Read them again. You’re mistaken. The 2nd one mentions the same one as the first but adds information from Arthur Brooks, the author of “Who Really Cares” Two cites. We’ve discussed this before on the boards and the studies always indicate the religious folks give more per capita.
You asked for a cite and got two. If you reject it fine but it goes against available evidence.
So your cites are 20/20 and a guy who wrote a book? Do you have anything without a commercial interest? Like, an actual peer-reviewed study?
That people are equally charitable is a nice default assumption, but one I’m not paticularly beholden to. Especially since even a correlation between religiosity and charity doesn’t necessarily indicate causation. I’m still willing to be convinced.
I agree there will never be enough evidence to prove God exists. While there may be evidence for Bigfoot. One is spiritual and the other material or animal. However
God can be proved to exist in a personal experience. I had a personal experience with God and know that God exists for me.
That’s not “proof”. All sorts of crazy, contradictory things can be “personal experiences”, they can’t all be true.
And if God exists, he exists for everyone, not just for you. “God exists for me” is just an attempt to pretend that a claim about objective reality is just a claim of subjective experience.
add a question mark to what I bolded. Make an effort to defend your position rather than requests on the efforts of others.
I’m going to agree with lekatt. When I was 13 or so, I was abducted by aliens into their spacecraft. They ran some tests on me and then let me go after an hour or two. None of my family or friends believe in my experience, but I have joined an online group that is totally supportive and accepts the truth about alien abductions. The sad thing is that no one will ever discover these spaceships or aliens, because they are invisible and have no mass. So I can totally relate to lekatt’s beliefs.
I stand by what I said, for me God exists.
Does he exist for me too?
That would be up to you. God is personal.
No. God is either real or not.
Relationship’s are personal, but an omnipotent being’s existence is not up to me.
It seems you may be saying that existence is in one’s head, heart, etc. That’s bullshit. Existence is what is. If you’re saying something else it seems you’re being purposely vague about it.
Apologies for taking so long to get back to this post. Given the array of topics in the OP it seemed best to discuss them one at a time.
But so no, I’ve never read Dawkins and have no idea what his studies were. I suspect that Martians would disagree that the studies are as laughable as you say, but I’d certainly enjoy hearing your description of the test, the results, and what flaws you see in them.
In my case though, I wasn’t referring to any particular study, I was referring to what can be seen naturally.
There are nations which are in majority atheistic/agnostic. Sweden, for instance, has a significantly different religious composition than the United States in a principally non-religious fashion.
Now I would venture to guess that people are most likely to pray and wish for one or all of the following things:
- Happiness for themselves and others
- Health for themselves and others
- Wealth for themselves and others
So, if I was to look up how most Swedes and Americans rate their personal level of satisfaction in life, their respective lifespans, and their respective incomes, would you expect the US to be particularly higher than Sweden? I would personally guess that the US is not. And more importantly, if you compare the US or Sweden or any modern country to–for instance–the Democratic Republic of the Congo (80% Christian), I think you will find a few things to be true:
- People are happier in modern nations than in the Congo.
- People live longer, healthier lives in modern nations than in the Congo.
- People have a better income in modern nations than in the Congo.
- Since the coming of the white man and the spread of Christianity, the people of the Congo went from generally peaceful, agrarian society–the sort that Jesus is likely to have favored–to a history that pretty well sucks on all fronts it can safely be said.
Point in fact if you graph out the religosity of nations and their income (which is generally linked to life span and life satisfaction), like here, I think you’ll find that the places with more people praying are the countries which you would least want to have been born a citizen of.
If you look at wars or business conflicts or any of these things, in general I think you will find that is entirely the paths that were chosen by the relative parties that led to their success or failure and that these are fairly evenly spread. The Christian realms weren’t in the long run able to accomplish much during the Crusades. The USSR, a nation which sought to convert everyone to atheism, was quite effective as a military power for many decades. Eventually it lost its place and it’s hard stance on religion, but this seems perfectly attributable to Communism not their lack of religion. Dr. Bronner’s Soap, which advances the messages of the Bible is not likely to win out against the major brand soap manufacturers like Procter & Gamble or Unilever. It is unlikely that Jack Chick will take over the comic book world from DC Comics. Marvel, or all those agnostic/Buddhist/Shinto Japanese manga.
Now while I wouldn’t be surprised that prayer may have some similar properties as a placebo–which can be positive–still we’re talking about a placebo. In all the ways in which real world effectiveness is concerned, prayer doesn’t appear to have any particular relationship to the quality of your life. A history of good, rational choices both on the part of your country and by yourself, seem to be the key ingredients.
And while I’ll agree that prayer isn’t said to guarantee anything, if religion brings you nothing (except perhaps a minor placebo), then there is no evidence that religion has any measurable effect. So the only thing you are betting on by joining a religion is your afterlife, which is entirely unknowable–and you’re basing all that work for it on nothing.
Societies tend to be worse off when ‘God’ is on their side.
Not that believers care; as long as they “save souls”, death and suffering are beside the point to them.
Let me rephrase the last paragraph of my previous post better:
If all of the thousands of religions to date have had miracles (which they probably have had, at varying levels of documentation) and all religions are passed on through the world through non-divine means, none of them have any real world effect by which they can be measured (for instance, the power of prayer), they don’t explain reality better than non-intelligent forces, that people who are not religious are just as moral as those who are religious, and essentially everything rests on what happens to you after you die–i.e. your religion will have no positive or negative effect on the life you live–but different religions have different criteria for what you need to do and what the afterlife is (heaven, reincarnation, etc.), then how are you to decide which religion is correct?
If you try to join all the religions on the planet and follow them faithfully, you’ll have to get circumcised, hang yourself by the nipples, run leaves through your nose, and commit various other acts of body mutilation. You’ll have to become a vegetarian. You’ll have to run from one church to another as you practice all of the ceremonies necessary to all of the tens of thousands of gods who have ever existed. And you’ll have to somehow get around the paradox that “There can be no other God!”-rule introduces since you need to worship all of them, including the ones with that rule.
I suspect you’d go mad or die of exhaustion.
Science, admittedly, has no suggestions for how to improve your situation after you are dead if there is such a thing that matters. So if there’s no worldly evidence in favor of one particular religion–and perhaps the correct religion hasn’t even been discovered on Earth yet–how does one decide which to follow? You might very well be doing the worst thing you could possibly be doing on this front by being Christian.
I’ll just note that I wouldn’t recommend debating lekatt on his religious beliefs. They bear essentially no relationship to any widespread religion. Probably they could best be described as “flower power”: God is love. That everyone loves is evidence of His existence. Etc. I’m not sure if lekatt believes in any sort of ritual ceremonies, afterlife, creation stories, or anything else. He just enjoys viewing this one emotion as an otherwordly being that does nothing other than make people…love.
While I wouldn’t necessarily say that contradicts Jesus’ message–assuming that’s where lekatt views his religion as coming from–any discussion with him will be unlikely to stay on topic since you’ll have no idea what his beliefs actually are and things will devolve into a back and forth to figure it out and by the time you realize it’s 70s era “love and peace man takes a puff”, the topic has been lost.
I had a little time yesterday and looked up these authors. I found some writing from Kreeft, NT WRIGHT {not White} and it turns out I have an atheism vs Christianity debate I downloaded from YouTube between Craig, and a fellow named Frank Zindler. Now seems like an appropriate time to listen to it.
I enjoy Wrights thoughtful style but he’s very wordy and I’m having a hard time finding the nut of his argument. Kreeft is more to the point and answers several listed questions. I chose something about the divinity of Christ from his own website.
he says;
because Christ claimed to be God.
He adds
My problem is that I don’t find this argument logical at all because it is based on a faulty premise, namely, that the text of the Gospels accurately represent the words of Jesus. All the evidence points to it being a lot more likely that the words of Jesus passed through many human filters. The Oral tradition , the first writings decades after he lived. The copies of those writings and the undeniable fact that those writings vary. The fact that the writings chosen to be in the Bible were chosen in part to support a certain theology even though at the time there was much discussion and various views. The added fact that there’s no reason to assume the Gospels were intended to be historically accurate.
A simple observation of human nature shows mankind often creates myths and associates them with historical figures. Should we assume that Christianity and Christ are immune from this rather common occurrence?
The evidence against the Bible being historically accurate is pretty powerful so I think Kreeft’s argument fails the logic test.
I’d point out that your statement that “They begin by assuming nothing.” proved to be incorrect and that has been my experience with all Christian apologists. You can’t build a truly logical argument on a faulty premise.
I’ll get back to you on the others.
One would presume( even if one shouldn’t where God is concerned.), that there was a specific reason for the Christ to have appeared when he did, but for some reason unnaccountable except by mystical mumbo-jumbo, the Creator sent His Messenger along before a secretary had been found to take notes. Was Jesus too busy performing miracles and preaching to have the time to set down his own thoughts on divinity? Or do the historians think they may even have existed and have just ‘disappeared’?
You are right, relationships are personal. My relationship with God is personal, if I didn’t have a relationship with God, I wouldn’t know He exists.
It is true you don’t know my spiritual beliefs, and you have not described them. You could ask, but it would have to be in a different thread for that purpose.
…