Don’t people blame global warming - caused by human activity - for changing weather patterns?
Didn’t I pretty much say that?
Perhaps.
Me neither. I do think certain things, though, should be used in weighing whether something is correct. Some things are scientifically testable, if they are claims about nature for example. Some things are logically testable, if they are inferential claims for example. And some things are testable by personal experience, if they are claims about your life for example.
But not in cases of morality, which is why He makes no moral judgments. (John 5:22 and John 8:15). Morality, it turns out, is not a matter of ethics, but of aesthetics. Whatever it is that one values isn’t even a matter or right or wrong; rather, it’s a matter of worth and worthlessness. But there certainly are issues of compatibility. If God is making a statement about what He values, then whether we value the same thing speaks only to whether we would be happier with or without Him in our lives.
True, we are working as hard as we can at catching up to natural disasters. We have managed to turn large swathes of land into deserts, for instance. But there are still plenty of natural disasters we haven’t figured out how to equal yet.
Even my hyper-physicalist and scientific self doesn’t think that meaning and purpose can be testable by science. I tend to trust people’s accounts of self-defined meaning and purpose, on faith if you will. We can test these by looking at behavior, but being fallible and self-contradictory, a person might well be convinced his life has a purpose which his actions subvert. None of this has much to do with the meaning of life, the universe, and everything, though.
I’m not sure that I (or my old Ethics prof) would agree that ethics is not related to morality. It might have a relationship to aesthetics in the same way that mathematical proofs and scientific theories do. However, I’ll accept that one definition of universal purpose would be to act to maximize the worth of what we do where the value is set by god. The problem with this is that we have either inadequate or contradictory data on what god values (and just saying love is inadequate) so if god wishes us to fulfill his purpose, he’s doing a piss poor job of enabling us to do it.
You could be right about that last sentence. (I agree with all the rest.) But it does seem to me that if meaning is assigned by people, then there are as many meaningful universes as there are people which, of course, makes them all subjective. The only way they could possibly be tied together is through a transitive agency that is accessible to all of them plus a Euclidean agency that makes them accessible to one another. But something tells me that you will resist that concession. 
I do realize that stripping morality from ethics is something very new to most people. In fact, I don’t know of anyone who has done it in quite the way that Jesus has, or even anyone who has interpreted Jesus in that way. But He clearly teaches that the rules (ethics) have been supplanted by an aesthetic (love). There’s much more detail, but I wouldn’t want to bore you. I really don’t think we’re even disagreeing on a whole lot.
I can read this three ways. The first is that a “meaningful universe” is the meaning assigned to the universe. In this reading I agree that there is one (at least) per customer. Then there could be actually different universe, based on meaning. I don’t buy this. The third is that there is one virtual universe per person - each person’s varying perception and assignment of meaning causes them to live in their own universe, with very noisy interfaces to everyone else’s universe. I think this is a supportable concept, and that in a sense both 1 and 3 are true.
Now that you put it this way, I agree. God-given (or Jesus-given) morality is distinct from ethics. You’d be hard pressed to find a good ethical argument for the flood, but if God defines morality, and God made the flood, the flood was moral. I’ve seen flood believers frantically trying to make it ethical (everyone was evil and the babies would grow up evil) because they were unwilling or unable to just respond that it was moral because God did it, so tough.
I’ve read enough of your posts to understand where you are coming from with the love angle, so no need to rehash it here. Your definition of god makes the Flood impossible, I’d think.
We agree, then, on all that.
Again, agreed. With Jesus, goodness is something of great value, freely given to all. (The rain benefits both the believer and the non-believer, as Jesus teaches.)
I think it may be my definition of man that is applicable here. He is a dual creature, one real and one transitory (the former spiritual, the latter physical). All bodies will die in one way or another, but what is important is what happens with the real man. So if a flood were to result in spiritual redemption for those who lost physical life, then it would be edifying, and therefore loving by definition. I’m not saying there was a flood, just that things that may seem like tragedies may not always be. Evolutionists (which includes most atheists, I would think) ought to understand this quite well. They are used to thinking of human existence as an eye-blink on the grand scale. The significance of man is not in whether he lives eight years or eighty, but in the eternity of his essential self.
That’s my take, anyway.
I and billions of others feel the presence of God. If we all stopped feel that presence, then either God would have ceased existing or else He would have abandoned our world. Admittedly there’d be no way to tell the difference between the two scenarios, but that doesn’t matter since neither will ever take place. We have it in writing.
Surely there have been people who felt that presence, but later became atheists (or changed religions)? It’s highly unlikely that all Christians over the world spontaneously didn’t feel it, but over time, I could see it happening just because they stop believing. Of course there’s also the possibility God doesn’t exist, but I thought you’d only accept one where he does.
Yes, I am one.
The mere fact that a small number of people have a certain experience and then cease to have it does not mean that no one has the experience. As for the prediction that Christian belief will fade to nothing eventually, people have been predicting that for a long time and it hasn’t happened yet.
I don’t recall saying otherwise. All I was pointing out was that some people in the past have in fact ceased to experience it. If we’re counting amounts of people believing or disbelieving in something as evidence for existence, by the way, I point you to the 2.1 billion who believe roughly what you do and the 4.5 billion who pretty strongly disagree.
Less of a prediction, more of a recognition of a possibility.
People have also been predicting the return of a certain important gentleman… for probably about the same amount of time, as it happens. That doesn’t seem to have happened yet either. But in both cases, the possibility remains. All I was saying is that it’s quite possible there’s a third reason in the universe in which God exists; people have fallen from belief before. It’s possible they could all do so.
Perhaps I failed to get my point across because of how I phrased it. I believe in God because God exists. Not because I have hallucinations that I can’t distinguish from reality, not because I’m too ignorant to understand the superior beliefs of our modern and secular age, not because my caveman ancestors developed a gene that forces me to believe in God, not because I’m part of the masses and need an opiate, not because my repressed sexual urges manifest as religious experiences, and not for the any of the other far-fetched ideas that are frequently tossed around as explanations for why people are religious. I believe in God because God exists.
It may be more clear if you realize that to us Christians, the question of belief is not just an intellectual exercise where everyone tries to come up with the best one-liner. It’s everything. Gods is the centerpiece of our view of everything: society, morality, ethics, education, government, art, history, and a great deal more. Hence if God didn’t exist then everything in the world would be vastly different. Trying to imagine something that would cause be to not believe in God is therefore impossible.
Just as you ask us not to misunderstand all Christians, I think you shouldn’t, either. You can’t speak for all Christians and say “what would cause you to stop believing?”, because at the very least I know a couple of who’ve been able to give answers to that.
I don’t personally think you believe in God because of any of those unpleasant things. I would probably characterise it more as “You believe in God because your past and current experiences lead you to the conclusion he exists”, since after all, God simply existing would not mean you believed in him without his effects on you.
I am able to imagine what life might be like if there was no logic; that’s a pretty central concept to everyone’s life. Without it, the entire universe would also be different. I respect the extent to which you believe but it’s quite possible you’re just not that imaginative.
Over a billion Christians believe Jesus is the Son of God and feel God/Jesus acting in their lives.
Over a billion Muslims believe Jesus was just a mortal prophet and that God has no son. But they feel God acting in their lives.
Since one proposition contradicts the other, somwhere, at least a billion people are fully convinced of something untrue and yet feel the truth of it and are ready to die for it.
Millions of people in the past have felt the presence of Wodin, Thor, Resheph, Anath, Ashtoreth, Nergal, Isis, Addu Shalem, Dagon, Sharrab, Yau, Amon-Re, Osiris, Sebek, Molech.
People were so very certain they existed that they put endless riches and labour into building their temples, sacrificed their own children to them, went to war in their names.
In case you think I am making these names up, please check out the article Memorial Service
What is amazing is that the absurd fraud continues and believers still act as if atheists were the weirdos.
Look, no one thinks atheists are weirdos. You believe what you want. What’s disturbing is all the criticism and mocking of those who happen to be of faith. Maybe you could learn more tolerance for those who don’t share your own values.
Would somebody please help me out here? Are my eyes deceiving me? For a moment I thought that a Straight Doper had cited H. L. Mencken as a reliable and authoritative source.
No, on second thought, that’s too ridiculous to be possible. I guess I am hallucinating after all.
You realize that to me, you’ve just said, “I have no reason to believe in God. I have simply assumed my conclusion. No, I don’t prop up my logical fallacy with evidence; I simply assume my conclusion, and logic, reason, and reality be damned.”
That is, you explicity seem to be saying: “I believe in god because [I know] that God exists, but I have no way of knowing that God exists whatsoever.” Does it surprise you that this seems like utter nonsense to me? Is there some subtlety that I’m missing that totally reverses the meaning of everything you’re saying?
Yes, absolutely, a lot of people consider their religion to be very, very important to them, to the point of structuring their lives and defining their identies around it.
That’s why it’s so disturbing. It’s like putting an imaginary friend as the most important thing in your life, supplanting family, friends, morality, social considerations, etc… A lot like it. Very disturbing. It makes me wonder what other massive and significant decisions the persion will make on a whim or an imagining.
What would you say to someone who said they believed in ghosts because ghosts exist.
No, the concept of God is behind all those things. There is no evidence that any real god is. The Greek gods were the centerpiece of Greek art - does that make them real? God was totally absent from my education (except for the few hours I spent in Hebrew school) and it didn’t hurt me any. I went through higher education and got a PhD without god. I got married without god. I had kids and raised them without god. God may be the centerpiece of all these things for you, but I don’t see how you can generalize.
That I have been god-free is not evidence that god does not exist - just that god belief is not necessary.