Well, there’s the Holy Spirit, which is an active part of this world. The problem is that we don’t know when the Holy Spirit is involved in something or when it’s not. I get into disagreements with my wife sometimes about the Holy Spirit. If something good happens, like say our daughter has a good grade in one of her college classes, it’s generally because she is working hard and studying hard, or the material is easy for her to understand. To me, it’s not “The Holy Spirit” that is giving her a good grade.
Another example is healing from a surgery/broken leg. I think it’s modern medicine that’s been developed by humans that’s allowing the people with broken bones to heal. The only “God” part is that he gave us brains to eventually develop medical protocols and such…When my brother broke his leg, it wasn’t God’s fault. And when his leg healed up from surgery & rest, it wasn’t because God wanted him to heal, in my opinion.
Anyway, it’s not just a debate between believers and non-believers. Even within Christianity, we don’t always agree on these things. You can have believers with different views on how active God is in the world.
I’ve also noticed that people who don’t believe in God (myself included) tend to default to a very specific idea of God, such as all powerful, all knowing and omni-benevolent. But I know even Christians who don’t think God is that kind of God.
I have felt this way about my born again sister, but I can also see that, after maybe 35 or more years of it, she is still unhappy about the same things she has always been unhappy about, mostly about how our father treated her (nothing criminal or violent, mostly just demeaning words over and over). It took me two years of therapy to forgive my parents for being human and less than perfect, but she is not there yet. She thinks that she doesn’t need therapy because she has her faith, but objectively this is not so. So I would like to insert some small wedge somewhere to get her to consider actual therapy from a trained therapist (not discussions with her pastor). This might or might not lead to questioning her faith, probably wouldn’t, but if she were getting that kind of help I wouldn’t care.
I didn’t suggest otherwise. I also didn’t mean to imply my problems were exactly the same as yours.
I just meant that you take your transformation as a clear sign of God, and dismiss it could be an alien. From my perspective, it looks like you are choosing to see it as definitive when I don’t think it’s a given. You may find it convincing, but as a personal, internal experience it lacks power to convince others.
I guess the point of my long story about myself was to say that I grew up believing, praying to God, got baptized, even read the Bible. None of that helped with my issues.
Incidentally, examining my beliefs and giving up religion and finding like-minded people to share those experiences didn’t really help, either.
Introspection, therapy, and finding people with * other* shared interests made all the difference.
Sorry if my exchange with @Irishman produced this misunderstanding, but I was not talking about myself. I was saying that some people want to see a connection between religious experiences and improvements in their own attitudes and perceptions, because it strengthens their belief and appears to them to give it legitimacy.
There are Christian counseling practices, with trained psychotherapists, that cater to evangelicals like your sister; my mother started her therapeutic career in one, though not an evangelical herself. The practice was founded by a born-again psychiatrist who often had to deal with that sort of resistance from the evangelical community. He wrote a pamphlet about it called “When Christians Need Help”. I can ask my mother if she can scrounge a copy and send it to you, if you think it might help you get that wedge into your sister’s defenses.
Well, it is kind of a default interpretation of Christianity historically, and I suspect a lot of that assumption comes from historically that is the concept most rebutted in philosophy. At least in the “beginner atheist’s handbook”.
Also consider that it’s the more directly involved God that is most atheists’ concern. It’s the religionists that want to force their idea of morality on everyone else that are the issue.
A laid back pantheist doesn’t really merit an argument, they aren’t trying to get you to obey Odin, or Ghanesh will come for you (or whatever).
I sometimes wonder if all those Christians out there know they don’t actually believe in the same god. I think they get unfair advantage by calling him “God” and pointing at the Bible, without really understanding that their interpretations of that God are significantly different enough to start inquisitions. I mean, sectarianism is a long embedded part of Christianity.
Sure, but mention that and it’s “Oh no, I know how I held the knife and it was definitely the sharp side.” Again, questioning the story as presented is putting their word on trial.
Well, I wouldn’t say this to their face but it’s probably not true in the literal sense. Memory isn’t very reliable. They may be omitting some details, unwittingly, that would make it make sense.
I’d say we all have experiences we can’t fully explain and probably try to avoid putting that person’s experience on trial. But rather to say, yes, weird shit happens sometimes, but it doesn’t mean the only explanation is God. Or even their very narrow definition of God.
Yeah. We had a friend in NJ who was very religious, and so was her husband. Then he told her that God wanted him to leave her and marry his secretary.
I’ve got a better example. I had a swelled disk (which showed up on X-rays) in my back, which basically kept me confined to the couch with heat on. Then it healed itself. No prayers, of course. If God did it, that’s odd, since I’m an atheist who would punch the mofo in the face if it existed. The human body is somewhat of a wonderful thing, and somewhat of a mishmash, all due to evolution.
I’ve heard plenty of people claim they chat with God. God only seems to say the stuff that could be found in the woo section of any bookstore. I tell them, ask God to give you the next two weeks of stock market results, then we’ll talk. Such is as scarce of healed amputated limbs.
I always hate it when after a long, complicated and dangerous rescue effort (mining disaster, catastrophic fire, people missing in a cave), people thank God for the rescue instead of the brave firefighters and other rescue people who really did the job. Gets on my nerves. Especially because they don’t blame God for allowing the disaster in the first place.
Certainly. How I would handle it now is say that I can’t disprove God did it, but I don’t have to. Your experience was personal to you, but I didn’t have it, so I can’t say what happened or why. I have no need to make you stop believing. I just want the space to live by my beliefs and not be inundated by the message that I must be evil for believing differently.
To be honest, I don’t recall now how the conversation arose. I mean, this woman wasn’t particularly in your face like that, we actually got along fine. It may even have been initiated by me - college conversations with a new-found atheist and all that.
My point wasn’t that I don’t have possible explanations, but that those conversations are rather pointless, liable to make the other person feel insulted, and their subjective nature makes them unconvincing to others. Better to reserve those discussions for folks who are trying to justify intruding in others’ lives based upon their own god belief.
I think rather than continue to be annoyed by descriptions of events being labeled “miracles”, I could be happy to just blur that word from being anything more than an intensifier. Same thing for “angel”. Break the assumed automatic connection to christian belief by shifting the meaning to a more secular description of nice people, kinda like “good Samaritan”.
I’m very close friends with a Presbyterian minister. He talks a fair amount about his faith and sometimes I go out of the way to ask him questions about his particular viewpoint, for example I’ll probably ask him about the United Methodist thing going on right now. He knows an incredible lot about theology and I think he has a pet peeve about things attributed to God that are not Biblical. I’m very interested in religion as a general subject matter and he likes to talk about it, so it works out very well. Sometimes he says things that sound absolutely bonkers to me but I think he feels the same way about us sometimes. We don’t make a big thing of it.
I don’t really talk to him about my own beliefs. He knows we’re atheists but constantly criticizing someone’s point of view doesn’t really make for good friendship. Right now we’re discussing our differences with regard to the novel The Road by Cormack McCarthy, which I think he sought out because I was so vocal about hating it.
Live and let live is certainly a good motto. Like you, though, I have a problem with people trying to interfere in how I live my life.
I’m aware of that. What strikes me about that term is that if someone does a kind act for a stranger, they are labeled a “Good Samaritan”. There are even orgs called Samaritan, with the Good only implied.
But I’m reminded of my Sunday School lesson where we discussed the root of that story. As such, Samaritans were an ethnic group. They were despised and stereotyped as low down, dirty, not good as a race. Think about that framing of the phrase for a moment. The phrase Christians most often associate with goodness from an unexpected place has racist origins where the Jews were the racists.
Also, the “good” has become practically embedded as to be inherent. I doubt most people would associate the term as an ethnic group. It’s just what you call someone who does nice things for strangers.
Maybe if they were more cognizant of the actual parable, they would realize Jesus was preaching against the kind of racism being practiced by the MAGA crowd.
Nah. They’re too sure of themselves to see that irony.
I’m sure the people who pick that name for organizations know it comes from the Bible. I’m not sure everyone who uses the term in passing for a good deed knows much about the origin of the phrase.
[quote=“Irishman, post:468, topic:1000101”]
I sometimes wonder if all those Christians out there know they don’t actually believe in the same god.
[/quote]Many of them just think that anyone who doesn’t follow their own particular vision of God is a liar who is knowingly serving Satan.