Sure, it’s an opinion. It’s just the “there is no god” is an opinion which is supportable by factual observation and logical deduction, whereas “Jeebus is comin’ back any minute, grab your guns!” is gibbering idiocy. Both opinions though.
“Jeebus is comin’…” may be gibbering idiocy, but “There is a God” is as supportable as “There is no God” by observation and deduction. Anyone who thinks differently shouldn’t be discussing this, because they’re not keeping an open mind.
Squints eyes
Ehhh… yes, nevermind then…
Hey, I’m just calling it like I see it. After a lifetime of interacting with Xians, seeing how they made Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye zillionaires, how they swallow uncritically whatever their pastors or priests tell them, I’m not sure that it’s possible to underestimate them. One can only listen to so many gasped disclosures that Proctor & Gamble are run by Satanists, that the Asian tsunami proves that the Rapture is coming really soon, that the US is a Christian country founded on Biblical principles and that non-Christians aren’t really American, that one can’t help but form a negative opinion of the faith that teaches people to believe such nonsense. Are you sure it’s my characterization or their faith that’s puerile?
How? A few minutes’ thought will show you that the probability of any gods existing is highly unlikely. Gods are just the anthropomorpizing of natural forces and the compulsion to observe community mores. What is prayer but arguing with thunderstorms? (Pace Terry Pratchett.*) If the law’s punishment can’t keep Ug the caveman from fucking another caveman’s woman, then threatening him with eternal punishment after death will scare him into line. That’s all religion boils down to.
Well, I don’t know about that. It’s one thing to say that reasonable people may differ on a subject; but if you have an opinion on it, unless you concluded that the arguments and evidence on each side are precisely equal so you just flipped a coin, or you’re a theist Sunday-Tuesday, an atheist Wednesday-Friday, and a pantheist on Saturdays, you presumably at some point decided that one opinion or the other is more supportable by observation and deduction than the other.
I apologize if we seem like we’re splitting hairs. I didn’t mean to suggest that both sides were exactly equal in everyone’s eyes - obviously, most people lean more towards one side than the other. I mean to suggest that both sides can be supported with rational evidence (so obviously we can’t be sure which is right).
See now, this is the kind of stuff we don’t need. First of all, I disagree with pretty much everything you said in this post. Secondly, you sound like you were scarred by religion at an early age, which has put you off on the idea of God altogether, even though the concepts of God and religion are not one and the same.
Then refute it. You claim there’s rational evidence supporting theism–present it.
Gee, thanks, doc. I’m impressed by your ability to psychoanalyze me through my post. You’re wrong, but why let that stop you from employing the genetic fallacy?
God is the subject; religion is the system of beliefs about God, so I don’t follow your distinction between the two. Fundies, being illiterate morons, confuse religion with ritual, so one hears inanity like, “I’m not religious, but I believe in Jesus as my personal saviour,” but I trust that doesn’t apply here.
Well you can hardly expect me to pander to your delusion;)
A rather bold assessment of the beliefs of a few billion people.
Do you find it contributes positively to a discussion to label someone else’s belief a delusion, or are you more concerned with other matters?
The same thing that’s delusional about claiming to have knowledge that anyone else’s evidence for the existence of God is, in fact, not evidence at all. Who is right? Who the fuck knows? Meantime I see little benefit to referring to the religious beliefs of an innocent as a delusion.
Respectable folks aren’t, I think, asking you to accomodate their position. They’re asking you not to insult it. (The less-respectable folks are the ones who make it hard not to say insulting things, but I don’t think that’s a valid argument for freely flinging around “delusion”.)
By not calling their beliefs a delusion, for one. That takes little self-respect. Hell, I manage it and I’m in no running for “person with the most self-respect.”
You can; you prefer not to. It is actually possible not to type “your belief is nothing but a delusion.”
Of course not. Your assessment of religious beliefs as delusions is perfectly legitimate, and you could use any other word in place of delusion and feel no change.
You might do to reconsider that position. It is wholly possible to state an opinion openly and not annoy. It is also easy to state a position of disagreement and not annoy. Observe:
“Your belief is a delusion”
“I am an atheist”
In fact, unless your mind is completely full, you can concern yourself with this one. It takes (well, me, but that’s just one person) precious little time to think, or to remind one’s self, “Calling religious beliefs a delusion is offensive, so I will think of a more intelligent way to express my position.”
(It also means less work for those of us who want to in some part remove from theists this notion of being insulted for their beliefs;))
What’s the rational evidence? All I can see is scripture, witnessing, and a putative deity so inscutable as to be safe from ever being disproven on evidential grounds. The unsupported accounts of others do not constitute evidence that can be rationally accepted; they must be believed a priori, or the whole concept of faith is meaningless. At best one has their own personal “experience” of the numinous as a guide, but since that cannot be independently verified in any sort of objective way, it’s never possible to find an objective proof that such an experience is not also of a delusional or hallucinatory nature. Again, I say, where’s the rational evidence?
This is not the subject of this thread. The subject of this thread is that neither side can prove their case to everyone, yet some people (on both sides) act like their position is a true fact, when it’s not.
I should have been a psych major. Actually, I was being facetious, but why let that get in the way of a witty exchange of repartee?
Some people define religion the way you do. Others define it as the active practice of worshipping or participating in rites or something. By the definition I used here, I probably wouldn’t be considered very religious. The way you define the word, I might be considered religious. The very term “religion” has taken on a different connotation in recent years due to a lot of people associating it with various unscrupulous or dishonest intentions or practices by certain intercessors and other associated people.
What does the number of people have to do with anything?
I find it a perfectly valid and concise means of expressing how I characterize the belief, for the umpteenth time. I struggle to think of a better word, and that’s precisely why I use it.
What evidence?
Whether or not they find my use of the word “delusion” insulting has no bearing on how respectable they are.
Such as?
And some people might want to reconsider the position that I’m going to Hell. I wouldn’t ask them to do so merely to be nice, but rather think about the issue critically and draw their own conclusions. And for the last freaking time, I do not regard myself as an atheist, as I do not harbor under any certainty that there is no God. Once again: I rather strongly doubt the body of human conception of God, but make no claim to know any better. All I claim is that I don’t put any credence in what they think they know, based on their religious traditions.
There is no more intelligent, or at least concise, way for me to put it. I won’t say that again. I don’t state what I think for your benefit anyway, so I’m sorry I can’t make you feel better about the way I express myself. If you feel somehow threatened by it, I consider that completely your problem.
Indeed it is. Assholes on both sides, and neither side will own up to it.
What gets me is when I can be minding my own business, not preaching (I don’t preach), and for that I get a handful of insults, condescension, and in some cases, preaching. Hey, how about waiting until I am obnoxious or preachy to you first, before you start in with all that crap? How can anyone (who claims to abhor being preached at) preach to someone who in no way is asking for it (other than being in the vicinity)? That makes no sense to me, but somehow it does to some people. Go figure.
The critical issue is that the observations in question are only available to individuals, barring certain specific cases (the interpretations of which are likely based on one’s own axiomatic structures based on experience – divine presence or collective hallucination? you decide!). There is as of yet no scientific technique for transferring experience to the heads of others or creating similar experience (the techniques that exist are subject to criticism as brainwashing, hypnotism, and the like).
This is compounded by the number of people – both theistic and atheistic – who are of the opinion that other people’s beliefs are their legitimate concern, who therefore attempt to cause them to come into alignment with whatever they find consistent with their personal experience.
I tend to consider the entire question as being equivalent to demanding some form of proof that I love my partners. The emotional and experiential information – the directly relevant stuff, in other words – is not available to scientific inquiry; nobody else has access to that information to confirm it. What is available is observable actions; the waters are further muddied by the fact that observable actions are subject to interpretation. (I do not consider a gift of cut flowers to be an action that conveys “love”; other people do. As “proof” goes, though, I think flowers suck. Just as an easy for-example.)
Some people will accept my reports on my internal experiences, even if they are inconsistent with their own internal experiences. Some will believe me to be mistaken, but allow as how I believe that certain things are true. Some will withhold judgement pending further evidence with which they can make better necessarily-subjective interpretations. Some will believe me to be mistaken, but refrain from bursting my bubble out of civility. Some – who always come across to me as having an agenda – will attempt to disabuse me of my “delusions”.
The big difference from my point of view is that more people seem to feel that it’s acceptable to have an agenda on the subject of religious belief than on the subject of relationships. (Though in the case of minority religions and minority relationship types, the number of people who have an agenda to push strikes me as being much higher. Not just people who want to get rid of the minority group, either; proselytising minority group members are just as much a pain in the ass.)
First of all, you see what you want to see, just as I see what I want to see. I could turn this around on you, and say, where’s your rational evidence for assuming there isn’t a God?
Secondly, suppose we evaluate our deductive reasoning.
[ul][li]If I go outside and see wet ground, I assume it rained. I’m probably right.[/li][li]If I see a large tower in the middle of downtown, I assume it was built by someone who knew what they were doing, who did it on purpose. It doesn’t make sense to me that the building just sprang up on it’s own, or that it came to be constructed so perfectly and placed in that location by accident.[/li][li]Similarly, from what I can see of this world, it doesn’t make sense to me that it was created or fashioned by accident. It seems a lot more likely to me that it was done on purpose, by a creator that knew what he was doing.[/ul][/li]Do I know that for sure? Of course not. Am I even pretty sure? Probably not. But it seems more likely to me, in my barely educated, humble opinion.
Yup.
And condemning the worlds most populus religion based on the opinions of some loud extremists is also puerile, especially when there are lots of Christian leaders who disagree with those extremists–they just don’t get as much press, because there’s nothing really newsworthy about a religious leader saying “God didn’t kill the tsunami victims because they tolerated homosexuality” or “Atheists are Americans too.”
]
Actually, there may very well be a number of measurable physiological and neurochemical correlates with the emotional state of love, such that I could get a pretty good idea of what goes on in human brains when they’re “in love” and diagnose that state. Not only that, if you insisted you were in love, despite all other evidence to the contrary, I might be able to show you are lying using some of the same technology. Such evidence is actually used in court (however flawed), you know, and neuroscientsts and criminologists are working very hard to find accurate means of determining such things with a degree of confidence that such evidence could be said to be “valid”, in a scientific sense.
One might also look at a human brain, and see characteristic patterns of a “spiritual experience”. It might not be possible to say what caused that pattern to emerge, but it surely could be possible to describe it. If that characteristic pattern of neurological form and function were to resemble other mundane states of consciousness (hallucinations, delusions not related to God), I think we can all be rest assured the theists would be unconcerned; for who can say for certain that God did not cause the change? As for agnostics, I doubt such evidence would do much more than corroborate their suspicions. It will be interesting if and when we have such information at our disposal, but I do not anticipate it will make one iota of difference in the number of believers, nor in their conviction their experience comes from anywhere but the mind of God.
Well, this says it as much as anything else. You don’t give a shit how anyone else feels, and you refuse to be held accountable to what you say. You say what you like because you feel like it, and fuck anyone who raises a disagreement.
You are, of course, operating under the delusion that your logic, beliefs and arguments are valid, and if you are insulted by my characterizations of you, I consider that completely your problem. I don’t know of a more concise way to say it.
Hey, even if every single theist was virtuous, I’d still think their beliefs about God and thre nature of the universe are wrong. There is no reason to support a supernatural belief system. I just happen to find the disconnect between their faith and their behavior to be amusing.
First a note: if anyone had bothered to read the thread linked in the OP, the “sinner” agreed, in his very next post, that he did not “know” there was no god, but considered god very improbable. So the pitting is of nobody. I do think it is legitimate to question the very basis of theology, given that theology assumes some god.
As for the rational reason to “assume” there is no god - and if there is a good reason, it’s not an assumption, how about this.
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There is no necessity of a god, since there are no major gaps in the development of the universe, after the Big Bang, that we need a god for. The blind watchmaker argument has been answered so many times that it is not worth responding to (read Dawkins’ book, for one.)
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If there were a god, wouldn’t he appear in the same way to all. Independent development of gods means it is far more likely that man created god, not vice versa.
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God is ill-defined. Which god should I not believe in? All I know that the more specific theists get about their god and what he/she/it has done in the past, the more all the so-called evidence gets refuted. There was no creation 6,000 years ago, there was not garden of Eden, there was no flood, there was no Davidic kingdom, there was no massacre of the innocents, there were no earthquakes and living dead at the time of the crucifixtion.
I can’t say I know there is no god anywhere, since the universe is a big place and maybe some deity created it for some other planet, got the story right in their Bible, and we’re living in the dregs. Disprove that!
Now I humbly await your rational justification for god belief.
BTW those theists who know and admit they have no rational justification, but admit it is belief, have my respect and admiration. But they don’t advocate passing laws restricting people’s rights due to what was written millennia ago.