[Cyberyeti]

32519, on 2013-January-07, 00:02, said:

OK, so you’re looking for a shortcut as why you should accept or reject the Bible and its contents. I don’t know if there are any shortcuts but I will give an opinion.

To prove that he exists and is real, at various intervals we have recorded unexplained phenomena and miracles in the Bible. These miracles escalated dramatically during the 3½ years of Jesus’ ministry, most notably in the form of people being cured from all sorts of diseases etc. These miracles continued in the period immediately after the resurrection and Paul’s ministry before tapering off altogether. Since Paul’s death until now at different times and different places there have been revivals followed by a gradual falling away of the people again.

Jesus promised those who believe would perform greater deeds than him (John 14:12). Apart from the years immediately after the resurrection this hasn’t continued for subsequent generations of believers. If it doesn’t happen before his return then he lied to us. If it starts happening while you are still alive, you will get another chance of salvation the easy way. If it starts happening after you have already died, you too will be saved, only the hard way.

So we should believe writings by followers of a "prophet" as being objective ? There is no objective verification of any of this, hence I don't believe it.

Quote

If you’re starting to feel uncomfortable about the things said in this thread, that is an EXCELLENT SIGN! It simply means that the Spirit of God is prompting you once again to respond to his calling.

No, it means that it's impossible to debate with a fanatic who won't even consider challenging what he believes.

My belief, Jesus was a historical person, but no more the son of any deity than anybody else, and the "miracles" were exaggerated/invented by his followers to promote their religion. Am I prepared to challenge that ? yes, just give me some decent independent evidence.

[wyman]

mikeh, on 2013-January-06, 10:22, said:

Religious belief seems to me to require the refusal to think critically.

I don't agree with this. We're all solving a Bayesian inference problem with relatively little data*, so our estimates turn out to be mostly prior.

*One of the problems is that there are people on both sides who think that there is an overwhelming amount of data, but I think those people are wrong on both sides. I do tend to agree with the folks who provide concrete evidence that such-and-such event couldn't have occurred on such-and-such timeline, but this is not (to me) compelling evidence of the non-existence of God.

[wyman]

Also, I don't know, Mike, whether you are suggesting that theism requires the refusal to think critically. I would strongly disagree with that. I think that even "religious belief" is far too broad for your statement to apply. Of course we could nitpick some tenets of Christianity, for example, that require the refusal to think critically, but if we start to shift more weight toward all Judeo-Christian teaching as parable and less toward the literal, things start to jive quite a bit more with our -- or at least my -- sense of reality.

I have a hard time going to church, because I don't believe a lot of the stories, and because I have a hard time talking to people who take them all at face value. But if I think about the stories as fictional, and if I imagine an old Jewish man writing down a number of half(more or less)-truths as a community guidebook, as a way to get the village in line, to curb "bad" behavior and set a moral code, all while injecting a little fear of God into them, everything checks out in my mind. I try to listen and understand what the author was getting at.

That the stories are false doesn't mean that God doesn't exist. Really, it provides no data at all. So we're back to prior. And I don't think that a prior that favors God's (or Gods') existence is totally unreasonable. If I believe God exists but that the stories in the bible are false, does that make me non-religious -- or does it make me religious and hence exhibiting a refusal to think critically?

On a personal note, I've applied a uniform prior to the existence of God, and I've hardly turned my Bayesian crank at all, so I have no idea what's going on out there.

[PassedOut]

Codo, on 2013-January-07, 06:16, said:

"Atheists do not want to deny religious believers the comfort of their faith."

You quoted this sentence and write the complete opposite yourself. Isnt't there a little gem in the bible (and elsewhere...) about the beam in the own eye?

I really do not understand why it is so difficult to respect different beliefs (or the lack of). I can respect your atheism, so please do not tell me that I believe because I have not "seriously thought about this subject."

I certainly don't want to deny believers the comfort of their faith. And I certainly don't think that a person is a believer only because he or she has not thought about it. That's why I posted the link. As a matter of fact, many believers have thought quite a lot about it -- phil_20686 comes to mind immediately.

But for a long time it was dangerous to say that there are no gods and that all religions rely upon superstition. Those threats removed, it's important to let folks know that a substantial number of good people don't need the comfort of a belief in god. If this information prompts folks to think about their beliefs and nevertheless to hold them even more strongly, I'm fine with it.

As you know, Plato quoted Socrates as saying, "The unexamined life is not worth living." To believe (or not believe) just because some "authority" makes pronouncements throws away an important part of the great adventure of life.

The fact that I'm quite sure that there are no gods does not mean that I don't respect religious folks. I've met a number of religious people who work hard to help the poor, the sick, and the hungry, and I have considerable respect for them.

[gwnn]

Codo, on 2013-January-07, 06:16, said:

If someone claims that his nonbelive is superior, like MikeH does- it is not. It is as misguieded as the credo of fundemental belivers who think that their way to understand things are superior for reasons just they know.
Noone can seriously claim to KNOW the truth, this is why we call it belief. Some people have very strong believes (or disbelieves). Fine to me, as long as they do not rate my believes as inferior.

I am normally very cautious about these things and would never claim that atheism, or even my atheism, is superior to Christianity (well, not as an absolute as you seem to be implying that mikeh is asserting), especially not your Christianity. However, surely we can agree that there are certain beliefs that are inferior (to whatever standard we agree on) to others.

Take the standard of morality, hopefully we can agree that a hypothetical religion in which (among other rituals) you kill every second boy in the family when they turn 5 is a morally inferior religion to one where they have all rituals of the former except killing these little boys. This gets very complicated when we go to real-life religions, which luckily have no such heinous doctrines, so in most cases it is not possible or even desirable to make such a comparison, but let's not say that all existing worldviews are equal and none is superior to any other.

Factual accuracy is another terrain where you can ascertain to a very high degree of confidence whether one system is better than another: if one person believes that the Earth is 6000 years old and another believes that it is about 4.5 billion years old, it is beyond a reasonable doubt that the second person is closer to the objective reality (yep it is up for debate whether God created the world with all the fossils and all the carbon-12 as if they had been already decomposing for tens of millions of years but surely that is by now unreasonable doubt).

It is not productive to assert that all beliefs are completely equivalent, surely you didn't want to say or even imply that?

[Codo]

gwnn, on 2013-January-07, 08:53, said:

I am normally very cautious about these things and would never claim that atheism, or even my atheism, is superior to Christianity (well, not as an absolute as you seem to be implying that mikeh is asserting), especially not your Christianity. However, surely we can agree that there are certain beliefs that are inferior (to whatever standard we agree on) to others.

Take the standard of morality, hopefully we can agree that a hypothetical religion in which (among other rituals) you kill every second boy in the family when they turn 5 is a morally inferior religion to one where they have all rituals of the former except killing these little boys. This gets very complicated when we go to real-life religions, which luckily have no such heinous doctrines, so in most cases it is not possible or even desirable to make such a comparison, but let's not say that all existing worldviews are equal and none is superior to any other.

Factual accuracy is another terrain where you can ascertain to a very high degree of confidence whether one system is better than another: if one person believes that the Earth is 6000 years old and another believes that it is about 4.5 billion years old, it is beyond a reasonable doubt that the second person is closer to the objective reality (yep it is up for debate whether God created the world with all the fossils and all the carbon-12 as if they had been already decomposing for tens of millions of years but surely that is by now unreasonable doubt).

It is not productive to assert that all beliefs are completely equivalent, surely you didn't want to say or even imply that?

Yes, we agree that there are beliefs which we would not recommend in our worlds and according to our standards. I f.e. claim that any fundamentalism is inferior to liberal ideas according to my standards. But who am I (or is Mike or you or whoever) to claim that these standards should be taken as the ultimate wisdom?
You and I (and Mike and all BBFler) will agree on an awful lot about what is right or wrong. But even if we do- why are our ideas- f.e. about abortion, condoms, 1kid-politics like in China, the Sharia, polygamy, democracy or the freedom of expression- the "right" ones? We have a set of rules which fits our education, our socialisation and our own feelings- I doubt that there is a world standard.
So I find it quite hard to call any form of belief or any form of governement as "inferior" - because we (at least I) usually just judge from our personal point of view. And this may be a quite limited one.

P.S. Anybody- being theist or not- who takes the bible literally- did not really read it.
Here is an old but nice example: http://www.snopes.co...ion/drlaura.asp
(I have no idea, who wrote it first, so I have no idea about the copyrights, but anyway...)

[mikeh]

wyman, on 2013-January-07, 08:39, said:

Also, I don't know, Mike, whether you are suggesting that theism requires the refusal to think critically. I would strongly disagree with that. I think that even "religious belief" is far too broad for your statement to apply. Of course we could nitpick some tenets of Christianity, for example, that require the refusal to think critically, but if we start to shift more weight toward all Judeo-Christian teaching as parable and less toward the literal, things start to jive quite a bit more with our -- or at least my -- sense of reality.

Deism is far more plausible than any particular religion. We appear to have evolved in such a way as to have a desire for answers, for explanations. Science cannot yet and maybe never can provide a definitive answer for how the universe came into existence. It may make no sense to think in those terms, but that's the way our brains seem to work, so we look for an explanation.

If there was a 'prime mover', there is the logical problem of how that came into existence. So to me belief in a god, as prime mover, simply moves the question back one step and is no real answer at all. But I can see an argument in favour of there being some god concpet that explains how the universe came into existence.

Religion is something else altogether, especially the judeo-christian-islamic varieties.


Religion, in that sense, is very different. It posits not merely a deistic explanation but one that involves a entity with a number of human characteristics, including an overweaning need to be worshipped. It requires a belief, unfounded on evidence, that humanity is profoundly important in the universe. It requires a belief that, contrary to the best evidence, prayer is effective, altho any positive response appears to be, shall we say, capricious? It requires accepting as accurate, true and valid internally inconsistent and often implausible stories.

Now,if we were to treat the bible as simply a set of tales designed to provide us with a philosophical way to live our lives, that would be completely different. Altho I always wonder whether those who suggest such a view have actually read the whole bible, since the OT contains quite a few horrific 'moral' pointers. Just look at the brutual genocide mandated by god, and the list of offences that merit death. Look at the way women are treated. And so on. But no religion treats the bible in that secular way! Especially in the J-C-I tradition, the acceptance of dogma is required as is the practice of praying to this divine, but fortunately for us, probably imaginary entity. And the expenditure of countless dollars supporting an elaborate edifice built entirely on deception, often self-deception. And the creation of various levels of animosity towards those who don't belong to one's particualr creed or subset of a creed.


It seems to me that the apologists for the Xian religion pick and choose the 'nice' bits: the bits with which they agree, in order to say: see..it works as a moral guide.

Btw, there is a huge difference, at least imo, between belief and disbelief. Anyone who says that atheists are similar to believers doesn't, it seems to me, understand that I am ready to believe subject to the provision of evidence. Religious belief, we are often told, requires 'faith'. Faith is the anthithesis of reason. Indeed a number of religious leaders, over the years, have deplored the effect of reason on society, precisely because (tho they never explicitly frame it this way) it erodes their power over their followers. Change religion into an evidence-based process and the numbers of believers would likely drop rather dramatically.

There is arguably some evidence in support of deism. My take is that such 'evidence' is negative, not positive. Deism remains as possible, due to the unarguable fact of our existence and the lack of scientific explanation therefor. Thus this is the argument of the gaps, and I don't like it. But no religion can avail itself of even that thin reed, because all religions have specific (even if internally contradictory) details for which there is no logical argument or acceptable evidence.

[Fluffy]

gwnn, on 2013-January-07, 08:53, said:

Take the standard of morality, hopefully we can agree that a hypothetical religion in which (among other rituals) you kill every second boy in the family when they turn 5 is a morally inferior religion to one where they have all rituals of the former except killing these little boys. This gets very complicated when we go to real-life religions, which luckily have no such heinous doctrines, so in most cases it is not possible or even desirable to make such a comparison, but let's not say that all existing worldviews are equal and none is superior to any other.

You surely realice how careful you had to pick the situation where the moralty was clear in one direction. And even then with a big ammount of imagination I could figure out scenarios where killing second sons was better than letting them live.


One of the bad things about classic relgions is that they teach a lot of laws that actually make sense in current context, but they forget to explain the reasons. One clear example is the no-pork in islam. If they teached why it was dangerous at that time to eat them they would had evolved once the danger was gone.*

Everyone I've talked this about agree with me that a party that ends in a kill for a very ill/old person is much better than attaching him to a machine for several years of pain, yet most western civilizations don't accept it right now.


*: I feel the same about bridge conventions: if you teach the convention but don't explain the problem they solve and how, the puppils will never use it properly (blackwood is a great example)

[kenberg]

I probably am reaching my limit here, but comments about Deism sent me to the Net. My understanding is that some of the Founding Fathers were perhaps Deists. I had some vague idea of their views so I put it in to Google.

http://altreligion.a...saz/p/Deism.htm tells me

Quote

Deism is not a specific religion but rather a particular perspective on the nature of God. Deists believe that a creator god does exist, but that after the motions of the universe were set in place he retreated, having no further interaction with the created universe or the beings within it.

Is this accurate? I don't actually see that it differs much from my own beliefs, although I would never call myself a Deist. The universe got created somehow. Since then, it runs on its own principles. Usually I am not in Mike's corner in pushing on the need for definition, but here I really do not see much of a difference in saying "I have no idea how the whole thing got started" or "God got the whole thing started but now it just runs on its own power". I guess I can agree that the statements are different but I can't see why the difference much matters. Either way we are on our own.

Which I guess sums up my larger view. If we agree that we all need to deal with our lives as best we can, then how someone phrases it seems to be of use primarily for starting arguments.

[billw55]

Fluffy, on 2013-January-07, 10:09, said:

Everyone I've talked this about agree with me that a party that ends in a kill for a very ill/old person is much better than attaching him to a machine for several years of pain, yet most western civilizations don't accept it right now.

And most western religions don't accept it either. Perhaps including yours? Is this another case where an individual congregant (you) does not accept certain details of the church's teaching? IMO this would be a good thing, showing that mikeh is quite wrong about your alleged closed-mindedness and/or blind adherence to dogma.

In my experience, the majority of believers differ from the total doctrine of their chosen church in some ways. Most obvious example, Catholics and birth control. Which means to me that they really aren't as sheeplike as so many atheists like to think.

[Winstonm]

kenberg, on 2013-January-07, 10:15, said:

I probably am reaching my limit here, but comments about Deism sent me to the Net. My understanding is that some of the Founding Fathers were perhaps Deists. I had some vague idea of their views so I put it in to Google.

http://altreligion.a...saz/p/Deism.htm tells me



Is this accurate? I don't actually see that it differs much from my own beliefs, although I would never call myself a Deist. The universe got created somehow. Since then, it runs on its own principles. Usually I am not in Mike's corner in pushing on the need for definition, but here I really do not see much of a difference in saying "I have no idea how the whole thing got started" or "God got the whole thing started but now it just runs on its own power". I guess I can agree that the statements are different but I can't see why the difference much matters. Either way we are on our own.

Which I guess sums up my larger view. If we agree that we all need to deal with our lives as best we can, then how someone phrases it seems to be of use primarily for starting arguments.

To me creation is the heart of the conflict of god/no god. To accept creation one has to assume a being can stand outside of reality and create from nothing, which goes against everything I know and understand about rational thought. The other side is equally perplexing in that one must assume if there is no god that our basic understanding of the universe is in error, that the big bang did not occur as thought and that the universe itself has no beginning or end, it is what always has been.

The long history of man has shown that we often fall prey to misunderstandings, so to me it is more likely that we were initially wrong about redshift and the nature of light than that an irrational entity exists and for some unknown reason decided to do the impossible and build a universe from nothing.

Perhaps there is no Doppler effect with light and the background radiation is not a holdover from a bang. Man being wrong makes more sense to me than god.

[mikeh]

Fluffy, on 2013-January-07, 10:09, said:

You surely realice how careful you had to pick the situation where the moralty was clear in one direction. And even then with a big ammount of imagination I could figure out scenarios where killing second sons was better than letting them live.


One of the bad things about classic relgions is that they teach a lot of laws that actually make sense in current context, but they forget to explain the reasons. One clear example is the no-pork in islam. If they teached why it was dangerous at that time to eat them they would had evolved once the danger was gone.*

Judasism has this rule as well, for the same historical reason.

Religion has been used for a number of purposes, some of them salutary. Indeed, as I hope has come through in my posts in the WC, I see religion as having been (net) useful in earlier times. It gave a structure to society, and while it gave rise to considerable violence, wars, pogroms, and the like, it also gave rise to universities, hospitals, and charitable works. The school I attended between age 7 and 13 was founded by the local bishop in the 1700's to provide an education to children who would otherwise had had no formal schooling.

But there is less need for the civilizing effects of religion these days, especially in countries with functioning secular forms of government, both capable of and willing to provide for education, health care, and a minimal social safety net.

Meanwhile the destructive aspects of organized religion continue to be problematic. Judaism is the least aggressive of the J-C-I forms, perhaps because of numbers, but the fundamentalists in Israel certainly appear to cause significant problems in the context of a possible peaceful solution to the Palestinian issue, and they do so at leastr ostensibly on religious grounds.

In Nigeria, muslims kill christians, christians kill gays, and so on.

In the US, Bush used Old Testament arguments in an unsuccessful attempt to enlist the French in the Iraq invasion, and there are a huge number of allegedly educated americans who believe the end times are coming, if not already upon us. A US general, speaking to his troops ahead of deployment to Iraq, told them that they were soldiers in a new Crusade, and religious indoctrination has been virtually institutionalized at the major military academies in the US (not a very tolerant form, either...just straight fundie Xian approach).

So at least in my opinion, the time has come for religion to fade away as a public force. I have nothing at all against anyone who finds it preferable to believe in a god, so long as that person doesn't take his or her view of god's wishes as a reason for imposing his view of the world on anyone else.

[mikeh]

billw55, on 2013-January-07, 10:44, said:

In my experience, the majority of believers differ from the total doctrine of their chosen church in some ways. Most obvious example, Catholics and birth control. Which means to me that they really aren't as sheeplike as so many atheists like to think.

LOL.

I have suggested in the past that we invent our god in our image. Studies have shown that we base our individual view of what our god wants on what we want, rather than the other way around.

Since many catholics want birth control, it is routine for them to do the mental gymnastics to avoid having to obey the strictures of the church on this issue.

Indeed, this phenonomen argues against the validity of religious belief, in the sense of an organized religion, with its baggage of ritual and rule.

Communism appears to be a failed approach to human society, and I have read (and been persuaded) that one main reason was that it was based on the malleability of the human personality, which proved not so malleable as Marx and Lenin had thought.

The same stubbornness of personality appears to be part of why religious schisms happen. Members of a faith find that an approach dictated by those in power within the faith conflicts with their personal wishes, so lo and behold, a new relevation or a new reading of doctrine results in a split, whereby the members of the new splinter sect get a god closer in thinking to themselves.

Most modern churches have evolved a way of trying to deal with this: the RC church periodically reconsiders basic approaches, but as with any large and sclerotic bureaucracy, the ones at the top tend to become both isolated and reactionary. Hence the RC leadership is out of step with many western members.

Doing mental gymnastics such as to violate tenets of the faith while claiming to be good members of the faith doesn't demonstrate an open-mindedness about religion. It merely demonstrates that religion is a man-made construct. If one can believe in the improbable and unproveable tenets of one's faith, one can surely choose to believe other implausible things, such as that one can pick and choose which tenets to observe and which to disregard without thereby becoming a heretic

Anyway, my take on Gonzalo is that he isn't a true believer in any one particular faith. He has chosen to believe in a god, and it sounds as if it is based on some notion of a christian god, but not necessarily one that any priest or minister would recognize as precisely the god of that person's sect. I may have misunderstood him, including his pm's to me, but that is my take for what it is worth.

[dwar0123]

gwnn, on 2013-January-07, 08:53, said:

(yep it is up for debate whether God created the world with all the fossils and all the carbon-12 as if they had been already decomposing for tens of millions of years but surely that is by now unreasonable doubt).

I would state that the two positions, the world being 4.5 billion years old and a God that exists outside time and space calling into existence a 4.5 billion year old world 6 thousand years ago, are equivalent.

In both cases, by the laws of physics, the world is 4.5 billion years old. Heck, everything before this point in time could be a memory manufactured by god as he called into existence the world a fraction of a second ago. If so, how old are you? Are you a fraction of a second old or are you the age you recall yourself to be?

[kenberg]

My head is starting to hurt. If you guys could just let me know what the conclusion is, I would appreciate it.

Seriously I regard the discussion as substantial and for the most part respectful. But I settled this all in my own mind long ago and am finding it too much work to go through the various views.

Best wishes to all.

[Fluffy]

kenberg, on 2013-January-07, 11:32, said:

My head is starting to hurt. If you guys could just let me know what the conclusion is, I would appreciate it.

People believe what they want to, and nobody will change their views. Nothing new really

EDIT: also people claim they are tolerant, but that is true only as long as other's beliefs don't interfere on their lives.

[dwar0123]

Fluffy, on 2013-January-07, 13:55, said:

People believe what they want to, and nobody will change their views. Nothing new really

EDIT: also people claim they are tolerant, but that is true only as long as other's beliefs don't interfere on their lives.

My views have changed over time, I assume this is so with most. Perhaps never as a direct and immediate result of a conversation with someone trying to change my mind, so in a sense you are right, but all those collections of conversations has over timed formed much of the basis of how I view the world so in a very real sense, you are wrong.

This is of course only in reference to soft subjects, rather easy to change my mind over factual subjects with simple proofs.

Also your beliefs are interfering with my life right now and I am tolerating it

[Vampyr]

Fluffy, on 2013-January-07, 13:55, said:

People believe what they want to, and nobody will change their views. Nothing new really

That is not entirely true. Sometimes, for example, people get emotionally stronger or more mature and find that they don't need "God" or (especially) a church with with not just "God" but theology as well. A lot of people brought up in a church later rethink the beliefs they were taught. Catholic school is a pretty reliable atheism training ground.

In the US, non-believers sometimes join the Unitarian Universalist Church so they have the community but can believe or not believe in any version of God, Gods or otherwise. I recently spoke to a UU minister who told me that the largest "group" in her congregation were ex-Catholics

Also, I think that in general, people believe because they want to, but don't believe because they can't. I mean, in many ways I would prefer to believe that my departed loved ones are happy in heaven. And that I have (perhaps a very slim!) chance of seeing them again there someday. What I do know is that they are "alive" in my heart and the hearts of others that loved them, and I can honour them by striving to be the person they believed I was (invariably a better version than the actual one!)

[gwnn]

dwar0123, on 2013-January-07, 11:25, said:

I would state that the two positions, the world being 4.5 billion years old and a God that exists outside time and space calling into existence a 4.5 billion year old world 6 thousand years ago, are equivalent.

In both cases, by the laws of physics, the world is 4.5 billion years old. Heck, everything before this point in time could be a memory manufactured by god as he called into existence the world a fraction of a second ago. If so, how old are you? Are you a fraction of a second old or are you the age you recall yourself to be?

Yep all this stuff is under the 'unreasonable doubt' column in my book my favourite one is about the verse "surely this generation shall not pass..." (or one that says 'some of you shall see with your eyes'?) and some biblical literalists just say "well maybe one or two of those guys are still around, why not?"

[Fluffy]

My sister who is an astrophysic atheist (or agnostic, not sure) told me that the notion of god creating universe was absurd, just as absurd as it being there on its own, maybe there is another option?