Moderator: Moderators
I throw down the gauntlet. Faith has made a positive claim. Either back up this claim with evidence or withdraw it.faith wrote:Most atheists have never read the bible and so I believe that if they had, the basics would be the same. Clearly they do not speak as if they have this knowledge.
Comfort is good and even if following where truth might lead us to an uncomfortable place there is nothing wrong with having a vision that connects things.Cephus wrote: I do, simply because once you become thoughtful and reflective, what purpose does all the fantasy thinking serve? Once you decide that it is important to accept only those things that are actually true and reject those things that are not, why bother with religion at all? Believing things because they are emotionally satisfying doesn't make them true, just comforting.
Comfort has nothing to do with reality.
On the other hand--why not? Perhaps it's aesthetically pleasing, a matter of subjective taste. It's certainly a useful metaphor and a very effective teaching tool--not in terms of intimidation, necessarily, but in that stories and myths have always been effective teaching tools.Cephus wrote:Once you have a satisfactory reason to be charitable and moral, tacking on religious beliefs is really irrelevant. If you have a prefectly rational, workable moral system, what is added by claiming someone told you to do it too? Why bother with God? Why not just say aliens told you to be moral?cnorman18 wrote:I don"t think empathy and religious belief are mutually exclusive. "Theists base their actions solely on the supposed demands of a deity" just isn't so. I was empathetic when I was a Christian and still am as a Jew.
Personally, I think they're full of manure. They're trying to prove that religion is necessary to morality, which it isn't, and are making those silly claims in order to support that doubtful point. I also think that you know that as well as I do.I agree with you, but let's be honest, there are a lot of theists, and you see this around here all the time, who say that without God, they'd be out raping and pillaging and molesting animals. These people are simply incapable of normal moral behavior without some imaginary friend threatening them. They are not being moral, they are sociopaths.What I had in mind wasn't the idea of ethical behavior itself--if that doesn't come from within, I don't think religion will help--but the body of specific ethical teachings that most religions carry as part of their traditions.
I have to observe that you rather clearly know very little about it, but that may just be my impression. I don't get the idea that you are highly motivated to slog through the Church Dogmatics of Karl Barth or Abraham Joshua Heschel's God in Search of Man. Since you dismiss all such work as irrational nonsense from the get-go, what would be the point?I think you seriously overestimate it.I think you underestimate the highly rational and systematic nature of theology.
There you go again. One may begin with a nonrational or even admittedly imaginary concept, and proceed rationally from there. Here are three examples:There is nothing rational whatsoever about theology, it starts with an irrational assumption and builds from there. Once you assume there is a supernatural without a shred of objective supporting evidence to back it up, you're already off in irrational land.
Like I said, you don't know much about theology. No system of modern liberal theology, Jewish or Christian, that I have ever heard of is structured in that way. The existence of God is not assumed as an axiom, but an explication of that belief (not the same as a proof, which does not exist any more than a disproof) is a virtually required part of the prolegomena of every presentation of systematic theology that I have ever heard or read. In Judaism, that question is very much on the table and debatable, and has been for many centuries.So long as your "reasoning" took into account the irrational faith structure of the religion, of course. That's really the point, when you start from an irrational position and have faith that it must be true, everything that is built upon it is irrational as well. It's like saying "My beliefs are all completely rational, except for the unwarranted assumption that unicorns rule the universe..."My professor, Schubert W. Ogden, was one of the most brilliant and exacting humans I have ever met, and when one turned in a paper to him, one knew that one's reasoning had better be absolutely solid and precisely expressed, or one would be rewriting it the following week, and often enough, the week after that..
As if that is all he ever wrote in defense of Christianity--and as if Pascal's Wager, though not persuasive to either of us, is in itself irrational.Which is why C.S. Lewis fell for Pascal's Wager. Uh huh...I personally reject Christianity, but I still recognize C. S. Lewis--not even a true theologian, but merely a popular lay writer--as a brilliant and lucid thinker and a gifted teacher.
LOL! Of course it does. Even if I granted all of your unwarranted and grossly prejudiced negative stereotypes to be true, which I don't, human feelings and needs are absolutely and inarguably part of reality.I do, simply because once you become thoughtful and reflective, what purpose does all the fantasy thinking serve? Once you decide that it is important to accept only those things that are actually true and reject those things that are not, why bother with religion at all? Believing things because they are emotionally satisfying doesn't make them true, just comforting.I do not think that thoughtful and reflective theism in necessarily inferior to atheism in that regard, though.
Comfort has nothing to do with reality.
I totally agree with every word of that. I note further that much of it can also be applied to some varieties of atheism, e.g., "we should have a small sense of humility regarding ultimate reality" and "they are convinced they know and everyone else has failed."Cathar1950 wrote:Comfort is good and even if following where truth might lead us to an uncomfortable place there is nothing wrong with having a vision that connects things.
But we should have a small sense of humility regarding ultimate reality and this is where many theist fail as they are convinced they know and everyone else has failed. Some even suggest others that do not share their vision are lacking some quality that should be open to all that want or seek truth.
It is truely amazing how some limited people seem to think they have a handle on the nature of ultimate rality and even their notions of an infinate God fail to take into account all they don't know. Some even claim a spirit tells them it is true yet th spirit doesn't seem capable of telling them all the same truth.
Because it's not real?cnorman18 wrote:On the other hand--why not?
So what? There are lots of things we could invent out of whole cloth that may be aesthetically pleasing and useful metaphors, etc. The problem is, they're not true and some of us actually care that what we believe is factually true. I'm sorry if you're not one of them.Perhaps it's aesthetically pleasing, a matter of subjective taste. It's certainly a useful metaphor and a very effective teaching tool--not in terms of intimidation, necessarily, but in that stories and myths have always been effective teaching tools.
Wrong. It's predicated on the *FACT* that there isn't a single shred of objective evidence whatsoever to support the factual existence of your God. Period. As you have completely and utterly failed to demonstrate that your claims have even the slightest possibility of being true, any rational person must reject them until you come up wtih something better.I also feel constrained to point out that everything you say here is predicated on the presupposition that the nonexistence of God is an indisputable and conclusively proven scientific fact.
In fact, any application of logic in any way, shape or form would force us to reject the ridiculous claim. Belief in God is a purely emotional act, an imposition of how you wish the universe was upon the fabric of reality. It's no more reasonable than little kids thinking there are monsters under the bed, yet here you are, a supposedly reasonable, otherwise rational human adult that still believes in the equivalent of Santa Claus. Most kids grow up amd figure out it isn't real, why haven't you?I would readily concede that the bottom-line belief that God exists is non-rational; that is, it cannot be said to have been reached by either observation of the Universe or by pure logic.
Yes, actually, it is. There is absolutely no reason to think that there are any magic men in the sky, such a belief is at complete odds with an intellectual understanding of the universe around us. While we cannot completely disprove the existence of God, we cannot completely disprove anything, science isn't about proof, it's about the best available evidence and that evidence does not support your God. We can't prove that everything around us isn't the dream of some head in a jar, but solipsism is still an irrational position to hold.But: that is not the same thing as irrational, i.e., contrary to rationality and in conflict with it.
Yes, but the person that they marry is real. If someone tries marrying a ghost or an invisible unicorn or something like that, we call them insane and irrational because they are.What one does for a living or who one marries are as much determined by personal taste, cultural factors, aesthetic considerations, and other indefinable personal inclinations as one's religious views, but such decisions are not, for all that, judged to be "irrational" and contemptuously dismissed.
I'll agree with you on that to some degree, although there are some who only make that claim about particular formulations of "God", those that are absolutely impossible and self-contradictory. But yes, a lot of strong atheists are just as faith-based as theists, no question.I think that all this also holds for the strong atheist position, that the existence of God is not possible; that is a positive assertion which requires proof to be accepted, and there is no proof of that either. That therefore seems to me to be just as much a subjective and non-rational conviction as theism.
What you describe is weak atheism. Agnosticism is "I don't know and I can never know, it is inherently beyond the capability of humans to know anything about the existence or characteristics of god(s)."I have said before that I think the only wholly rational and logical position, absent positive proof in either direction, is "non-theism" or agnosticism. "I don't know and am awaiting proof."
Of course it isn't, I'd argue that religion is often harmful to morality because it misplaces the ultimate source of morality. Non-theists, in general, understand that morality comes from within, they know why they act as they do because they are the ultimate moral agent. Theists, on the other hand, imagine that morality is handed down by fiat by God, without any understanding for why they should act the way they're told to act. It's like someone telling you "my holy book tells me to hop around on one foot and cluck like a chicken." Why? Because the book says so. That's not morality, that's mindless authoritarianism and it's been often perverted by the church and used to control the faithful.They're trying to prove that religion is necessary to morality, which it isn't, and are making those silly claims in order to support that doubtful point. I also think that you know that as well as I do.
All of these works, all religion, starts from the unfounded and irrational assumption that there is this God out there. You freely admit that this assumption cannot be challenged from logic or reason or evidence, it just has to be accepted without question. Because every single one of these works and religion itself is built upon this single wholly-faulty assumption, everything that comes after, no matter how internally consisten or rational or reasonable, it's all tainted by the initial assumption, that God exists. If we were to claim that unicorns created the universe and based all of cosmology on that assumption, then cosmology would be as ridiculous as religion is. When your assumptions and axioms are unwarranted, it ruins everything it touches.I have to observe that you rather clearly know very little about it, but that may just be my impression. I don't get the idea that you are highly motivated to slog through the Church Dogmatics of Karl Barth or Abraham Joshua Heschel's God in Search of Man. Since you dismiss all such work as irrational nonsense from the get-go, what would be the point?
Because it's not particularly academic. You have to remember that advocates of astrology think that's academic too and that creationists have their own "universities" and offer "degrees" in what amounts to be dogmatic lies. Just because people study something doesn't mean it's worth studying, you just have people with too much time on their hands.Yours is certainly a valid opinion, as far as it goes, but I still have to wonder how you can dismiss an entire academic field as irrational foolishness without knowing, strictly speaking, what you're talking about.
That's because you don't have people believing that Gandalf and the hobbits are real. There are stories in the Bible which may teach worthwhile lessons, just as other literary works might, but there's quite a difference between learning lessons from a book and claiming the book is factually and historically accurate. Right now, there are people running around who practice the Jedi religion and think that the things in Lucas' Star Wars movie really happened. These people are insane.(1) Fiction. One may begin with characters, events, or even a setting (as in SF) or an order of natural law (as in sword-and-sorcery fantasy, which assumes magic) that does not exist, and build upon that a coherent story, teach coherent and worthwhile lessons, and of course provide entertainment and provoke thought. The concept of a world containing wizards, hobbits and elves is inarguably non-rational, but I have never heard The Lord of the Rings condemned as "irrational." The Bible may be no more factual than that book, and God as imaginary as Gandalf, but that doesn't mean that theology as an academic body of thought is any more irrational than the body of critical work on Tolkien, or for that matter the trilogy itself.
Then surely you realize that mathematics is a human-invented language for quantifying concepts, it's not meant to be "real". Mathematical concepts don't really exist, you can't go down to the corner store and pick up "one". I'm not sure how you think this is going to help you though, unless you want to admit that God isn't real either, he's just a philosophical concept that primitive man created to help him understand the world around him. That much would be very accurate, but in the modern world, it's a primitive concept that we no longer need.(2) Higher mathematics. As a former math teacher, I am aware that there are many areas of mathematics concerned with ideas and concepts that are wholly and entirely nonexistent in the real world, and in fact cannot possibly exist.
Wrong and you knew you were going to be from the start. Love *IS* a complex electro-chemical reaction in the brain, nothing more, nothing less. We don't completely understand it yet, but we're making great strides and we can replicate the feeling and the emotion with chemicals at will. Love obviously isn't irrational because we can demonstrate that it exists, unlike your God. If this is the best you can do, give up, you've lost.(3) (And you knew this one was coming) Love. Human, romantic love. Now you can rationalize all you like and say that what we call "love" is the result of mere biochemical processes, cultural indoctrination, genetic survival imperatives, unconscious connections and appetites, and what have you--but all of that just proves my point; love is as irrational as all hell, and we don't declare the books (and poems, and plays, and songs, and movies, and operas, and paintings, and statues, and self-help books, and advice columns, and, God help us, Dr. Phil and Oprah shows) about it to be "irrational".
Not really. I mean yes, there have been Jewish scholars who have questioned the existence of God over the years, but it's not something that has ever been widely considered, any more than it was considered when Christian Episcopalian scholars questioned the same thing. At least in Judiasm, one can question it more easily because Judiasm is as much a cultural thing as a religion, one can easily be a purely secular Jew and in fact, I know of several atheist Jews.Like I said, you don't know much about theology. No system of modern liberal theology, Jewish or Christian, that I have ever heard of is structured in that way. The existence of God is not assumed as an axiom, but an explication of that belief (not the same as a proof, which does not exist any more than a disproof) is a virtually required part of the prolegomena of every presentation of systematic theology that I have ever heard or read. In Judaism, that question is very much on the table and debatable, and has been for many centuries.
It is, it's based at it's core on a logical fallacy, that of the false dichotomy. Therefore, like religion itself, everything that comes after, everything that was built upon that faulty base, is itself faulty.As if that is all he ever wrote in defense of Christianity--and as if Pascal's Wager, though not persuasive to either of us, is in itself irrational.
Are you trying to suggest that Shakespeare's plays rest on logic? Shakespeare was an entertainer, Lewis, supposedly, was a philosopher of sorts. He just wasn't very good at it. Some of his books were entertaining, but as a logical, legitimate description of reality... not even close.Please. Shakespeare wrote a few very bad plays (Titus Andronicus, Troilus and Cressida), but that doesn't knock the rest of his work into a cocked hat.
They have nothing to do with reality in the way that I was speaking. I'm sure you've run into the people that say "I don't want to live in a world where there is no God". So what? What they want has nothing to do with what is. The only thing that matters is what kind of a world they actually do live in, their wishes are irrelevant. I can say I *need* a million dollars or I *want* a million dollars all I want, the fact is, I don't *HAVE* a million dollars.LOL! Of course it does. Even if I granted all of your unwarranted and grossly prejudiced negative stereotypes to be true, which I don't, human feelings and needs are absolutely and inarguably part of reality.
Of course, you'd have to show where I have ever said I was a strong atheist, which you wouldn't be able to do because I'm not. My experience is the opposite, however, the people I find who are 100% positive they are right are the ones who have absolute faith in God. The rest of them, like myself, go with the current best evidence and acknowledge that as we learn more, we may have to revise our ideas about the universe.It's ironic, in a way; in my own life, which is not a short one, the only people I have ever met who are 100% sure that they are 100% right, that all others who believe differently are obstinate, unthinking morons, and that they have all the answers and nothing left to learn about these matters are (a) SOME fundamentalist Christians, and (b) SOME "strong atheists" like yourself. You have more in common with religious fanatics than you think.
Are you threating to kick me out?cnorman18 wrote:That is correct. None of the NT documents were written until decades after the death of Jesus.InTheFlesh wrote:Now you really lost me!
Early Christians didn't have the NT?
I am well aware of that. I was pointing out that Christianity started because of what came forth out of the mouth of Jesus. The authors then quoted him and put it on paper. We have the NT to believe in, but they had Jesus himself.
Jesus and his disciples are the foundation of the Christian church.
That, even if granted as true, is not the same thing. We are discussing the contents of those documents, and they did not exist during Jesus's lifetime.They had the source himself,
Why do you think the disciples were first called Christians?
Was it not because they preached the words of Christ?
I wouldn't debate that, once again, I'm well aware that the earliest new testament writings came to us well after Jesus had ascended.
It also isn't universally agreed that all of the words of Christ as reported in the Gospels are necessarily authentic.
By who, unbelievers?
You need to get used to a new perspective here; the Bible is not accepted by everyone as the Word of God, 100% true, or even 100% accurate. If those are your assumptions and the basis of your arguments, your time here will probably be short, and will definitely be unpleasant.
They are not my assumptions, the Word of God itself claims that it's pure.
I just believe in it. Why would preaching his word be unpleasant?
Wrong on both counts. First, one may say a writer is mistaken without "calling him a liar" (and if you are going to take differing opinions on matters of religion as personal insults toward anyone, you can expect to be offended here rather often).If you don't believe in the NT, you are calling all the authors of the NT liars without having proof against them.
Even though most Athiests seek proof of God, it's the accusers that have to prove that the gospel is a lie.
Actually, we are debating cause you took offence to the scripture I shared.
You or anyone else on this board has yet to offend me.
So when the eyewitnesses claimed to have seen Jesus after he rose from the dead,
was that a mistake on their part?
Second, no statement should be assumed true without proof. One who makes a positive claim holds that burden, and a challenge to the claim requires none. If you claim you own a bicycle, and I challenge that claim, the only rational answer is to show me the bicycle, not to say "Prove that I don't."
That was a very poor analogy.
In most matters discussed here, there are not two alternatives, but three: "true," "false," and "not proven."
I disagree, something is either true or false.
There are NO other options. Something is either true or it's not.
It's either true that we came from God or it's not.
Proof has no bearing on the truth.
In some circumstances, yes. A doubtful or improbable statement requires corroboration. A statement that invokes the supernatural is by its very nature doubtful and improbable.If someone gives a testimony in court,
do they need to prove they are telling the truth, or would the accusers need to provide the proof that the testimony is a lie?
Why is that?
We being the only form of life is also doubtful and improbable right?
I think that very few people here would characterize it as a deliberate lie. Errors, misperceptions, orally transmitted legends finally written down--all of these are possible.I understand that just because someone says something doesn't make it true but where's the proof that the NT is a lie?
There's no way to sugar coat it.
You think that God appearing to Moses is a misperception?
You either believe he saw God face to face or you are calling Moses a liar
I understand you don't like calling the eyewitnesses liars,
but that's exactly what you are doing if you deny their testimony.
There were eyewitnesses of the life, miracles, death and resurrection of Jesus.
What is the misperception of that?
I don't care what stance you take,
but you should at least man up to it
and say that you think they are lying about what they wrote that they saw.
There really is more than one way to look at the Bible. There are even more than two. Get used to these ideas if you plan to spend much time here.
No one is threatening to “kick you out� – BUT those who lose respect are generally (and rightfully, in my opinion) treated with disdain by others and they generally go away relatively soon.InTheFlesh wrote:Are you threating to kick me out?
It strains credulity to accept claims that a person who has been a member for a month and has made nearly eighty posts without realizing the Cnorman is a Jew. He is VERY open about that fact AND the usergroup “Jewish� appears under his ID and avatar on every post. How could anyone NOT notice that about a person they were debating?InTheFlesh wrote:And as far as your other post, I didn't misread anything. You said that after you re-read that specific post you didn't know how I didn't know you were Jewish.
In order to maintain my crumdgeonly constitution I am going to parse for the fun of it.McCulloch wrote:I throw down the gauntlet. Faith has made a positive claim. Either back up this claim with evidence or withdraw it.faith wrote:Most atheists have never read the bible and so I believe that if they had, the basics would be the same. Clearly they do not speak as if they have this knowledge.
On a less confrontational note, do atheists reject religion and God because they are ignorant of religion as many staunch religionists claim?
A or B? Are you sure about this, or just being obstinate?cnorman18 wrote:It's ironic, in a way; in my own life, which is not a short one, the only people I have ever met who are 100% sure that they are 100% right, that all others who believe differently are obstinate, unthinking morons, and that they have all the answers and nothing left to learn about these matters are (a) SOME fundamentalist Christians, and (b) SOME "strong atheists" like yourself. You have more in common with religious fanatics than you think.
