I was kind of wondering if another thread would be required, or if it’d fit here, for: “What Arguments Would You Use To Convince Someone That God Does Not Really Exist?”
Speaking in tongues, interpretation, prophecy, healing…there’s a few others, but I’m too lazy to look up 1 Corinthians 12 right now.
Since it looks like the subject of my personal experience may be continuing here, what the hey, let’s roll with it, baby.
One thing, maybe not that important, but my conversion experience preceded any involvement in any sort of community.
And once I was part of a community, it was a small part of my life. The people I was newly connecting with and forming lasting friendships with weren’t part of that community, they were other people at my high school, and the interactions I was having usually didn’t have much to do with my newfound faith. I’m really not seeing how spending an hour or so a week with some Ren Faire enthusiasts would have enabled me to basically form my own community away from them.
Mostly because science started proving them wrong. Early on the Church was very interested in getting scientific evidence of their beliefs, because they genuinely believed the facts would support them. But as science systemically proved them wrong about everything it touched, they retreated to a combination of talking about how faith is all that matters, demonizing facts and logic (literally in some cases, such as with the sects that claim fossils are a Satanic deception), and shaping their dogma and assertions to avoid being scientifically testable. Science burns religion like acid; much of modern religion is shaped by the need to avoid it.
Not just early on. Many scientific advances in the late 18th and early 19th centuries were done by clerics, often in England, who had lots of money and spare time because of how the system was set up. They studied the world to try to prove the Bible, and found it was false in its assertions about many things. They were honest enough to publish. Many of the churches could handle this, though there was pushback from the more fundamentalist evangelicals. The breaking point was when Darwin showed that we were not specially created. That discredited the more moderate religionists and enabled the more fundamentalist ones who just rejected evolution. As they still do.
I read a fascinating dissertation on this very subject.
Yeah, someday, God will forgive all those amputees He refuses to heal for some reason.
No, it just means that your faith is a subjective experience that cannot be cited as evidence of anything other than your understanding of it; at least, in regards to convincing another person of its truth. Note that I’m not discounting your faith, or disbelieving of your experience of it; just stating that it’s not amenable to proselytization.
Well, of course. Anything you find is always in the last place you looked, silly!
Yep. And this is why I think “proving” anything about God is so stupid, either for (laughable) or against (pointless). And yet it is the subject of ream upon ream of prose.
Proving? I agree with you. What about just asking for evidence?
Chars
I think the reason for having God might also be looked at as further evidence of his existence. If we use a human interpretation of God to prove God, we will lose every time. We can almost be certain that if God does in fact exist it would be incomprehensible. So if we choose to have a God he has to be comprehensible, There is no other way it can be passed on. The reason I believe we need God is primarily as a model human to base our identity on. No human could possibly fit the bill as a model. I also believe that the importance of admiring or at least liking who we are does rely on an almost perfect model. This seems like an odd evolutionary trait. Obviously not everyone needs it but there are a lot of us who do.
Yeah, but oddly believers say God is incomprehensible on one hand, and on the other say exactly what he thinks about our sex lives.
In any case, being incomprehensible in total doesn’t mean he can’t be comprehensible in certain aspects. Who can grasp the infinity of integers, but we still can count to five.
Gods seemed to begin as totally comprehensible. The Greek Gods are people who live a long time and can turn you into a spider. As time went on god became less and less comprehensible, and even more so now that the need for gods to explain the natural world has been diminished or eliminated.
To me, the Scientific Method is not the only method of knowing things to be true.
When the Enlightenment overlaid belief with rationalism, an enormous effort was made to reconcile the two; this seemed not only possible but necessary, at the time, to the intelligentsia. But the effort failed. Because you cannot get to the spiritual via that path. It cannot be grasped using those tools. This is why I say it is pointless to try.
Many Christians have no real apprehension of the spiritual. They have a shallow acculturated conviction based on dogma, and take comfort in the community of other Christians they belong to. That comfort is no small thing, in fact, despite arguments and efforts, there has been no successful replacement of it, much to the loss of society. This kind of person can “lose their faith” by being argued out of it with rationality, or through bad experiences within their community. Those who have been visited by the divine – and this is not rare either – are not anchored in faith simply by habit and incuriousness, but by experience. That is a whole different thing.
Like all religions, Christianity is silly and made up. But the Divine is not. In the realm of the Divine, we are silly and made up.
Was the Divine around before there were humans? Do other animals experience the Divine? This spirituality thing seems to be indistinguishable from an acid trip.
Was the Divine around before there were humans?
Of course. We didn’t invent it, it’s the other way round.
Do other animals experience the Divine?
Not the way we do, probably. Our consciousness of separateness from the Divine appears to be unique to us. But of course we don’t know. We are profoundly ignorant of the consciousness of other beings.
This spirituality thing seems to be indistinguishable from an acid trip.
Psychedelics can open a temporary window into it. But then it slams shut, and we can’t remember what happened, really. But the Divine is not our perception of it, or our experience of it.
The way that can be named is not the way.
I think you messed up your quoting or something.
yes, fixed.
But that’s just restating the issue with different words; there’s no more evidence that the “spiritual” exists than there is that a “god” exists. Replace the word “God” in the title of the thread with “the spiritual” and all that changes are the Christian-specific aspects.
Funny how nobody asks “how you you know Huitzilopochtli doesn’t exist”; it’s almost as if believers made their minds up beforehand what the answer is and are trying to backwards reason to a justification.
Like I said, two realms which are known in completely different ways. Cannot use the processes of one to understand the other. But here I just run into the argument, ‘but there is only one method of understanding!’
All I can say it, no, there isn’t. And that’s where it stops.
And Huitzilopochtli clearly existed at one time. Probably doesn’t any more.
You must first get peer-reviewed scientific proof, and present that in your argument.
I know the Abrahamic bible teaches in Proverbs 3:5: “Trust in the LORD with all your heart and *lean not on your own understanding.” That’s basically saying “Just believe god exists because I told you to.” You can’t ask someone to do that as a logical argument, because why shouldn’t they believe in Satan or some other mythical being? You should be asking yourself, “What does this person have to gain by me blindly following them?” The answer is that they want to get free labor and/or resources from you.
We trust scientists because science works, we can see it with our eyes, even though we may not comprehend how it works, we know it does because we are using the internet, we can see the garbage we left on the moon. We know microbes make us sick, not because we can see what they do to us, but because scientists have told us how infections spread, shown us ways to reduce illness, and we know these methods work because we have practiced them ourselves.
These advances have come no thanks to religion, which for so long has repressed science because each enlightenment of scientific truth reduces the amount of power they hold over people, as their realm is the unknown.
Many argue that the beauty present in nature is proof that god exists, you could also argue that it’s proof that god does not exist. If the universe’s existence is proof of god, what created god then? Adding in a creation myth just complicates things and adds further questions, and we know from Occam’s razor that the simplest explanation tends to be the closest to the truth.
Do I believe a divine being or afterlife exists? I hope so, but I don’t put my money on it. Live for the present, as this is likely the only life we have to live. Live a life full of love and happiness. You can only keep your joy by giving it away, so spread it out.