On what do you base that assumption?
Reading comprehension problem? I posted this back in January. I’m already on record as saying that causality can be a valid way of looking at things.
I don’t think you’re interested in understanding anything (including me and my mindset) in here, I think you’re trying to “win a debate”. If that’s correct, I’m just going to shrug and say you have so far failed to demonstrate that prayer does not work. The continuity and consistency of my arguments is not relevant to that endeavor.
Great! 
We agree, then, that neither revelation from God nor discovery by science is sufficient for purposes of coercion.
Unintended and withdrawn. Every human owns his mind and body, and no person of any age should ever be coerced.
There are a lot more nonbelievers out there than we all might think. Lots of people go to church because they have been brainwashed from childhood to do it. Their beliefs are not as strongly held as poeple who argue with skeptics. They would not argue, because they know “they got nothin’.” Over time, in an affluent and educated society, this group will gradually be won over to the nonbeliever camp, just because being a nonbeliever is better on some very fundamental levels: for one thing, you get to sleep in on Sunday. For another, you don’t have to spend your Sundays dressed up listening to some boring old fart droning on and on about nonsense. For yet another, you don’t have to tithe.
This sounds childish, but these are real advantages.
On the other hand, when confronted with moral issues, you have to think for yourself. For some, this is intolerable and avoiding it is worth much more than tithing and giving up Sundays. If skeptics really want to get people to dump religion wholesale, they should develop a group of simple, easily understood moral guides – much like the Ten Commandments – and promote them vigorously in the media. The line would be: “You don’t have to go to church to be a good person. You don’t have to tithe to be a good person. You just have to live by these rules.”
People would jump on it like a starving whore on a horny sailor. It would suck the marrow out of most organized religions.
Of course, this won’t help with the older folks who believe because death terrifies them and the prospect of an afterlife is very appealing. It would be very hard to pry this group away from any religion that promises an afterlife.
And come the following month, you danced back into your denial of determinism with your [post=8276879]“only one event” argument[/post] again. Where was your conciliation toward causality there?
Funny, that’s pretty much what I’m accusing you of. I’m not so vain as to consider your failure as a victory for me. I am very interested in coherent ideas. As long as you stay in the “only one event” cave, you can claim many victories for yourself (such as opposing determinism). The price, however, is you cannot then leave the cave when it suits you without being called on it.
You should reconsider throwing that “reading comprehension problem” stone. Re-read that [post=8294886]last paragraph[/post] again.
Yes, it is.
Fair enough, then. (I think). I use the term “prayer” because I think the process in which I engage is the valid process (as opposed to the “say these magic phrases while holding your hands like so, you’re s’posed to do that 'cuz it’s Sunday” recipe-following thing) of prayer; in other words, in contrast to the majority of skeptics and atheists, I don’t think the phenomenon of theism is a giant wad of bullshit and therefore that all of its believers are in need of an unearned and unjustifiable “free pass” in order to be absolved of believing in bullshit. I believe the origins of religious practice (including the recipe-following mindless-ritual stuff) are in experiences such as I’ve described, that excited enthused people tried to describe it in words to folks who had had no such experiences, and that the whole thing got underlined as Real Important Stuff, and institutionalized, to the point that participating and avowing belief became mandatory, at which point of course mindless recipe-following became the norm.
I think as religion’s mandatory element fades away (it has largely ceased to be officially, legally mandatory but is still culturally or politically obligatory in many circles), it will become quite rarefied. I don’t think it’s an experience that nearly everyone regularly has, and it certainly makes no sense to pressure people into pretending that it’s happened to them.
How mainstream culture will view people in the future who have such experiences is not obvious to me. I’d like to think we get a “free pass” in the sense of the benefit of the doubt, that there may be an experience (somewhat rare) that’s happening there rather than us just being nuts and/or schizophrenics or silly deluded people.
If you still think I’m dancing into and back out of protective caves, claiming a position that I happily desert when it’s convenient, let me know. The universe really is a single event (that’s a statement of fact; or it is so give or take a quibble about “event” as the proper term for it); causality really is washed out of the picture when you look at it that way, as a fully explanatory model for how and why things occur. We find causality, which is a different way of looking at the world, to be massively useful and cogent, to the point that no one could dispense with it and cease to use it on a daily basis; and yet the same could be said of models that are intrinsically incompatible, such as free will and intentionality (no one can dispense with that and conduct their daily affairs without an investment in the belief that things happen as a consequence of intent).
You prove to me that there are no Leprechauns in Ireland (that includes underground) and I will prove to you there is no God.
How many times do we have to say it? He who alleges must prove. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. THAT WHICH IS ADVANCED WITHOUT EVIDENCE CAN BE DISMISSED WITHOUT EVIDENCE.
AHunter3, allow me to clarify the context of my on-boardness:
What I’m not willing to give a pass to is having it both ways.
Dance, dance, dance.
No, that is not what I said.
Should I check with you on every decision to be sure that you approve my information? You are assuming a level of authority beyond all reason. Of course, I am one of those idiot Christians, and can easily be dismissed.
Yes, I should be severely punished for suppressing your views. When did I do that?
Tris
It may surprise you to learn that you can be a believer and still sleep in on Sundays. You can skip church altogether, or find one that meets at a different time. You can go without dressing up. If you look hard enough, you might even be able to find a church where the preacher is neither boring nor old nor a fart, or at least not all three.
In fact, some people actually like going to church. A few even like the dressing up part. To them, your inducements are about as persuasive as telling a football fan that if they stop believing in football, they don’t have to spend their weekends inside stuck to the couch, watching a bunch of overhyped beefy no-neck guys fighting over a misshapen ball. For such people, even if you could convince them that their basic religious beliefs were false, they’d still keep going to church or a church equivalent.
Personally, I sympathise with those who see churchgoing as a dreary, PITA waste of time. I haven’t been a regular churchgoer for quite some time, because I haven’t found one that was (to me) worth getting up and going to, though I would love to find such a church. But that doesn’t make me a nonbeliever. It makes me someone who doesn’t see waking up early, dressing up, and trying to stay awake through a boring church service as particularly central to what Christianity is all about.
Lord Ashtar has not advanced the proposition that there is a god. His post that you have quoted was in response to the OP bemoaning the fact that some skeptics do not challenge ythe belief in a god. Lacking an actual assertion on the part of Lord Ashtar, you have now joined the OP in asserting that one should not believe in a god, so you have undertaken to provide the evidence.
If you wish to wander around claiming that someone else bears the burden of proof, it would behhove you to wait until they have actually asserted something that requires proof. Lord Ashtar has not done so, therefore your rather petulant claim is out of order.
I’m sure that someone may be along to assert that a god exists, (although I would still hold that your assertion and that of the OP take priority by beiong first), and you can challenge them for their proofs, but until then you should really not interrupt the thread with unwarranted challenges.
A guy with a similar name said it then.
Hey, if you have an argument against, “Where possible, when doing things that effect other people, you should try and rely on what all data is available to you rather than gut instinct.”, then I am perfectly glad to listen to it. But the Rush Limbaugh act of, “Oh why are you picking on me…? I know you’re a great all-knowing person who knows everything, but I’m just a cuddly little teddy bear!” isn’t an argument.
So then would you raise your children to be religious?
My entry into this conversation was originally curiousity. You were set to defend the efficacy of prayer, and I wanted to see how. You disavowed yourself from some of the traditional aspects of prayer, and so I asked for clarification. Your clarification just raised further questions, and didn’t reveal anything new, so I pressed for more. I got into this in hopes of hearing something new, a new approach or idea or something, and I didn’t find what I was looking for.
At this point, it looks like what you consider prayer fails in the same way that more traditional prayer fails in: you have no evidence that it is in fact ‘god’ that is causing the effects you experience, as opposed to some other mechanism. You won’t give any evidence, claiming that I do not have the appropriate experiences, or that the English language fails to provide adaquate words. I do not require medical evidence, or any sort of proof. I want to know why you think it is in fact ‘god’ that is causing these effects when you ‘pray’, and not something else.
This might be worth pursuing, but I have a feeling it will just come down to definitions of ‘exist’ or ‘abstraction’. I consider something to exist when it has some observable effect in the physical universe. It’s possible to say that something does exist, even if it exists solely within the mind. I can understand that definition, even if I don’t fully agree with it. It is possible to say both that the world JRR Tolkien envsioned exists (as an abstraction in the mind) and doesn’t exist (physically).
My daughter is agnostic. I’ve told her of my life experience, but she has a life of her own. It is impossible to raise a child to be religious. The best that can come of it is the sort of feeble intellectual belief that some people call “faith”. But faith is a gift directly from its object. If my daughter experiences something similar to what I experience, she will have faith.
If these are equivalent to you, I see no need to continue the discussion. If they are not, I wonder at your motives in deliberately misinterpreting me.
I am not sure just what you fear so much that you feel your right to self expression is being suppressed. It certainly has nothing to do with me, or anything I said anywhere, much less in this thread.
Yes, I made a light repartee using the original poster’s phrase of Giving a pass. I am sorry I lost you going around that corner; I will try to signal in advance, in the future at any attempt at lighthearted irony. My point was that I don’t use logical argument to proselytize. I believe it to be a grave error of faith. (I don’t think it actually makes me a fool.) I then engage the criticism of being told I am a fool by embracing it. (See: Dada) This also has certain biblical precedents, and while I don’t find dueling verses to be useful spiritually either, I am subject to indulgences in these sorts of indirect referents. Call it a literary pretension.
(Watch out, here comes another one of those humor things.) By the way, I am somewhat warm and a bit fuzzy, but I don’t expect any deference from you because of it.
Tris
I didn’t claim to have any. I didn’t introduce the word or the concept. Although it is true that I find both the word and the concept useful, I’ve said all along (and more than once) that I’m perfectly fine with dispensing with any theology-laden terms other than “prayer”. I think they obfuscate the issue. The discussion tends to veer off into whether or not there is a god, or what “god” means. Heck, this one has veered off into causal determinism and the Big Bang! (I’ll take part of the blame for that, though).
What I consider prayer does not depend for its validity on god, on ‘god’, or on holding to a concept of ‘god’. I’ve said it is commonly experienced by the person so engaged as if communication was taking place. I have not said that the efficacy of the process depends on holding in one’s head an image of a ‘god’, ‘goddess’, ‘djimm’, ‘what which is’, or ‘The Force’ or anything else, though.
Then why do you believe what you believe? You have to have a reason for thinking what you do. Either you read it somewhere or experienced it or heard it spoken or took a bunch of drugs and saw it written on a cloud in fire or something. That is evidence. Some of it, like personal experience, isn’t good evidence, but its still just a form of evidence.
But you believe in something that is greater than just humanity, outside the social mindset, ‘the god in all of us’, etc. Something. It doesn’t matter what you choose to call it, you think it’s there, and that it helps us in some way. If this thing isn’t there, how does your version of prayer work?
What’s it to you, and what does it have to do with prayer?
Did I say I know how it works? Someone else said they were prepared to demonstrate that prayer does not work and I said “bring it on”. I did not say I could explain how it works, did I? I didn’t say I could prove that it does work, did I?
Sure, there’s some people who like to dress up, others who like the social aspect, but I think a whole huge pile of churchgoers are there because they have a vague sense that they will “get in trouble” of some kind if they don’t go to church. They’re the ones who will desert the church in droves sooner or later, probably sooner in the US. We’re still a thrid world country, culturally, but we’re getting there.
As for those who don’t need to go to church to believe, sure, they’re out there, but I don’t think they’re all that numerous. If you want to eliminate religion, you don’t go after the Buddhists, you go where the numbers are.