question of what harm creditig God with all good can do.” I was actually somewhat miffed that your reasonableness drained my argument of the weight if might otherwise have had. However it also didn’t seem right to bash you for not attempting to defend the less defensible christian attitudes, especially since you’re not actually one of them anyway, so I left my reply short, as you saw.
Right, and it’s reasonable to speculate about alternate explanations. That doesn’t change the fact that you’re skipping a few logical steps when you go from “we vaguely hope that there’s some unknown important non-evil explanation for all the horrible random occurrences in the world” to “All the horrible things don’t count at all, so we know for sure from rainbows and sunsets that god loves us all.” That’s just the cherry-picking evidence thing again, loosely backed by a vague and unfounded dismissal of the unfriendly data.
It actually used to be widely belived that misfortune was godly punishment for some unknown sin. A ‘swat’, as it were. Then people noticed more and more that they didn’t need a god to explain lightning strikes and earthquakes, and from there, they became free to notice that the corellation between sins and “godly punishments” is so poor as to be, well, insignificant.
This is a parent where, when one kid steals cookies from the cookie jar, swats all the other kids. Or sometimes swats nobody. Or sometimes swats his kids when they haven’t done anything.
There’s a term that we have for a parent that swats their kids at random and without cause. Hint: it’s not “loving”.
This was a lot more reasonable back when we used abacuses. (Abaci?) Nowadays we have a lot more empirical data available, and it’s much better organized than it was back then. So, while it used to be reasonable to assume that some god had a hand in nearly everything, this is no longer the case. Which is probably why most religions of today are, or are based on, religions that are multiple hundreds of years old. Back when these religions were started, they were pretty good answers to the world. They are now as obsolete as, well, the abacus.
Actually, we have better purpose than that, as can easily be read the fact that we don’t react to all experiences the same way: we each have the duty to reduce our pain and increase our pleasure. Accounting for mental states, we have the purpose of trying to be happy, and avoiding regret, guilt, or sorrow if possible. Accounting for empathy, we have the purpose of increasing societal happiness, and reducing general suffering. And an awareness of posterity and the continued life of others after your own is over mitigates or eliminates that ‘belittling’ sensation.
See? Easy.
Comparatively, christian religion tells you what to do, but it actually does a poor job of telling you what your purpose is…to be a subservient slave to god maybe? To lie around in purposeless inactivity in heaven? Or maybe to suffer in hell forever? To scream all the time, or to play a harp a lot? Whee.
Oh, and to “Is this all there is?”:
“Have you run out of things to see and do yet? Have you seen it all, done it all, everything, everyhere? If not, then the ‘this’ you refer to is probably just your limited area of experience, and is nowhere near to being ‘all there is’.”
Christian religion is an evil human habit, with its homophobia, its ‘us or them’ divisive nature, its demonization of various harmless practices, its censorship, it’s assaults on scientific education, its tendency to make followers pliable to the desires of their leadership…and that’s if we don’t care about the significant drain on time and money that religion poses on the participant themselves.
I’d rather see somebody drown their sorrows in alcohol. At least in that case the damage is relatively local.
Except that the only way to be properly sensitive to their beliefs is not to attack them at all. If you push the debate beyond their ability to counter you, then you are attacking their core beliefs, and are no longer being respectful.
And cherrypicking evidence is the general order of business with religion. Isn’t it? Or is it that you don’t think that tampering with and modifying your evidence is dishonest in other disciplines?
Or is it that, with religion, truth is not a defense? It doesn’t matter if they’re flat wrong and their religion is full of more holes than a swiss cheese that’s made entirely of air - you can’t point this fact out even if it’s true, or you’re disrespecting their beliefs again.
Needless to say, careful avoidance of disrespecting their beliefs is no better a way to convince them of their errors than cursing and throwing feces at them is - you can’t change enyone’s mind if you don’t take them out of their comfort zone.
You can stay friends with religious people just fine by never challenging their beliefs. And in a lot of real-life circumstances, this is often the better choice than the generally doomed attempt to pop their bubble of beliefs. However, we’re on a message board, in a forum called Great Debates, in a thread discussing what evidence may be reasonably gathered to objectively support the axiomatically accepted religious belief that God is loving. I don’t feel the need to avoid engaging in religious debate here; do you?
Some people believe exactly that but it doesn’t mean they’ve abandoned all logic. It most likely means that a good part of their belief is emotional just as it is for those who believe the opposite.
I don’t agree. People *feel * God’s love. They have an experience that they label as spiritual, or feeling God’s spirit or presence. Why they choose to label that experience as they do has a lot to do with their social enviornment.
IMO part of the difference is what people are reaching for. God belief has a lot to do with finding meaning, purpose, and direction for our lives. When you speak of UFOs, or ghosts, etc those things don’t relate as much to the very fabric of who we are.
I don’t think logic and reason is abandoned or that hard evidence should be ignored although I recognize that many do both. We are all moved by our subjective experiences and we must interpret those through the combined filters of our ability to think and analyze and our emotions. Nobody is exempt from this. People are different and societal influences are different so we come to different conclusions.
Since I haven’t done that I have no comment.
That’s why logic does not apply in the hard evidence way and “know” may be an inapproproate term. You can’t share your subjective experience with someone in a literal sense. Two people won’t come to the same conclusion when interpreting similar experiences. The question in the thread title is pointless if it’s read as , can you convince me God loves me through verbal arguments and a show of evidence?
You’ll have to explain this one. I’m not sure what hate has to do with logic and reason anymore than love. I think emotion and reason are two different factors. Is it illogical to kill someone if they have something you want or need and they won’t give it up? Mankind has been doing it since day one.
God belief doesn’t have to mean abandoning logic, reason, or the advancement of knowledge and wisdom. IMO both science and spirtitualism represent the search for truth. Science is the objective physical arena and spiritualism is the subjective inner person arena. A scientist may form a theory and spend years exploring it and believeing it has validity only to have to change his concept drastically as new evidence and new discoveries present themselves. That doesn’t make his original theory illogical. It’s just part of the process of discovery. We have to go forward on what we believe is true or what may be true. It’s not illogical. It’s part of the process.
It is illogical in this thread to assume a divine perspective for God and then argue the logic of it from a human perspective. The basic example; “If God loves us then innocent children wouldn’t die needlessly”
From the divine perspective physical death isn’t nessecarily a bad thing so there’s no logic in that argument.
Since we don’t have that divine imagined perspective we can only guess. That’s fine if it’s a fun discussion but let’s not call either side logical.
If children die in a painful manner, and I’ll not go through the far too many ways this can happen just for shock value, in what way could it possibly not a bad thing?
Hmmmmm interesting but I don’t think so. Looking at the world atheists conclude there is no God or no need for a god. In order to enter the argument you have to assume God is and then agree oin certain charecteristics. From there we can compare those charecteristics to what we know about the physical world around us and the discussion begins. On both sides it’s only guessing. There may be reasoning involved but we can’t come to logical conclusions because we can’t address the issues from the divine perspective we imagine God to have. Ultimately we can only come back to the same point we come to when we ask. Does God exist? or What is our purpose here if any? The truthful answer for atheist and believer is “I don’t know but here’s my personal judgement call”
Sure. We can argue all sorts of things and we eventually come around to the same spot don’t we? Is there a purpose in human physical suffering from the divine perspective that we don’t have? answer; I don’t know.
Regardless of how that feels emotionally it is true and it is not illogical. My objection in this thread are the things being mistakenly called logical or illogical. Trying to argue that the divine perspective doesn’t make sense from a physical human perspective is only speculation and has very little to do with logic.
That’s interesting as well and I agree to some extent. I think the atheists in this thread are putting their own spin on these charecteristics. God’s love, like human love, is experienced subjectively and not fully inderstood. From a human physical perspective we can make a judgement call about what is or isn’t love. We hope we’re right. We csan’t call it logical to apply that same human physical perspective to God.
Fair enough. All I ask is that the athiests who sincerely think and feel it doesn’t make any sense to them {which I understand and respect} don’t call their guesses logic and mine crap. When it comes down to it, we’re both guessing.
I don’t know. {see how that works?}
I’m not trying to be funny. Having just finished a round of analogies that proved futile I’m not going there. I can’t explain it. The fact that I can’t doesn’t make either of us more or less logical.
Are you perhaps willing to concede that a “guess” which doesn’t require personifying a few seemingly intractable philosophical questions in the form of a personal entity beyond human comprehension who is best appreciated in a completely subjective way by individuals might potentially be more reliable and offer greater explanatory power for people living in our current physical reality than one that does? Note that I’m not necessarily calling your guess “crap” so much as suggesting that some guesses might be subjectively “better” than others.
I look at the world and see no god, and no reason to believe in one, using the same evidence and chain of reasoning I’m using here. But, given that we’ve agreed to suppose a god for the purposes of the thread, I don’t think I’ve assumed a lot more than his existence, and that he has some sort of supernatural powers. There are many characteristics of this god, as I mentioned, where love and natural evil are not an issue. But I think the problem we’re addressing here is that many theists have an opinion on God’s love, achieved spiritually, which clashes with the evidence of the world. That’s where the logic comes in. In my work I intuitively come up with lots of ideas. I then test them, and discard the ones that fly in the face of evidence. There is really no conflict - unless you are so wedded to your intuition that you hold on to it even when it is clearly incorrect. Which is what I think religion is all about - except for special cases like the Dalai Lama and reform Judaism.
Some things, like the purpose question, have no logically derivable answers. I don’t see how any religiously derived purpose is any better than my answer - that we have none except self-created purpose. Given the lack of real direction from our deity or deities, I’d go on and say all our purposes are self-imposed, but some people feel better pretending they come from outside.
I look at the world and see no god, and no reason to believe in one, using the same evidence and chain of reasoning I’m using here. But, given that we’ve agreed to suppose a god for the purposes of the thread, I don’t think I’ve assumed a lot more than his existence, and that he has some sort of supernatural powers. There are many characteristics of this god, as I mentioned, where love and natural evil are not an issue. But I think the problem we’re addressing here is that many theists have an opinion on God’s love, achieved spiritually, which clashes with the evidence of the world. That’s where the logic comes in. In my work I intuitively come up with lots of ideas. I then test them, and discard the ones that fly in the face of evidence. There is really no conflict - unless you are so wedded to your intuition that you hold on to it even when it is clearly incorrect. Which is what I think religion is all about - except for special cases like the Dalai Lama and reform Judaism.
Some things, like the purpose question, have no logically derivable answers. I don’t see how any religiously derived purpose is any better than my answer - that we have none except self-created purpose. Given the lack of real direction from our deity or deities, I’d go on and say all our purposes are self-imposed, but some people feel better pretending they come from outside.
And I don’t know in the strict sense either. But how far fetched do you want to get, to say that every single drowned baby drowned for some good purpose? This is what unfalsifiability is all about. If nothing will sway you from your assumption that God loves us, I can’t keep you from building a giant house of cards of supposition around the proposition. I can shout up as the house teeters that maybe you want to get off it, but it’s your choice.
Emotionally true and illogical are hardly contradictory. I’ll certainly accept that you feel this is emotionally true, to you. But we can believe in both logical and illogical things. I think you are begging the question in the correct sense. If you believe that god loves us, then anything can be explained in those terms, and seemingly contradictory evidence explained by saying god loves us in ways we don’t understand - as you just did. Sorry, that’s not logical in the commonly understood sense.
Like I said, calling it love does put human physical perspectives to god. That’s how we understand them, and saying God loves us makes god attractive. Atheists in this thread are not adding characteristics to god, but just testing the commonly understood effects of the characteristics you are giving to god against the evidence.
Atheists have a clear and simple answer to all these dilemmas. Tsunamis are not hard to understand given the understanding that we inhabit a world much bigger than we are which works according to its own laws without regard for us. That we live in an unfeeling and uncaring universe doesn’t bother me a bit, but I realize it bothers lots of people. However, an unfeeling universe hypothesis explains what we see far better than the loving God hypothesis, and I think that this is all we are saying.
Regarding whether God “loves us” or not, my response is Fuck God (“Iraq’s new crisis: Moms, dads abandoning kids”)
Whether the suffering in this world is his doing or not (due to the “free will” of humans to choose to do evil deeds), if he is omniscient, he knew, before making the world, that shit like this would happen. He built the world anyway, so he is morally responsible for the evil that is happening.
Even if this world is not “real”, and is more akin to a dream that you can wake up from and “learn” something, I should note that nightmares, even if they go away when you wake up, are extremely unpleasant while you are in them, and not something anyone wants to go through.