Belief in reincarnation is not a necessary component of Buddhism, and there is no belief at all that you “join with a higher power.” Your understanding of Buddhism is not very accurate.
No, I 'm asking for scientific proof for a factual assertion. You have asserted that there is some sort of “higher power.” That is a scientific assertion, not a philosophical one. You have said that atheists “ignore the evdience” for this scientific claim. What are atheists ignoring? You can’t try to weasel it as being outside the purview of scientific evidence, because you already asserted it as a scientific fact (whether you realize that or not).
You’re the one running in circles here.
Evidence for WAHAT? You have to explain exactly what it is you’re asserting before I can tell you whether a falsifiable test is possible.
Any one piece of evidence? No. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. In order to convince me of the existence of a deity you’d need to provide numerous consistent pieces of evidence that all fit together to support your hypothesis.
But the same is true of any extraordinary claim. For example, there’s no single piece of evidence that would convince me the moon is made of green cheese. However, given a consistent pattern of evidence that supported that hypothesis, I’d eventually accept it.
It’s impossible to know “the truth” about anything. The best we can do is create mental models that accurately describe how the world behaves.
Naturally, it’s a dual-edged sword. There’s a Mother Teresa for every Jim Jones; and while I hope & pray the number of “good” religious people outweigh those who are completely delusional, as time marches on, it becomes increasingly difficult to determine where the exact balance lies.
Let’s put it this way – last night I watched a History Channel program about the Seven Seals of the Apocalypse, as “foretold” in the Book of Revelation – yes, to rational people it’s obvious bullshit, but to millions of others (especially Tea Party-minded Christians) it is factual, future truth. Even worse, they’re not afraid of Armageddon – they want the Apocalypse to happen! They’d even support the Antichrist’s presidential campaign, merely because they’ve deluded themselves into believing that Jesus Christ will ultimately triumph, to unite Heaven & Earth while the sinners (aka everyone they don’t like) burn in hell. That’s…scary. :eek:
And frankly, that’s my primary disdain for genuine atheism (not agnosticism – have we reached that consensus yet??) – because atheism is an inherently selfish faith, and its practitioners rarely perceive any greater truth beyond their own very small community. Sure, they obey the law, assist friends & family, donate to charity, and may even fight and die for their country when called upon – but that’s basically where their sense of universal responsibility ends.
I’m sorry…was there a question that I missed? I don’t think I skipped one (at least, for which any satisfactory answer exists) but if you think I’m mistaken, I’ll give it a shot.
Atheism is not a belief.
Atheism is not a belief.
Atheism is not a belief.
Atheism is not a belief.
Atheism is not a belief.
Atheism is not a belief.
Atheism is not a belief.
Atheism is not a belief.
Atheism is not a belief.
Atheism is not a belief.
Atheism is not a belief.
Atheism is not a belief.
You also need to learn the definition of “agnosticism.” You are throwing around these words without understanding what they mean.
Okay, I see where this debate went awry. I’m not attempting to convince or convert anybody – just speaking my mind, nothing more. As for “extraordinary” evidence…well, that’s not my department. If you’re genuinely seeking divine wisdom, you must do the work yourself – NOBODY can provide the answers for you. Only you can do that.
Truth is relative – facts are not. (And even facts can be deceptive, especially if someone like Mark Fuhrman gets his sticky fingers on the bloody glove…) But your final sentence is absolutely correct – we can never comprehend the full story, not until we pass beyond the veil of infinity. (And probably not even then!) All anyone can do is determine the best course of action, based on what we know and what we truly desire, and take a shot in the dark. Once you reach that particular level of enlightenment, you’re good to go.
The good religious people are just as delusional as the bad ones. The fact that their delusions happen to be beneficial to the rest of us is an accident.
How is that different from the level of universal responsibility displayed by 99.99% of all theists?
So because there is no atheist Mother Teresa (who is an exceptional outlier), we’re supposed to believe that atheists have no morality. I’d argue that it’s more likely that atheism simply lops the ends off the bell curve. You’re less likely to find an atheist Mother Teresa, but you’re also less likely to find an atheist Mohamed Atta.
Didn’t see any answer in there, but that might be my fault. Please clarify as to what the evidence is, please.
Edited to add: And if you ask a question of atheists, it would be polite to actually let them answer it themselves instead of doing it for them.
You ASKED what it would take for us to be convinced of the existence of God. I’m answering your question. Did you even notice that my answer directly contradicts your curious belief that atheists are rigid ideologues who are immune to evidence?
You fail to grasp the significance of what I’m saying. We can never be absolutely certain of ANYTHING, even things that seem as transparently obvious as the existence of a chair in front of us. Every piece of knowledge that we have about the world is a provisional construct.
And the idea that the “truth” will somehow be revealed after we die is a cruel lie.
Even Mother Teresa was no Mother Teresa, at least as far as I’ve heard on these boards. She apparently withheld some care because she believe that pain was good for the soul or something, and gave money that was clearly meant for her hospital over to the Church.
Closer to a Mother Teresa ideal was maybe the nun mentioned in this op-ed (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/27/opinion/27kristof.html?ref=opinion) who performed an abortion on a woman who apparently would have died otherwise. Of course, the Church did the right thing in that case by excommunicating her and then disassociating itself from the hospital completely.
No wait…that wasn’t the right thing to do.
Anyway, since I’m posting here, I just want to mention that I don’t collect stamps. That’s my main hobby. (In another similar thread, someone mentioned that I have a disturbing fetish about stamps, so I need to keep my reputation going, I suppose)
Okay, well…if you’re gonna nitpick that part, then yes, I’m forced to agree with you. But at least we can agree that their specific delusion is harmless, correct?
As long as they’re not blowing up abortion clinics or smearing feces on themselves, who cares what any individual believes? Why waste time confronting their faith?
Oh Good God…
Do I have to pull out the dictionary again? I’m becoming rather annoyed by your rigmarole, Dio. :rolleyes:
That doesn’t answer my questions, and in fact doesn’t answer them in a particularly useless manner. Once the afterlife human has achieved this full non-discrete perception, why would their time on Earth with its boring linear path to entropy matter? Somehow, that finite time leads to an eternity (or at least perceptual eternity where time is fluid) of… what, exactly? Contemplating and analyzing and re-analyzing every possible minute aspect of that finite life? Can the soul-in-afterlife go on to gain new experiences and knowledge? Doesn’t this crowd out the experiences and knowledge gained on Earth? If it does not, are the souls capable of infinite knowledge, as would be inevitable with an infinite existence? If it does not, does that mean the souls can “forget” things and rediscover them a microsecond/eon later?
I get that the fear of death makes the idea of an afterlife tempting, where the good are rewarded and wicked punished and all that, but I’ve never seen a theory about how it works that… well, works.
In addition to the inability to reason I mentioned upthread, I should add the inability to incorporate new information that challenges their beliefs. How many times has fuzzy been told that he or she isn’t using vocabulary correctly?
Also, he or she runs away and changes the subject when asked to defend his or her claims. Fuzzy isn’t here to debate, he or she is here to blindly repeat his or her thesis without regard to how intellectually worthless it is.
Because believing delusional things can lead to all sorts of minor errors as well as big life-or-death ones.
For example, religious beliefs underlie a lot of the casual cruelty that’s inflicted on homosexuals. We now know that there’s no rational reason to be ashamed of being gay. But lots of people still feel that way, usually because they’ve been taught within their religion that homosexuality is a sin.
The fact that “homosexuality is a sin” is an irrational and delusional belief makes it much harder to argue against. You can martial all the facts you want to support your position, but if someone believes “God said it, I believe it, that settles it” it’s very difficult to convince them otherwise.
Its the standard use of the scientific method, that is, using logic to start from a premise and reach a reasonable and logical conclusion.
Theists are annoyingly stubborn when they’re asked to dismiss their unrelenting need to be at the center of the universe when they consider questions of existence. They are refusing to acknowledge that with every scientific discovery, the human experience has repeatedly being removed from the center of importance that theism has at its core of its unsupported and baseless ideology.
Existence questions and their examination have to be independent of the entity that examines them otherwise they are biased, and that fact alone renders theism as a useless and pointless exercise in self-absorption.
As an example of human-centric nature of theism, there has never been a case where a theist has described what their preferred deity was doing during, let’s say, the last 50 million years of the Cretaceous period. Were they twiddling their divine thumbs waiting for when some random human will call on their supernatural powers to influence the result of a slot machine in Las Vegas, on September 17, 1983? Not to mention letting us know what the theistic spirit was doing between 12 and 12.3 billion years after the Bing Bang. Counting helium atoms?
On the other hand, any knowledge we have acquired using logic is independent of human bias (most of the time). For example, Gravity is a universal reality. It doesn’t matter that it was humans that discovered it and its laws, however complete our knowledge of it is yet.
If people don’t accept the fact that the universe and its laws exist independently of the human species, or our solar system, or our galaxy, and the fact that if their claims are true, then they should be valid whether or not humans exist, then all their claims have to be discarded as fantasies and therefore false.
If you’re genuinely seeking divine wisdom, you must do the work yourself – NOBODY can provide the answers for you. Only you can do that.