Church teaching and tradition is not reliable historical reportage. Given human societies’ proclivity to create mythologies, especially for sociopolitical ends, religious teaching and tradition is probably the least reliable source of factual history.
The question you were asked about evidence was a good one, but you just choose to evade it. Let me put it a different way.
Suppose I were to suggest that, according to the best conjectures we can make based on archeological records and other evidence, the real historical Jesus was a fervent political revolutionary whose primary goal was to free Judea from Roman domination. Pretty much a non-magical, non-miracle-working dude with a political axe to grind, who was probably charismatic and astute enough to associate his revolutionary objectives with laudatory noble goals. What if he was crucified by the Romans, not for trumped-up reasons, but because he was genuinely a threat to the Roman hegemony in the region? And what if some of his followers and the generations after them gradually embellished stories about him, as our societies and cults are wont to do, until the accounts we call the Bible started to emerge and then, with the final great inventiveness at the Council of Nicaea, the recognizable framework of modern Christianity was created.
What if I were to propose that this plausible and historically supportable scenario is what really happened – a scenario made all the more plausible by not requiring any appeal to magic and miracles? What objective evidence do you have that it’s wrong, or that your version of events is for some reason more credible?
Sure, but the “massive community” on which you rely for objective information has historically been notoriously unreliable and prone to manufacturing mythologies, especially over long timeframes. We all know how stories get distorted in the retelling. Now multiply that by thousands of retellers over thousands of years and add in a generous dose of motivated fabrication, and the resemblance to factual reality is pretty much zero. I understand that belief in mythology gives people hope, and there is value in certain kinds of spiritualism, but most organized religion peddles a shallow form of spiritualism and false hope.
Pretty much, yes. Mostly just unimaginative and completely lacking in credibility.
BTW, I don’t consider myself an atheist and have no interest in advocating atheism. Just not a fan of organized religion.
You’re right, but it just doesn’t make sense that we would expect a deity to give us some kind of super showy parting the Red Sea kind of miracle just so that we would believe what is already obvious.
The world is here. We’re here. The universe can be studied and understood. It should be obvious that there is a source. Why do we need some voice from the heavens? Why can’t God just be humble?
If my sister is an adulterer, my father a closeted homosexual, and my mother a whore? The bible is clear on that. The church stopped meting out that punishment eventually, but the history of the Catholic Church is soaked in blood. And even in the modern day, its moral track record is drenched in the blood and tears of raped children and african AIDS victims.
I’m sorry, but I just can’t respect that. Humanity is full of traditions spanning back generations that countless people draw inspiration from. Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, other Christian sects, local cultures and traditions. Many people gain hope, beauty, inspiration, and other positive things from those institutions and traditions.
But at the core of so many of them, including Catholicism, is a demand that we reshape our worldview to accept things with poor evidence that we cannot possibly justify. That we build the core of our reality around stating that we know something we cannot and do not know. And it only gets worse from there, as these organizations demand that we adopt a morality that makes no sense (classifying harmless actions as morally wrong, expecting us to take thoughtcrimes seriously, treating eternal torture as a morally just punishment for anything, etc.), grant them our time and our money, and spread these ideas to our children in ways that we would never accept if, say, a political party was doing it rather than a religion. And that’s without even getting into the shit everyone knows is wrong, like the consistent and persistent sexual abuse scandals that the catholic church keeps fucking covering up.
If such a deity existed and wanted to “make himself known” “unmistakably”, then would hopefully be smart enough not to pull this stunt in a period that was basically prehistory out of the sight of literally anybody important. If he did do such a foolish thing there would be no way to distinguish the superstitious gossip about him from all the other superstitious gossip of the era, while all his own words and such would inevitably be lost to history because he didn’t even hang out with people who could write.
Now, if this dude came down and performed a medical miracle in a modern hospital, of getting born from a woman with an intact hymen (which I assume is what you mean by “virgin”)… actually I’d still assume a scam, it wouldn’t take too many people colluding to swap one woman for another before making their announcement. That business with rising from the dead and walking around with open holes into his guts, mind you, that would be pretty interesting. Not that I would put it past a good magician to figure out a way to make you think you were manhandling his intestines, but it would definitely be worth a second look.
Let me know when such a dude turns up. I’m sure it will get pretty decent press coverage, so just post the links to the interviews where people are poking things through him.
No, no, that’s modern stuff. He’s referring more to the old establishment – like the California Mission system. Or maybe older stuff like Pope Pius III, pregnant nuns, land grabs (that stuff with the Borgia family), whoever was the model for Dumas’ Cardinal Richlieu…
You do realize you just committed heresy, right? You just announced that the Catholic church is false, because the FSM is most definitely not the deity worshiped by it. The FSM didn’t send any Jesuses (Jesii?) to earth. The FSM isn’t going to save anybody’s souls. The FSM isn’t going to send anybody to hell. All of catholicism is false. All of christianity is false.
I admit I thought it was odd to see anybody trying to pull the cosmological argument on a message board of educated people. But to see somebody not try to avoid the argument’s most obvious flaw, but to slam themselves headfirst into it :eek:
Also, and I was so stunned by your faceplant into the cosmological argument I didn’t notice this immediately, but where on earth are you pulling this bizarre statement from?
If you’re trying to argue that capital-G God is the christian god and thus he’s the only god because he’s the christian god and the christian god says there’s only one god…well, among other problems, we can’t infer the existence of capital-G God from the cosmological argument, so capital-G God’s definition is utterly irrelevant.
If you’re simply trying to argue that it’s impossible for there to ever be more than one god around, regardless of the religion or theology under discussion, then you have an amazingly poor grasp of history.
That’s a fairly new idea, and false to boot. If you define “God” as the creator, well, there’s no such thing as the single creator of, say, the Empire State Building!
The story of Doubting Thomas is one of the most bizarre, manipulative stories in the entire bible. It makes it clear that god could trivially offer any of us the evidence needed for us to change our minds… But expects us to believe despite not offering us that evidence. Blessed are those who believe without having seen - but given what’s allegedly at stake, I’ll settle for just being as holy as a doubtful disciple.
Look, if a used car salesman responded to you asking for proof that the car had a nice stereo with “Eh, I prefer customers who trust me,” I can’t imagine anyone here would have trouble seeing the problem - if what you have is the truth, then exposing it to honest investigation will not destroy it. The only thing demanding faith without evidence does is allow lies to fester.
I didn’t properly respond to the OP’s actual question, so:
This will sound a bit rude, but the first thing to realize when you’re talking to an atheist is that atheism isn’t a belief. Like, if I said, “How can you maintain your staunchly held belief that Santa Claus is a fictional character?”, the sentence doesn’t quite work. Not believing in Santa Claus is, in a technical sense, a belief but it’s still weird to present it in that manner. It’s a fictional character and we all know how the presents show up under the tree.
But what if we don’t know how the presents show up under the tree? Is that proof of Santa?
At that point we ask ourselves, is it more likely that a fat man with a bunch of Keebler elves practices trademark infringement by crafting knock-off plastic toys modeled on those produced by large manufacturers targeting popular American cartoons and then somehow flies around the planet faster than the speed of light delivering those products to children for no obvious reason…or that someone’s going to the store, buying stuff, and sticking it under the tree while no one is looking?
Minus seeing that occur, factually I don’t know the answer, but I can still make a reasoned decision.
But what if 70,000 people say that they saw a fat man come flying out of the sky, in a sleigh drawn by floating reindeer, and load the toys under the tree?
Well I mean, sure, that does give one pause. But at the same time, we live in a world where several million Jews were gathered up with the help of the general populace and delivered to be murdered in a methodic, factory-like style by well-meaning folk. We live in a world where thousands of men will say that their penis is missing, because the local witch is cursing everyone, and then when a white doctor takes a look, sees their penis, and says, “I see your penis. It’s right there, just stop looking away and look at yourself.” And then the man looks at his own penis and cries, “I’m cured! Thank you, doctor!” You have to ask yourself, did 70,000 people see a fat man fly out of the sky, or is it just that most people are stupid and gullible? Did 70,000 people actually see it, or were there 70,000 people gathered, and 100 of them say that they saw it and the person who went around to ask everyone happened to be a Santa Believer, and he prioritized the testimony of those 100 over the testimony of the 69,900?
Let’s consider that you, yourself, are an atheist. You would probably think nothing of going to watch Thor: Ragnarok. It’s a work of fiction, based on ancient fictions.
But, I mean, people used to be sacrificed to Thor. Real live people would go, find someone (or 99 someones), and murder them in the name of appeasing the god Thor, because they had personal faith that everything they experienced around them was sufficient evidence of the reality of the gods.
If I go today and talk to a devout Buddhist or Hindu believer, they’ll say all the same things as a devout Christian, in terms of miracles, “feeling the truth”, “feeling presences”, etc. There have been hundreds or thousands of religions through history and tens of thousands of gods, and it’s reasonable to assume that all of the believers, jamming leaves up their noses, hanging themselves on hooks, cutting flesh off their penis, murdering people, killing nearby tribes, giving away their hard-earned cash to lazy bums, etc. all would have said the same thing through history and been every bit as certain. They would have pointed at all of the magical events and the clear “rightness” of what they were taught as infants, when their brain was still learning how to interpret the world around them.
You have decided that all of that is nonsense and fiction. Despite the full faith of billions of people over tens of thousands of years, you think that Thor is a fictional character, along with Old Man Coyote, Tengri, Nasilele, etc.
Or…maybe you believe that those are all trickster spirits and not the actual creator (as the OT describes it), but then why are there all these trickster spirits that teach values that are basically equivalent to Christian ones - be kind, don’t murder folk, obey your parents, etc. - but only differ in whether they want you to slice parts off of your penis or stuff leaves up your nose? If it’s a trickster deity, then the physical nonsense and rites and rituals all make sense, but that doesn’t match up with the belief system. Nor do the rites and rituals make sense for a benevolent deity - and particularly not one that crafted quantum mechanics.
Let’s assume that there really is a creator god, for example. Not faith, not a religious fiction, but a genuine Star Trek style alien with sufficiently advanced technology to create a universe.
Why does he create it?
Looking at humanity, the closest we’ve come is in using computers to model the climate. We create little mini-Earths that are abstractions of the real world - for ease of computation - in order to study the effects of climate change, predict the weather, etc.
Outside of this sort of scientific pursuit, it’s not clear that there’s much reason to create a full universe. When we create a world for a video game, for example, we design it like a theme park - like Disney World - because we want to be able to step right over from quest 1 to quest 2 without any downtime. The size of our smallest elements - polygons - are just small enough to seem curved according to the resolution that our eye can see at. Why bother spending the energy calculating a whole bunch of stuff too small to see?
Quarks are amaaaaaaaaaaaaaazingly tiny. The universe is amaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaazingly full of empty nothing. If God was playing with legos, and making a sculpture of an ant, it’s like he’s using 10 trillion legos just to make sure that the end of the ant’s antenna is sufficiently round, and millions of trillions of legos just to build the whole sculpture. And then he’s putting that ant in a gallery that’s so huge that if had an elephant running around trying to find the ant sculpture, it would still need to run around for billions of years before ever, possibly, having a chance of actually spotting the sculpture off in the distance, let alone the billions of years it would take to run over to the thing once you did know which direction to run.
Why do that? If your goal is to create an ant sculpture and spend most of your focus on that ant and create a nice place for that ant to be seen, the quality of detail is just ludicrous and the setup completely moronic.
And then you give the ant life and tell it that if it doesn’t obey you by chopping off part of its penis, that you’ll disown it and leave it to fend for itself in the great empty gallery of nothing. And then you wait a few thousand years and tell the ant, “Okay, let’s forget the penis part. Haha! Gotcha ya! Actually, I’ve killed a guy to take the blame for you being bad about that, so you’re all clean now. What I’d really like is that you get rid of all of your possessions so long as there’s no one more needful than you in the whole land and never ever get divorced. No worries, I’m sure you’ll do great this time.”
If we actually accept the reality of God, rather than just saying, “Spirituality, woohoo! I believe!” And then basically treat God like a fictional character that we’ve formed our social club around, we have to ask what the hell the motivation for all of this is.
If we ignore the book and penises and divorce, and just look at the observable universe, then the universe we see doesn’t look like something that was created for the purpose of creating and analyzing life. The scale is too fine and the vacuum too large. It looks like what we would expect from someone doing something like modeling particle physics in a very large computer. And, by happenstance, that allowed for live to evolve, but that’s just a side effect of wanting to observe how quantum objects interact with one another on massive scales.
Humans would both be so large compared to the objects being looked at (quarks and atoms) as to be be unrecognizable as life - just megaclumps of quarks - and at the same time so small compared to the big clumps creating suns that we would be lost in the great void.
We would expect life in all variety of forms to pop up all across the simulated universe, and for the scientists to have ethical obligations to simply ignore their existence, continue their study of quantum mechanics, and let all of the life they created disappear in a poof as soon as the simulation had produced the result they wanted and it was time to call it a day. It wouldn’t make any sense for them to create all of this just so that they could make the sun shimmer in just one of the billions of galaxies they had created to give some sort of obscure sign that they’re watching us. What’s the point? Why not just create a flying viewer screen hovering on all sides of the planet, that everyone can see, that shows a real time video feed from inside their lab? I mean, they created the universe. They don’t need to play it small and risk people being unconvinced because a bunch of people hiked out on a hot day and stared into the sun for 15 minutes while being told by a group of kids that any weird effects they see - while staring at the sun - are evidence of extra-dimensional aliens who envision a war between angel spirit and demon spirits in 50 years time. They can just get on the phone with us and be like, “Yo, we created you. Here’s the straight story.”
It is possible that something strange and unexplainable happened at Fatima. Atheists don’t believe they know everything. Just the opposite, they’re people who accept that they don’t know something and are willing to let it lie there.
Back in the 60 or 70s, there was a famous mentalism act in the UK known as the Piddingtons who performed some extraordinary well-known acts for the BBC. In the story of their act, the man, Sidney, would say that he could read or send information with his wife, Lesley. She would be miles away, in an airplane, underwater, etc. with no communication devices but would be able to do things like read a line from a book that was randomly chosen by the audience back at the theater, at the exact moment that he “sent” that information by telepathy to her.
If you ask a magician how this was done, they’ll say that they don’t know. It’s a mystery. But at the same time, they’re not telling you that real magic happened. They just don’t know, because there are multiple ways that the feat could be performed and they don’t know which specific ones were used. Many of them could probably recreate the exact same result, but that wouldn’t be evidence that that’s what actually happened.
So should we say that it may have actually been real telepathy? Or should we say that skepticism should reign supreme - particularly when there are plausible explanations for the mystery? We don’t say that we know what happened, we just say that we don’t know, we doubt that the most outlandish explanation is correct, that less outlandish explanations are more likely, and minus further evidence that’s sufficient.
A person who believes in telepahy would say that this a non-answer, unsupported by any evidence, and is simply unwillingness to accept the clear evidence presented in the BBC coverage:
But that’s ignoring the greater evidence that, for example, other magicians - who fully admit that they’re just conning people through sleight of hand and lies - have said that they can pull the same thing off. Or, in the case of God, it’s ignoring that other religions profess equal miracles.
I’m currently reading a book written by the grandson of a couple who helped the Piddingtons to complete the act. Because they were willing to speak, there happens to be a factual answer that’s not just speculation about how the performances were achieved.
With Fatima, we’ll never know what happened. But billions of people have been convinced to believe that spirits want them to do silly things. I see no strong reason to believe that this isn’t an extension of that.
If you graph the expected lifespan of mankind over history, it is quite low until the late 18th century and then suddenly rockets up from something like 40 years to 80 years, over the course of 200 years. Most of that difference comes from modern medicine and its ability to prevent the loss of about 30% of babies and infants before the age of 5.
On that graph, there is no similar shift after Jesus. If you didn’t have the years listed along the bottom of the graph, you wouldn’t know where Jesus fell on the graph. Not him, not Confucius, not Zoroaster, nobody.
The Bible doesn’t ask people to treat women as their equals. It doesn’t suggest democratic government. It doesn’t say a damn thing about germs or quarantining. There’s no warning to people to not go over the Atlantic and mingle with the natives in the new land until they’ve developed vaccines.
The world didn’t become a better place nor even really a different place after Jesus showed up. His philosophy was not all that different from other philosophies suggested by other philosophers of the time, and his knowledge of God does not bear the scrutiny of archaeology. We know the history of Yahweh, in the Middle East, and it’s clear that Jesus does not. If his goal was to improve the world, then why did it take 1800 years?
If something funny happened in Fatima, that’s more liable to be a weird instance of ball lightning or sunstroke than bearded ancients that whisper poor philosophy into the ears of roaming mystics, playing a trick on crowds of bored people. I don’t know what happened, and I can’t prove that option B is the correct explanation versus options A, C, D, or E, but I don’t strongly worry about the event because there are better explanations and Christianity doesn’t offer anything to compel me to think that they’d have a better explanation for unexplained things than the other thousand religions. As of yet, all religions seem to fail the test of basic usefulness.
Let’s consider meditation for example.
Lots of people practice meditation with the idea that it allows them to find their true self, open their mind, become better people, etc.
Well, Indians - the people who invented meditation - are the inventors of the Caste system, and the untouchables; a horrible and disgraceful practice that makes Jim Crow look pleasant.
This long supported, mystic tradition that millions of people vouch for having made them into better, stronger, more spiritual beings is, factually, unable to make people into better people.
What happened in the late 18th century was that people did the opposite of meditate - clearing their mind and trusting their instincts - instead they thought deep and hard, slaying all ideas that couldn’t bear strict, ruthless scrutiny by the most skeptical bastard. And then they’re write it down on paper and they’d send it to all their most skeptical and least easily convinced friends, around Europe, and have them shoot as many ideas down as stupid, wishful, and impractical as possible.
That made the world a better place. It has saved billions of lives over the last 200 years. Rabid skepticism has created gender equality, democratic government, and modern medicine. When Christianity brings something similar to the table, then we can start talking about miracles. Making the sun wobble, even if you convince me that it was achieved by some extra-dimensional spirit, still doesn’t matter at the end of the day if the extra-dimensional spirit doesn’t have any good ideas that are actually good for humanity.
The classical philosophical definition of God is essentially the one supreme source of all. By this argument, there could be other deities or divine beings, but only one can be supreme. This basic principle holds in all major world religions, western or eastern. That’s what I meant by it.
If you want to get classical classical, that seems to be inaccurate. Before monotheism, there have been several theologies that posited a pantheon.
And in fact, a pantheon might well be more philosophically sensible than a single deity, because the whole omnimax business is riddled with logical paradoxes. There is nothing to support one master-god as being more valid than a committee. And I even chatted with one christian type who asserted that the entity that created the universe was not the same entity currently managing it.
