I think it would take a big religious / spiritual experience to change my atheism, or I’d have to have some really strong objective evidence of the existense of (a) god. I don’t think either would leave me much choice - ofcourse, if you have strong enough evidence, that does not imply faith or religion.
If I knew as a fact the christian god existed, and he would walk by and have a chat, I don’t know that I would be all that reverent. I’m just not sure he’d deserve it.
Yes. I believe (hah!) that people should always take a critical look at themselves and the world, regardless of dogma, popular opinion, religion or the “science of the day”. I can be a pretty outspoken atheist, but I don’t think it’s a good thing to try to impress your opinions or beliefs about the world onto other people. Making people think (or even just confuse them) is much more constructive IMHO.
Not nearly as odd as manna and a pillar of smoke by day and fire by night. What sort of poop does manna leave anyway? What sort of traces do nomadic camps leave anyway? I know that there were a large number together, so that might help them leave discernible traces. It is hard enough to get good archeological evidence from fixed sites, but just how do you find nomadic camps whose sites were well-policed?
The pattern would be quite recognizable if found, because of their well-documented shape. Of course absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. I would like to hear your proposed methodology to settle such a question given the difficulties I listed. It might not be as hard as defining the temperature of the earth is, but I think it would be very hard to do.
Basically the God question for me comes down to this. “Do you believe in consciousness at all?” and the second part would be “Do you believe that all the universe is conscious or only certain parts of it?” and the third part would be “If you are conscious, then are you not the universe being conscious of itself?” God would be the aggregation of all consciousness.
Does it actually state that it was 1 million jews in the desert? Where does the 1 million number come from? Second question would be, “How do you differentiate Hebrew Nomads from other nomads of the time?” Finally, last but not least, I would say, if whole cities and temples made of stone can be hidden by the Sahara, then how exactly is it they expect to find evidence of shit and campfires?
One last time before I head off to bed: let me urge anyone who is really curious about the Israelites in the wilderness, there is evidence, but it’s in Arabia, not the Sinai peninsula (please see previous post about this). You can order a copy of the film at www.monumentpictures.com It is about $20, but hey, education ain’t cheap! Night, all! Have fun discussing!
No, I believe the OP was questioning the reasons behind a continued “belief” in god despite a persitent lack of evidence for his existence. I think he used Christianity as an example because that is the frame of reference he is most familiar with.
I think if we can combine the courage to be true to ourselves with the desire to keep learning and growing. we’ll get to where we’re supposed to be. Not everyone is supposed to follow the same path. Although I believe the truth is the same for everyone, the path which gets us there can vary a great deal. We do better to focus on our own path than to critisize the path of others, but life is bound to bring us to some confrontations.
A quick story that relates.
I went to a church and heard a sermon from a preacher who happened to be a councilor at a religious based collage. He said a few of his students were questioning the beliefs of the church {of their parents} and expirimenting with other beliefs. He was concerned about the direction they seemed to be taking and wondered how to approach them and what to say. One night as he was out walking and meditating on the problem the message he believed he got was “leave them alone and don’t interfere, they are in my hands”
I took this to mean that it was right for them to question and develop beliefs that were their own and not merely an obedient refelction of their parents beliefs.
Your own trip through atheism led you somewhere else and your beliefs will still mature and evolve as time goes on.
Oh, if you want to assert that *some * religious people regard non-religious (or other-religious) people as possessing less worth, I’ll not argue. You can always find at least one person saying such asinine things; and mswas has indeed been helpful in offering himself as an example.
If you want to say that religious people are *more likely * to regard others as having less worth … well, I don’t know that we’d ever get to the bottom of that.
But both of those are very, very different from saying or implying that thinking someone is wrong is either neccessarily or inherently a devaluation of their worth as a person. That is what I took you to mean, and that I would disagree with very vigorously.
I have a very good freind who sincerely believes in astrology. I think she is very wrong and have told her so; she thinks I’m wrong in my beliefs and has told me so. Nevertheless, we are good freinds and value each other as people very much. Disagreement – even fundamental disagreement – does not equate to diminishment.
Hey, I didn’t claim that I was enlightened. ;p I was merely trying to establish that it is hard to build a brick house without a belief in say ‘brick’. In otherwords, that God is the most fundamental aspect of all things. Everything else is a manifestation of such. So how can an atheist truly know anything without a belief in a necessary fundamental? In otherwords, they are always working with an incomplete data set.
I believe that IS an absolute, it’s not relative, it’s simply the truth. God cannot be ‘proven’ by looking at the subsets, only by looking at the whole all at once. Such a thing may only be experienced, as the ‘algorithm’ that would define such a thing would be the one that accounts for everything from Neutrons to Fish to Galaxy Clusters. So how can I not see someone asking people to “prove” God to them as anything other than simpletons?
I’m all for being open-minded, but one cannot be so open minded that they embrace the incorrect as having equal validity with that which is correct. However, I do not think that atheists have no right to their opinion, or no right to exist, or are in any way an inconvenience to my existence, anymore than I would want to be rid of annoying children. They are having their experience, and that is fine. It doesn’t mean that their assessments however, are in any way, correct.
Stupidity does not equate to a diminishment of one’s value. It is an assessment of their prowess in a particular ability. Just as I might say that a grown man who cannot lift 20 lbs is “weak”.
The question is what is faith in and also what is faith. Faith is compounded of belief (intellectual), trust (a combination of head and heart) and loyalty (a matter of the heart). The God that mature Christians worship is the Word who creates and sustains everything. Yes, they believe that the Word had a unique fleshly representative, Jesus, (an avatar in your terms) in whom lived the fullness of God bodily.
The words of the Word made flesh recorded in the Word of God, the Bible, are what guide faithful Christians. The particular sign of Christians is their self-sacrificing love for each other. Jews and Christians alike are supposed to love God with all their being. Since Jesus is the Word made flesh, Christians obeying the first great commandment to love God with all the resources of their selves; each other with the divine resources of the Spirit of Christ Jesus; and all the neighboring world as much as they love themselves–will obey those words out of love.
One of Jesus’ words was, “If you love me, obey my words.” Another one of those words was to share the love he had for all who have accepted Him with all those who have not yet accepted that love. That love, which those who come witnessing bear, is like a gift. Just as you can lead a horse to water, but not make him drink, you can lay a gift before someone, but you cannot make them take it. When you meet those who are out there telling the good news of the risen and coming Christ remember this, they obey and bear the highest truths of their Master Jesus Christ to you out of love for Him and love for you.
I know I am concious, or at least, it is the one of the few things I have solid evidence for. “I think therefore I am” and all that.
I believe certain parts of the universe have conciousness (e.g. most humans).
I am as concious of the universe as I am. As far as I experience it, I don’t think I am the whole universe. I put some trust in other humans - i.e. my parents told me of my birth, so the universe was here before I was born. I have seen people die. I don’t believe the universe will end when I die, because it didn’t end when they did, and I have no reason to believe I am any different in that regard. Neither has it stopped when I slept or was unconcious - at least, not according to everybody else who was there.
So. I am a temporarily concious part of the universe. I am alive now and I want to experience stuff. I am a hedonist and a seeker of knowledge. I don’t busy myself with what comes after death, because as far as I know there is no way to find out untill I die. I hope it will be a stunning adventure, but I don’t count on it and until that time comes, I’m going to make the best of it here.
How do you define what is you? Are you your body? Are you your philosophy? Are you your experiences? If you’ve ever skipped a rock, are you not the new postion that the rock has at the bottom of the river? Are you not the streets you have walked down in your town? Are you not the flakes of your skin in the cracks between the floorboards? Are you not your pets, or your friends? Are you not the posts you make on this message board? And like the rock you skipped that has forever altered the flow of the river, are you not the perpetual ripples that go out into the matter/energy from the points that you impact? Are you not going to live on as long as anything that I affect now that you have affected my life? So if I have children will you not live on through them via me?
Personally I do not believe in death, nor do I believe that one is completely unconcious during sleep. You are still experiencing outside of an intellectual realm. The parts of conciuosness where things can be defined, quantified or qualified are not the only realms in which one is concious. We have parts of ourselves that we have created arbitrary delineations and distinctions in order to compartmentalize and focus our will/energy, but that does not mean that our fingers are any less concious than our brains, only that they are conscious in a way that is not verbal. For some reason in modern society we seem to have lost respect for any sort of conciousness that cannot be verbalized.
So while your body may decay and decompose and deconstruct, it will do so for eternity in the bowels of the creatures that eat you and the creatures that eat them, your effects upon the conciousness of those around you will impact upon the flow of their lives just as the rock you skipped impacted the flow of the river in which you skipped it.
At least, that is how I see it, but I also believe that rocks and stars are conscious and I do not believe in empty space, and that nothing merely describes the portions of the universe we have chosen not to acknowledge at this time.
