Most atheists have never read the bible

[McCulloch]

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.

I throw down the gauntlet. Faith has made a positive claim. Either back up this claim with evidence or withdraw it.

On a less confrontational note, do atheists reject religion and God because they are ignorant of religion as many staunch religionists claim?

[cnorman18]

On the other hand--why not?

Because it's not real?

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.

So what? There are lots of things we could invent out of whole cloth that may be aesthetically pleasing and useful metaphors, etc.

And we do. Some people build their lives around such things. They are called "artists." Is life an art or a science? Could it be that there are other ways than yours to look at things?

If you have read my other posts, you know that I do not claim and have never claimed that the existence of God is an objective, provable and/or verifiable fact. I say that it is, for me at least, a subjective judgment, based on entirely subjective perceptions and experiences in an area where there are no facts, only their absence.

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.

I am not convinced that they are not true. That is, as I say, YOUR subjective judgment. It is not mine. Your position is no more objectively provable than mine, though you seem to think so.

There are some of us who think there is, or at least may be, more to "reality" than objective, proven facts. We make room in our lives and thoughts for the transcendent, the speculative, the metaphysical; the dream, the hope, even the wish. I'm sorry you're not one of them. There is value in all those things.

Are those aspects of reality really there, or do we create them?

Who cares? In this life and this world--and I do not claim to know if there are others--we humans must make our own meaning.

That perspective may make no sense to you. Too bad. That does not make it wrong, nor me a primitive-minded idiot.

For the record, I don't say that your way is wrong, either. It is your own, and that's not for me to say.

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.

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.

Which proves nothing, of course, as you will finally admit presently. Perhaps there is more to "reality" than objective fact. Thoughts are real, for instance. Dreams can become real. Hopes can be fulfilled.

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.

First, what you state in the above paragraph is inarguably a "strong atheist" point of view, which you deny below that you hold. If the assertion that a belief in God has not "the slightest possibility of being true" is not a strong-atheist position, what would a strong-atheist position look like?

As for claims; I make none. I freely acknowledge that, as objective fact, I do not know for certain that there is a God. I certainly think it possible, and I choose to live my life in light of that possibility. I do not seek to prove it to anyone, nor do I recommend it. It is up to the individual to decide for himself what to believe, or not.

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.

In fact, any application of logic in any way, shape or form would force us to reject the ridiculous claim.

Indisputably a strong-atheist position, again.

Anyway, how so? The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, to coin a phrase. You are again claiming an objective, proven fact where none has been demonstrated.

Belief in God is a purely emotional act, an imposition of how you wish the universe was upon the fabric of reality.

As a matter of fact, that is not and cannot be true in my case. Because of my peculiar neurology, I am emotionally impaired. My beliefs are intellectually based, and have to be, because I am incapable of emotional bonding to anyone or anything, including a religion. If I were so capable, I would most likely still be a Christian.

One of the attractions of Judaism to me was that there is very little, if any, appeal to the emotions in its theology or its services.

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?

Like many atheists, you insist on faulty and false, not to mention calculatedly insulting, analogies. The hundreds of thousands of volumes written on the subject of religion argue pretty strongly that belief in God is just a bit more complex and nuanced than belief in Santa Claus or monsters under the bed.

That analogy is not based on reasoned argument, but on pure contempt and a desire to demean and humiliate your opponent. It is a very thinly-veiled insult, and was intended to be. I suppose the equivalent in my direction might be equating you with Stalin and Pol Pot. I know that's been done, but I haven't done it.

I respect the atheist point of view, and say so often. It's puzzling to me that so many atheists, who claim to believe in tolerance and freedom of thought, can't find a way to respect mine.

Santa Claus, indeed.

But: that is not the same thing as irrational, i.e., contrary to rationality and in conflict with it.

Yes, actually, it is. There is absolutely no reason to think that there are any magic men in the sky...

An equivalent to Santa Claus, intentionally disrespectful and merely another veiled insult.

...such a belief is at complete odds with an intellectual understanding of the universe around us.

I think "says you" about covers it here. I don't agree. Can you provide some objective evidence to convince me of that, other than your bald assertions?

That it's in conflict with YOUR "intellectual understanding of the Universe," I do not doubt. But is yours the final authority? Are you really asserting that your own perspective and judgment are the only ones, that you hold the authority to declare what is and is not rational and logical?

If you were stating all this as your own opinion and admitting the possibility of the rationality of my own, we would have no argument here. You aren't doing that. You are stating that your opinion is The Ultimate Definitive Truth and mine is childish, idiotic and indefensible. I don't think you've quite established your credentials on that score, and you haven't come within a light-year of proving, as you said, that the existence of God has "not the slightest possibility of being true."

While we cannot completely disprove the existence of God...

You contradict yourself. "Not the slightest possibility of being true," remember? Everything else you say here is in direct contradiction to the sentence above.

And: who's "we"? Just wondering. Are you alleging that there are no competent scientists, logicians or philosophers--or any people who make their living with their intellect--who believe in God?

we cannot completely disprove anything...

Nonsense. Science has completely disproven all kinds of things. The inheritance of acquired characteristics. That tuberculosis is caused by a particular temperament. That wearing copper bracelets is an effective treatment for arthritis. Creationism.

science isn't about proof, it's about the best available evidence and that evidence does not support your God.

How can nonexistent evidence support or not support anything? How can there be any evidence of a transcendent being in the first place? Surely someone has proven that there is no such thing as "transcendence"--no?

If you can't prove that there is no God, why can't you just accept that there are people who don't believe as you do that are not fools or mental defectives because of that fact?

Gee, I can; and I'm supposed to be the intolerant, doctrinaire, and closed-minded one. How does that work?

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.

And that is a truism, both fatuous and irrelevant. Once again; religion is a bit more complex and nuanced than that.

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.

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.

You are switching arguments here, and not for the last time. If you can't prove your premise, as you admit, then what remains is the rationality of the process of making a decision about it. The decision to believe in God is influenced by all the same factors as the decisions listed above, and they are not considered "irrational." Therefore, neither is a decision to believe in God based on those factors.

You are essentially saying, "WE (?) cannot prove that God does not exist, but it's absolutely certain that He does not, therefore," etc., etc. How rational is that?

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.

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.

And I would agree with that instantly.

But yes, a lot of strong atheists are just as faith-based as theists, no question.

Agreed. Frankly, it seems to me that you are one of them. You have here admitted that you absolutely and without question believe something that you cannot prove.

?

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."

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)."

Never heard that distinction before, but it makes sense. I stand corrected on that point.
I still say, with the terms corrected, that "weak atheism" is the only totally rational and logical position that is not primarily a subjective judgment.

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.

Of course it isn't, I'd argue that religion is often harmful to morality because it misplaces the ultimate source of morality.

I would agree that that can happen, and does.

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.

Also agreed.

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.

But now you're on shakier ground. Some theists seem to believe that "Good" is "Good" only because God says so, but not many, in my experience, and no theologian or Bible scholar in modern times believes this that I have ever heard of.

God Himself is constrained by a moral code. That is apparent in the first book of The Bible, when Abraham rebukes God for planning to destroy the righteous along with the wicked in Sodom. The passage in question is in Genesis 18 (and it does not matter, of course, whether this is a "teaching story" or literally true. The principle is established there, and elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible, either way).

God may or may not have handed humans a code of morals; but either way, it is not arbitrary. God could no more make evil good and good evil than He could have made a world where two and two make five. Morality is built into the nature of reality.

Perhaps you don't know quite as much about theology as you think you do.

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.

As I said, that can happen. It's happening in Islam now, when the mass murder of innocents is declared to be a sacred act.

But it's not integral to religion itself, and is absolutely foreign to a religion like Judaism (and most liberal denominations of Christianity) which encourages and even requires critical thought and taking responsibility for one's own moral judgments.

I often complain that some atheists speak out against caricatures and cartoons of religion, and do not acknowledge the reality of it. This is the sort of thing I mean.

It is a fact that there are fundamentalist churches in the South where the members dance with venomous snakes in their hands because there is a single verse in Mark that promises that believers have that ability. That is the sort of thing you mean here, and it does occasionally happen. But the fact is, every other Christian on Earth regards that as insane, whether it's in the Bible or not. When I was growing up--in small-town Texas, mind--the short version of "ignorant, illiterate, poor-white-trash religious nutcases" was "snake-handlers."

If religion were as invariably mindless and authoritarian as you say, they'd all be doing it. Believers don't check their brains at the church door. That's a stereotype of religion, and a viciously false one.

I have to observe that you rather clearly know very little about [theology], 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?

All of these works, all religion, starts from the unfounded and irrational assumption that there is this God out there.

I disproved that with several specific examples. You ignored--and deleted--them. We will get back to that later.

You freely admit that this assumption cannot be challenged from logic or reason or evidence...

No, I did not. I said that it can neither be proven nor disproven. If it could not be challenged, then how is it that Jews still debate it?

...it just has to be accepted without question.

False again, and so proven in the parts of my post that you deleted.

Because every single one of these works and religion itself is built upon this single wholly-faulty assumption..

Ditto. You are rejecting my arguments and examples and insisting on the accuracy of your own phony caricatures over my informed and well-founded objections. How is that logically or rationally different from a fundamentalist who does the same thing in the opposite direction?

...everything that comes after, no matter how internally consistent or rational or reasonable...

You are shifting arguments again. Earlier, you said that such thought cannot be rational. That was the point of my examples below.

it's all tainted by the initial assumption, that God exists.

Which you admit you cannot prove to be false. How, then, can it "taint" anything?

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.

Another veiled insult if no probative value. Equating talk about God with talk about unicorns is another caricature.

I thought you preferred to talk about reality. Why, then, can't you address the reality of religion as it actually is, instead of setting up textbook examples of strawmen and attacking those?

When your assumptions and axioms are unwarranted, it ruins everything it touches.

If you don't even know the axioms and assumptions, but only cartoon versions of them--as you keep proving out of your own mouth--how can you possibly know they are unwarranted?

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.

Because it's not particularly academic.

Oh, please. That's the equivalent of denying that African-American Studies is an academic discipline because one is a racist.

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.

Strawmen again. The fact that some religious beliefs are wrongheaded and false does not mean they all are.

Just because people study something doesn't mean it's worth studying, you just have people with too much time on their hands.

So all the academic work and scholarship of a thousand years and more is a waste of time because you don't understand it?

That's the issue here, after all. You have proven over and over that you know nothing about actual theology as it is actually practiced today, but only the stereotypes and caricatures of it that you cling to, even when shown that they are demonstrably false.

(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.

That's because you don't have people believing that Gandalf and the hobbits are real.

Wait a minute. This example was given to address your contention that no thought about something that isn't real could be rational. That Gandalf and the hobbits aren't real is central to my point; even if God isn't real, thought and writing about him aren't necessarily irrational. You are here conceding that point.

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.

Excuse me, but I don't do that. Few modern, liberal theists, whether Christian or Jewish, do.

Once again, you are assuming that all theists are fundamentalists and insist on arguing from that perspective when it is a plain falsehood. Do you just not know that, do you discount it as unimportant, or are you deliberately arguing disingenuously?

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.

And you think I might disagree with that?

Do you have any arguments that are actually about modern religion as it is actually practiced, or only about strawmen, caricatures and fundamentalism?

(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.

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.

Again; my point here was that thought about concepts that don't exist in reality is not necessarily irrational. Even if God does not exist, it is possible to think and talk about Him without necessarily being irrational. That was your earlier contention. This example was given to counter it, and since you have already conceded it, we can move on.

(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".

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.

Which proves my point. Love, you admit here, is irrational, and therefore the fact that talk about it is not considered so shows that talk about God shouldn't be, either. But as I say, you've already conceded the point.

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...

Switching arguments again. Are you now saying that nonexistence and irrationality are the same thing? If so, let's go back to Gandalf.

unlike your God.

You are again assuming the unproven.

If this is the best you can do, give up, you've lost.

Why would I do that? So far, you've retreated on one of your major assertions, that all theology and thought about God is irrational; you've admitted that God's nonexistence is unproven (and therefore, logically, should not be assumed, though you haven't admitted that); you've shown that you know little or nothing about the actual beliefs and teachings of modern theists, even on matters as basic as the origin and authority of ethics as they relate to God; you've shown that your arguments depend on strawmen, caricatures and stereotypes, and that you won't, or more probably can't, address actual, real religion as it is actually believed and practiced by non-fundamentalists without resorting to such transparent and intellectually dishonest devices.

Why would I give up now? I'm on a roll!

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.

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.

Tell me, how many Jewish Torah studies have you been in lately? Any Episcopal Bible-study sessions? Read any religiously-oriented newsletters or periodicals? Up to date on readings in Reconstructionist and Humanistic Judaism? Do you know how fast those movements are growing?

Are you sure you want to stand by those statements when it's clear you know next to nothing about anything but fundamentalist Christianity?

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.

So do I, but we're talking about Jewish theology. Secular and cultural Jews don't discuss that all that much.

I'm a religious Jew myself, and I am struggling right now with the following questions: in what sense, exactly, I believe in God; what role, if any, He played in the formation of the Hebrew Bible; whether that book has any authority, considering my recent thoughts on the matter, and if so, in what way; whether my devotion to Jewish tradition and culture either requires or implies a belief in a personal God; and if my personal reasons for believing in God as I have and (so far) still do are still sufficient as these ideas change and evolve, primarily from interactions on this forum.

Question: If all theists are as invariably and inarguably childish, complacent, unreflective, doctrinaire, and fricken irrational as you insist we have to be, then where the hell did I come from?

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.

Oh, I think I might be able to do that.

Give me a break. "No slightest possibility of being true"? You did say that, did you not? Exactly how would a strong atheist's position differ from that? "Absolutely no slightest possibility"?

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.

So how come I'm doing that, as regards belief in God, and you're not?

It's sad that people like you just jump ahead and demand that your wishful thinking is reasonable and true, even though there is no reason whatsoever to think that it is.

Just how well do you think you know me?

I live in this head, and you don't have a clue about what I think, or how deeply, or about what I believe, and in what way.

On the other hand, you have made it clear that you see no significant difference between my beliefs and worldview and those of Jimmy Swaggart. That gives me a pretty accurate picture, I think, of your depth of understanding of the subject of actual religion; and your responses to my comments tell me much about your commitment to "learning more" and "revising your ideas," even about what people do and do not believe when they tell you, first-hand. You prefer to cling to your caricatures and stereotypes, and think in terms of strawman unicorns and Santa Claus as opposed to addressing the reality of religion as it is.

One wonders, really, which of us acknowledges reality, and which relates to what we wish it were. As far as the actual nature of religion is concerned, as opposed to simplistic comic-book versions, I think that answer is clear enough.

[cnorman18]

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.

A or B? Are you sure about this, or just being obstinate?

Good point. There have been a few Muslims with that attitude, too. And a couple Nazis. Real ones.

And some conspiracy freaks. And an acidhead or two. What are we up to now, H?

[cnorman18]

Now you really lost me!
Early Christians didn't have the NT?

That is correct. None of the NT documents were written until decades after the death of Jesus.

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.

Okay, but in that case it was an odd way to put it.

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?

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.

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?

Some, but not all. Many liberal Christians take the NT with a grain or two of salt, while still acknowledging Christ as Lord and Savior.

Do you think it is a requirement to believe that the Gospels are 100% true and accurate in order to be a Christian? There are many Christians who don't.

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.

Not everyone believes that that makes it so. That means it is your assumption.

I just believe in it. Why would preaching his word be unpleasant?

Because people do not come here to preach. They come here to share and exchange ideas. The unpleasant part may be the reactions you get here from your preaching.

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.

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).

Actually, we are debating cause you took offence to the scripture I shared.

Not to the proof text. To your attitude.

You or anyone else on this board has yet to offend me.

You don't find people calling the NT authors liars (which is what you say you think) offensive? Sure sounded like it.

So when the eyewitnesses claimed to have seen Jesus after he rose from the dead,
was that a mistake on their part?

Beats me. There are all kinds of possibilities. Grief sometimes gives rise to hallucinations, for instance. In extreme situations, sometimes people can't distinguish a dream from a real memory. And so on.

I once knew a girl who claimed to have seen Jim Morrison a month or so after he died, at arm's length. She was absolutely sure of it. She certainly wasn't lying; she really believed it. But she didn't see Jim Morrison, either.

Lots of people have seen Elvis, too. It happens.

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.

It was off the top of my head. I think it'll do, though.

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.

Sure; but sometimes humans can't know or prove which it is. That is called "not proven."

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.

No, but it has a bearing on whether or not people accept it. If you think everyone here is just going to accept that something is true because you, or the Bible, says so, you're in for a steep learning curve.

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?

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.

Why is that?

If it wasn't extremely unusual, it wouldn't be called a "miracle." That makes them doubtful and improbable.

We being the only form of life is also doubtful and improbable right?

Who ever said that?

I understand that just because someone says something doesn't make it true but where's the proof that the NT is a lie?

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.

There's no way to sugar coat it.
You think that God appearing to Moses is a misperception?

I dunno. I wasn't there.

I don't think that we can ever know for sure, first, if it happened at all, and second, if it did, what it was like for Moses. I don't think we could know that if we'd been in the same room.

Personally, I think it probably happened. In what way, I can't guess. The book says that God spoke to Moses face to face, and that he was the only one that that ever happened to. What was that like? No one but Moses could ever know.

You either believe he saw God face to face or you are calling Moses a liar

Uh, no. There are other possibilities that I already listed.

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.

What you are doing now is called "putting words in my mouth." You don't get to do that here.

I said exactly what I meant, and by saying, "No, here's what you REALLY think, why don't you say it?" you are both calling ME a liar and claiming the ability to read my mind. I don't think I care to agree with either of those.

Don't tell me what I think. Don't tell me what to say. You have no right to do either.

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.

Are you threating to kick me out?

No, I'm predicting that you'll leave in high dudgeon after a couple of hundred people tell you to get lost. I'm not, but if you continue with this doctrinaire and superior attitude, it's gonna happen.

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.
I asked you to point out what you said that made it obvious you were Jewish in that post,
and you then started to point out other posts which I DID NOT read.

I quoted remarks from the same post you replied to, and I explicitly said that I had done the same thing myself.

Even though you're pointing at me,
it's obvious that you were offended by the NT scripture I shared.

Not at all. I was annoyed that you presumed to try to declare an end to the debate with a proof-text. Are you claiming to be able to read my inner emotions now, too?

But like Jesus said,
Blessed is he who is not offended in me.

Peace, InTheFlesh. I hope you learn how to do this soon. So far you've been a minor annoyance and that's about all.

You might start with listening to what people tell you and not just ignoring it and going on in the same way, and also by not telling people what they think, what they're really trying to say, and what they have to believe.

[Cephus]

And we do. Some people build their lives around such things. They are called "artists."

Yes, but artists don't look at these things and think they're real. We have another word for people who do take these imaginary things seriously. We call them "insane".

If you have read my other posts, you know that I do not claim and have never claimed that the existence of God is an objective, provable and/or verifiable fact.

Which is just a convenient dodge for getting out of backing up your claims. I'm sure that would have worked for Pons and Fleishman and their claims of cold fusion. "Yes, it works, but we never claimed it is objective, provable and/or verifiable!" If it is none of those things, what's the point in believing in it at all?

I am not convinced that they are not true.

Rational people do not simply believe everything they are not convinced are not true, they actually believe things that they are convinced, by logic, evidence and reason, that *ARE* true.

Your position is no more objectively provable than mine, though you seem to think so.

My position is that your claims for the existence of God are unsubstantiated, therefore there is no rational reason to take them seriously. My position is absolutely objectively provable. Try again.

There are some of us who think there is, or at least may be, more to "reality" than objective, proven facts.

No, there are some who *WISH* there was, it's purely an emotional position, not a rational one. You don't want to feel like you're all alone in the universe, you want to feel comforted that there's an invisible friend in the sky that's watching out for you. You want to feel special because you have this "relationship" with the supposed creator of the universe. None of these are rational reasons for actually accepting this position. What you're doing is little more than holding a security blanket and sucking your thumb because you think that somehow it'll make you safer and more secure.

First, what you state in the above paragraph is inarguably a "strong atheist" point of view, which you deny below that you hold. If the assertion that a belief in God has not "the slightest possibility of being true" is not a strong-atheist position, what would a strong-atheist position look like?

A strong atheist rejects the possibility that god(s) exist, a weak atheist simply lacks belief in god(s) because there is no good evidence to accept it. If you want to do a word substitution, there is a difference between someone who rejects the possibility of Bigfoot and someone who simply sees no good reason to think Bigfoot is real. One is open to changing their mind, one is not. Lack of belief, as a weak atheist, is not the same as belief in the lack of existence, as a strong atheist.

Come on, are you telling me you've been on these forums all this time and you still don't know this?

I freely acknowledge that, as objective fact, I do not know for certain that there is a God.

Then you must also freely acknowledge that you have no rational reason to believe that there is a God either. This is a cheap theistic dodge. If you can't demonstrate that your beliefs are true of valid, STOP MAKING THE CLAIM THAT THEY ARE! It is blatantly dishonest to repeatedly claim that what you believe is true and then, when backed into a corner, say "but I can't prove it and never said I could".

The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, to coin a phrase. You are again claiming an objective, proven fact where none has been demonstrated.

You can't read well, can you? I said that there was no objective evidence and in that, I'm absolutely right, you even agree with me. You really need to stop sticking your foot in your mouth.

My beliefs are intellectually based, and have to be, because I am incapable of emotional bonding to anyone or anything, including a religion.

If they were intellectually based, you'd be able to support them intellectually, which you have utterly failed to do. You cannot come to a reasonable belief in the existence of the supernatural intellectually, it just can't be done because there is no evidence whatsoever that would lead you there. You *WANT* there to be a supernatural, you *WISH* there was a supernatural, you *FEEL BETTER* thinking there is a supernatural, therefore you believe in one. The fact remains, from a purely intellectual basis, there is no reason for thinking that the supernatural actually exists.

Like many atheists, you insist on faulty and false, not to mention calculatedly insulting, analogies.

No, they're very accurate analogies, you simply don't like having the ridiculous nature of your beliefs pointed out. Belief in things without a shred of objective evidence is ridiculous, whether it's ghosts, aliens, Bigfoot or God. You just single one of those words out for special treatment. Ain't gonna fly, my friend.

I think "says you" about covers it here. I don't agree. Can you provide some objective evidence to convince me of that, other than your bald assertions?

Agreeing is irrelevant. If you disagree, prove it. Show that God is actually an objectively better explanation for what we see around us. Oh wait, you can't prove anything objectively, can you?

Wait a minute. This example was given to address your contention that no thought about something that isn't real could be rational. That Gandalf and the hobbits aren't real is central to my point; even if God isn't real, thought and writing about him aren't necessarily irrational. You are here conceding that point.

Belief that god(s) are real is central to theism, if you don't believe in the existence of god(s), you're not a theist. Are you suggesting that Jewish rabbis don't think that God is real? What's the point of the stupid hat and hairdo and all the pathetic bowing and scraping if God isn't real?

And here I was thinking you were better than this. Guess not.

Excuse me, but I don't do that. Few modern, liberal theists, whether Christian or Jewish, do.

Actually, they do, at least in part. There are a lot of parts in the later Old Testament that likely are historically accurate, but they have nothing to do with the supernatural, they are just a recording of ancient Jewish history.

Do you have any arguments that are actually about modern religion as it is actually practiced, or only about strawmen, caricatures and fundamentalism?

Do you have any arguments that would differentiate liberal theology from these things? Certainly, there might not be as much silly ritual, but the basic beliefs are still as irrational and illogical, you just don't dress up in robes and swing a lightsaber.

Even if God does not exist, it is possible to think and talk about Him without necessarily being irrational.

Depends on the context. I can think and talk about Harry Potter in the context of a literary character, I can examine the motives that J.K. Rowling gave him and what I think he should have done based on what I read in the books. If you want to limit religion to that, that's fine, but that's not what religion does. Religion PRAYS to these fantasy characters. Religion thinks these fantasy characters are real. Religion imagines that they're special because they were doted upon by one of these fantasy characters. If you want to do literary criticism of the Bible or Harry Potter, feel free but once you start taking the stories contained within seriously, you've crossed the line to irrationality.

Which proves my point. Love, you admit here, is irrational, and therefore the fact that talk about it is not considered so shows that talk about God shouldn't be, either. But as I say, you've already conceded the point.

You really need to stop lying. I never said that love is irrational, in fact I pointed out that it is EXTREMELY rational in that it has a naturalistic explanation. If you can't be honest, stop responding.

[nygreenguy]

And we do. Some people build their lives around such things. They are called "artists." Is life an art or a science? Could it be that there are other ways than yours to look at things?

Hey cronman, I figured I would chime in here as well.

The statement above appears to be an appeal to authority. I dont think artists are experts in "the real"

I am not convinced that they are not true. That is, as I say, YOUR subjective judgment. It is not mine. Your position is no more objectively provable than mine, though you seem to think so.

Well, I, for one, like to reserve the use of the word objective because every single one of us have our biases.

However, the non-existance of god doesnt need to be provable in order to be a valid point. It only needs the absence of evidence.

There are some of us who think there is, or at least may be, more to "reality" than objective, proven facts. We make room in our lives and thoughts for the transcendent, the speculative, the metaphysical; the dream, the hope, even the wish. I'm sorry you're not one of them. There is value in all those things.

I would disagree here. I dont think there is value in them other than personal comfort. There are very few times when I would say personal comfort is more important than the truth.

In fact, I think they hinder progress and do a disservice to all of us. I think that they are the primary reason we will never reach our fullest potential.

Who cares? In this life and this world--and I do not claim to know if there are others--we humans must make our own meaning.

I care! I consider myself a truth seeker!

Which proves nothing, of course, as you will finally admit presently. Perhaps there is more to "reality" than objective fact. Thoughts are real, for instance. Dreams can become real. Hopes can be fulfilled.

This is completly different than claiming the reality of the supernatural.

As for claims; I make none. I freely acknowledge that, as objective fact, I do not know for certain that there is a God. I certainly think it possible, and I choose to live my life in light of that possibility. I do not seek to prove it to anyone, nor do I recommend it. It is up to the individual to decide for himself what to believe, or not.

Possibility =/= reality. We must use the best tools we have available for determining what is real and apply them. As it stands, I simply can see any reason to believe in a god.

Anyway, how so? The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, to coin a phrase. You are again claiming an objective, proven fact where none has been demonstrated.

This is the thing, no one ever has to prove a negative (unless the positive has been shown) Imagine a world where we had to disprove the existence of something before we could suspend belief. We would have to disprove the small aliens orbiting my head, the flesh eating mini dinosaurs in my butt, etc...

Imagine if I told you I had 25 corvettes. You would say "prove it!" And I would say "Prove I dont!" There would be no way for you to prove I dont have 25 corvettes. I could have hid them on mercury, or underground. They could be invisible. A much more rational approach is to dismiss me as a total liar until I provided you with evidence of my ownership of 25 corvettes.

As a matter of fact, that is not and cannot be true in my case. Because of my peculiar neurology, I am emotionally impaired. My beliefs are intellectually based, and have to be, because I am incapable of emotional bonding to anyone or anything, including a religion. If I were so capable, I would most likely still be a Christian.

Emotionally impaired, but not absent. This also still doesnt mean you must act rational.

Like many atheists, you insist on faulty and false, not to mention calculatedly insulting, analogies.

Ad hom! Not to mention a generalization.

The hundreds of thousands of volumes written on the subject of religion argue pretty strongly that belief in God is just a bit more complex and nuanced than belief in Santa Claus or monsters under the bed.

Another appeal to authority.

An equivalent to Santa Claus, intentionally disrespectful and merely another veiled insult.

Do you think its an insult because its obviously clear santa doesnt exist?

I think "says you" about covers it here. I don't agree. Can you provide some objective evidence to convince me of that, other than your bald assertions?

Think of the corvettes. Do you have any evidence, since you are claiming something does exist?

That it's in conflict with YOUR "intellectual understanding of the Universe," I do not doubt. But is yours the final authority? Are you really asserting that your own perspective and judgment are the only ones, that you hold the authority to declare what is and is not rational and logical?

The basis of his argument follows the rules. Its equivalent to saying "do you have the authority to claim that 2*2=4? Logic works like math, there are certain rules for which hold true, one doesnt need to claim authority.

You are switching arguments here, and not for the last time. If you can't prove your premise, as you admit, then what remains is the rationality of the process of making a decision about it. The decision to believe in God is influenced by all the same factors as the decisions listed above, and they are not considered "irrational." Therefore, neither is a decision to believe in God based on those factors.

What you do and what you marry are hardly compareable with what you believe.

God Himself is constrained by a moral code. That is apparent in the first book of The Bible, when Abraham rebukes God for planning to destroy the righteous along with the wicked in Sodom. The passage in question is in Genesis 18 (and it does not matter, of course, whether this is a "teaching story" or literally true. The principle is established there, and elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible, either way).

God may or may not have handed humans a code of morals; but either way, it is not arbitrary. God could no more make evil good and good evil than He could have made a world where two and two make five. Morality is built into the nature of reality.

What does it matter to be constrained by a code you make. If you can define it, there essentially is no code.

No, I did not. I said that it can neither be proven nor disproven. If it could not be challenged, then how is it that Jews still debate it?

Do I, or do I not own 25 corvettes?

Another veiled insult if no probative value. Equating talk about God with talk about unicorns is another caricature.

In all seriousness, how is it any different? Simply because not as many people believe in unicorns? What makes a religion, or a belief ina god and more valid than a belief in mythology? Many people say thats the only difference between mythology and religion. People still believe in one.

Tell me, how many Jewish Torah studies have you been in lately? Any Episcopal Bible-study sessions? Read any religiously-oriented newsletters or periodicals? Up to date on readings in Reconstructionist and Humanistic Judaism? Do you know how fast those movements are growing?

Another appeal to authority?

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.

Im in NY, and I know more atheist jews than theist jews!

On the other hand, you have made it clear that you see no significant difference between my beliefs and worldview and those of Jimmy Swaggart. That gives me a pretty accurate picture, I think, of your depth of understanding of the subject of actual religion; and your responses to my comments tell me much about your commitment to "learning more" and "revising your ideas," even about what people do and do not believe when they tell you, first-hand. You prefer to cling to your caricatures and stereotypes, and think in terms of strawman unicorns and Santa Claus as opposed to addressing the reality of religion as it is.

Hopefully by this point you will have already addressed my unicorn assesment, but I think his comparison has some value if its taken in a very, very broad sense. The one thing in common between you and Jimmy is you both claim god exists. To me, thats where the beef is. Im quite sure from reading your posts thats about as similar as you two are as well!

[faith]

Hello Cnorman18.

I enjoy reading your posts because they are well thought out and they also show you think for yourself.

cnorman18"]The answer that Faith is looking for as proof that one has read the Bible and understands it is likely this:

The basis of the Bible is God's plan of salvation. The message of the whole content of the Bible is that all humans are sinful and in need of that salvation, and that God has sent His only begotten Son, Jesus Christ, to bear our sins that we may be saved through faith in Him.

Peace to Faith, but if one reads the Hebrew Scriptures without straining them through the screen of the New Testament, that is hard to see.

I am jewish descent of the matrilineal line. I also believe that the bible speaks of Gods salvation being for everyone and that this was his purpose and plan. To the Jews first and then to the gentiles..

First, the idea of a life after death is very rarely mentioned in the OT, and when it is, the ideas concerning it are equivocal and contradictory. It is not mentioned at all in the Torah (for those who came in late, the Torah consists of the first five books of the OT, and is the most sacred and authoritative part of the Bible to Jews). The Afterlife simply isn't a major concern.

However it was still a belief which seperated the pharisees and sadducees.
The Pharisees believed in angels, spirits and the resurrection of the dead.
Where as the sadducees did not believe in these things.
So they ae a basic belief to the pharisees. Showing these beliefs were mixed till Christ and Paul.

Reward and punishment is most often discussed in terms of the whole people, not individuals, and even then is about reward and punishment in this world, not the next.

The very idea of "salvation," when it appears at all, is most often in the context of literal "salvation" in this world as well; being saved from ill luck, enemies, disease and the like.

But you would know that your second paragraph would not be acceptable to the Jews because they could not use superstition and God has always promised to provide when they trusted in him and not the false gods of fate. The fact there was a mixture of beliefs with the sadducees and pharisees show that eternal life after death with reward was not ruled out.

There are Messianic references in the OT, to be sure; but few, if any, apply to Jesus, and the passages that are alleged to refer to Jesus are generally talking about something else. In no case is the Messiah said to be sent to save us from our sins, to give us free entry into Heaven, or to be God incarnate. He is to be the Savior of Israel, not of individual souls, and an ordinary man. An anointed King, to be sure, but mortal and the son of human beings, not of God, and possessed of no supernatural powers or attributes.

In my humble opinion:

I believe David gives a clearer picture when he says God will not abandon him to the grave. Even in psalm 139 when he says even if he descends into lowest depth even there God shall lead and guide him. In the usual places in Isaiah 53 God is clearly talking about the Messiah and him being a sacrifice for sin.
Gods promise of salvation in Jeremiah 31:31-34 shows that he forgives the sins and allows us to serve him without fear by the presence of his Spirit within us in our hearts via the laws. I think a thread to discuss them may be a good idea..

The basis of the Hebrew Bible is the evolving understanding of the Hebrew, later Jewish, people, of the nature of their God and their relationship to Him; but it is far from being presented in chronological or any other discernible order, and is really unintelligible without reference to the tradition of interpretation and commentary that has accompanied it and expanded upon it from the beginning. It was written by and primarily addressed to Jews, though the lessons and principles taught there are freely available to anyone.

It's main objective is to show that man can have a living relationship with God.
That God is a real person and power in the life of someone who knows him/
That there is no one person or power greater than him. I believe when it says he is the God of the living not the dead. That these people are spiritually alive to God. Starting with Abraham right the way through to the present day.

What the message of the whole content of the OT is, I decline to say. There are many such messages. Love and reverence for God, to be sure; but there is also an overwhelming concern for justice, which specifically includes assistance to the poor and lonely.

Isaiah 58 on true fasting but more importantly it supports Gods purpose to love and save us when we trust him and obey him. Also to make known his way to his servants. The word of God is about life and living it in fullness with him.

There is no word for "charity" in Hebrew; the word we use is tzedakah, which translates literally as "justice." That the fortunate should give of their substance--their time, their money, their concern--to the less fortunate is not considered a "good deed" worthy of praise and adulation, but a basic duty, required of all. Even the very poor are required to give tzedakah to those who are even poorer than they.

Jesus was very much in keeping with this. I think the same thing with God, we have to empty ourselves of self to receive him fully.

Besides justice, there is also an enormous concern for human freedom, and for the dignity and essential equality of all. Even kings are subject to the rules of justice and ethics.

These principles are hard to see on the surface of the Bible, with its wars of extermination, gross injustices, and apparent condoning of slavery, racism, and the subjugation of women; they are drawn from the tradition, which makes no bones about correcting the superficial view that says because these things are reported in the Bible, God must approve of them.

To not know God is to see things in the wrong light. But God cares enough to show us when we are wrong and enough to forgive and to set us right instead of punishing us as we deserve. Gods patience and love is shown in great amounts.
But it is only those who know him who understand a fathers love for his children and wish to see them walk aright.

No one knows or understands God entirely, but we feel we know and understand God at least that well. Abraham said it first, to God Himself: "Far be it from You, act in this way, to slay the righteous with the wicked and treat then the same! Far be it from You! Shall the Judge of all the Earth deal unjustly?"

Lot was a great show of how God will save even one just person. God is able to save just men.

As far as anything addressed to individuals is concerned, ethical behavior is probably the most overwheming message of all. The proper conduct of humans toward each other, regardless of faith and nationality, and even toward animals and the environment, is a given and an imperative. It is demanded as an absolute, and for individuals at least, reward and punishment are not a factor. One is expected to be good because it is good, not because rewards and punishments are promised and threatened. Humans are not children, and the Bible demands that we be responsible for our own moral decisions on the basis of morality alone.

YHWH has always taught that those who do what is right are acceptable to him.
Abraham believed God and he counted this as righteousness toward him. In the end those who obey God do have a living relationship with him. But we know even with Saul that there are those whom God has removed his Holy Spirit from.

Such is the Jewish view. There are others, and we do not say that those views are necessarily wrong. Perhaps God does offer a "plan of salvation" for some others--or perhaps He will at least honor their sincerity, their faith, and (one hopes) their good works with the kind of Heaven they feel has been promised to them. I hope so. But for myself and my people, the way is more demanding, less clear and well-defined, and has no promise of a happy end or continuation for any individual person.

I believe the Messiah was always the better way in the second covenant.

I do not present my views here as the only correct ones. No one can. The conclusion that the Bible is a hodgepodge of contradictory and often meaningless bits of alleged history, folktale, and myth is as reasonable and defensible as any other, and more so than some; I do not share it, but that's as far as I can go. I cannot prove that it is not, nor that the principles and lessons I see there are not the projections of human hopes and wishful thinking. Even if that be true, those hopes and wishes can have a positive value of their own.

I believe I am that I am does not need to establish proof. It is about finding truth through faith. No man is an island but they cannot live with God in that he has founded everything we have. Right to the core of our being. Life is not about the beliefs or even history, folktales and myths. It is about God in the past, present and future being the true and only being able to give life to us in any way.
I do not worry about men but what God thinks and says...

In any case, anyone, with any view, who says that theirs is the only proper way to read this book (or that anyone who does not understand it as they do must clearly not have read it) is on very thin ice indeed. The value of the Bible, if it has any (and I think it does) has always been that it carries a different message for everyone who reads it, and from every one of those messages the rest of us might--I say might--have something to learn, even if it's only to think hard and critically about one's own in order to refute them.

You and I both know that those who have read books we have read can converse on the same level. The bible is a book for the Spiritually alive the people of the living God. We see that Gods people are not limited by the world and creation but are active within it and that God leads them in the way that is true in his sight.
If we assume no one can know truth then we accuse God of giving us scriptures and being deceitful saying no one can know the truth of them he teaches.
God has not done this his scriptures as so we can know the truth. The truth about him and how people who know him can live by them and know him spiritually with him teaching them. Isaiah 54:13.

Love Faith.xx

[cnorman18]

You are remarkably selective in which of my arguments you choose to respond to and which you choose to ignore. I will not speculate on your reasons.

First, I'll respond to the statements in your last; and then we'll take another look at the issues which you have avoided. Should be interesting.

---

And we do. Some people build their lives around such things. They are called "artists."

Yes, but artists don't look at these things and think they're real. We have another word for people who do take these imaginary things seriously. We call them "insane".

You miss the point. The ideas that lie behind the metaphors, symbols, and fictional characters and events that artists create--and which are the reason they create them--are quite real, and I would say that they take them very seriously indeed. The same can be said of theists who study the Bible but do not read it literally.

Once again, you betray your devotion to the stereotype that all theists are literalists and think of God in the simpleminded way that you think we do.

If you have read my other posts, you know that I do not claim and have never claimed that the existence of God is an objective, provable and/or verifiable fact.

Which is just a convenient dodge for getting out of backing up your claims. I'm sure that would have worked for Pons and Fleishman and their claims of cold fusion. "Yes, it works, but we never claimed it is objective, provable and/or verifiable!" If it is none of those things, what's the point in believing in it at all?

If there was ever a false analogy, that's it. Cold fusion exists, or does not exist, as an objectively verifiable process involving concrete objects in a specific time and place. It is provable and verifiable. Denying any of those things would be silly and futile.

The God-concept is none of those things. It is not provable or verifiable, as you have implicitly admitted when you said God's existence cannot be disproven.

Are you insisting that I prove something that we both agree cannot be proven? What possible point would there be in making such a demand? Perhaps that is only a convenient dodge for getting out of even considering, let alone refuting, the idea that there are other orders of belief than the objective, literal, and concrete.

I am not convinced that they are not true.

Rational people do not simply believe everything they are not convinced are not true...

No more do I. "Everything"? Strawman again.

...they actually believe things that they are convinced, by logic, evidence and reason, that *ARE* true.

In terms of concrete objects and processes in the temporal world--like cold fusion--certainly. In terms of metaphysical concepts and other such non-concrete beliefs, not necessarily.

Here is a formulation that might help you understand where I'm coming from. My own religious belief is a kind of speculation; "The heart, the meaning, of this body of thought, ethics, and metaphysical understandings of the nature of the Universe might be a valid and coherent way of looking at the world; I shall explore it and live my life as if I were sure of its truth."

Notice that I speak of the heart and meaning of that body of thought, not the literal and historical truth of the stories used to teach it.

Now, that approach makes no claims of proof; it certainly doesn't lend itself to trying to convince others of its objective truth; and it isn't, it seems to me, irrational.

Call it a provisional belief, rather like the opposite of weak atheism: I see no hard evidence that there is no God, and plenty of subjective, internal evidence, probative only to me, that there is; and so I choose to believe until my belief is proven false. Like the weak atheist, I am open to changing my mind (and may be doing so as we speak).

What about God, anyway? One of the things you don't acknowledge here is that belief in God is not necessarily a belief in a 'bearded Grandfather in the sky," an invisible Superbeing, or any of the other stereotypes which are the only ones you allow as possible ways to believe in Him.

We Jews don't claim to know or understand the nature of God; as I've written before, God is the Ein Sof, the Totally Other, unknowable and incomprehensible. Is he a discrete and distinct entity at all? Might He be something like Tillich's "Ground of Being," or a Universal Mind, or something we cannot conceive at all? I dunno. But for sure he's not the kind of cartoon Grandpa-in-the clouds that you seem to think I have in mind. (That many theists believe just that, I do not deny, or even that some of them are Jews; but that's not my problem.)

I may coming around to a different view in light of my remarks on the origin of the Torah on another thread; since I think that God had no direct part in the formation of the Bible, but that it was the product of human thought--and, indeed, that the only voice that God has or has ever had is our own--and that humans have more projected or injected or imposed meaning and authority on that book than found them there as intrinsic to it--perhaps, in some sense, God is the same. There is, or may be, a God; but if there is, He is unknowable, and the God-concept that is held by organized religions is more the creation of men than the other way around.

Thought continues, and the ideas are half-baked thus far; but as you see, I'm rather a long way from the kind of theist you (rightly) find primitive and benighted.

Does any of that help at all, or am I still an irrational moron?

Your position is no more objectively provable than mine, though you seem to think so.

My position is that your claims for the existence of God are unsubstantiated, therefore there is no rational reason to take them seriously. My position is absolutely objectively provable. Try again.

The only claim I have ever made is that I hold a subjective and unverifiable belief, as described above, that may or may not be objectively true.

There are some of us who think there is, or at least may be, more to "reality" than objective, proven facts.

No, there are some who *WISH* there was, it's purely an emotional position, not a rational one. You don't want to feel like you're all alone in the universe, you want to feel comforted that there's an invisible friend in the sky that's watching out for you. You want to feel special because you have this "relationship" with the supposed creator of the universe. None of these are rational reasons for actually accepting this position. What you're doing is little more than holding a security blanket and sucking your thumb because you think that somehow it'll make you safer and more secure.

Can I note for the record that you are here claiming a supernatural power, i.e., that of being able to read my mind?

You are once again attributing to me simplistic and, yes, irrational beliefs that I deny that I hold. Perhaps you'd care to try to prove those positive claims.

Where, in all the rules of this forum, of logic, of science, or of rationality, does it say that you have the right to tell me what I think?

First, what you state in the above paragraph is inarguably a "strong atheist" point of view, which you deny below that you hold. If the assertion that a belief in God has not "the slightest possibility of being true" is not a strong-atheist position, what would a strong-atheist position look like?

A strong atheist rejects the possibility that god(s) exist, a weak atheist simply lacks belief in god(s) because there is no good evidence to accept it. If you want to do a word substitution, there is a difference between someone who rejects the possibility of Bigfoot and someone who simply sees no good reason to think Bigfoot is real. One is open to changing their mind, one is not. Lack of belief, as a weak atheist, is not the same as belief in the lack of existence, as a strong atheist.

Come on, are you telling me you've been on these forums all this time and you still don't know this?

I know of the differences between those positions, of course; but I had never seen them explained together with those labels. In my discussions with Zzyzx, he takes what you call the "weak atheist" position and calls it "non-theist," which I accept. I had assumed, I see wrongly, that a "weak atheist" says "there is no God," with no particular reference to the possibility of changing his mind, and a strong atheist says, "no God is possible." I may have been off a bit, but I was pretty close.

I admit I haven't spent a lot of time or effort meditating on the distinctions, since I hold none of those positions. The definitions you give here seem to be the most logical and accurate, especially the one that clarifies agnosticism as "not only do I not know, I cannot know." Thanks.

But to return to the point of all this: Are you a strong atheist, or not? From your words in your last post and your definitions here, it would appear that you are.

I have no problem with that; I just wonder why you denied it.

I freely acknowledge that, as objective fact, I do not know for certain that there is a God.

Then you must also freely acknowledge that you have no rational reason to believe that there is a God either.

But I've already said that. I regard my belief as non-rational and subjectively based, as opposed to irrational, contrary to and contradicted by rationality.

This is a cheap theistic dodge.

I regard it as a different way of looking at the kinds of belief that people may hold. You may not agree, but you certainly have no warrant to accuse me of lying about it.

If you can't demonstrate that your beliefs are true of valid, STOP MAKING THE CLAIM THAT THEY ARE!

Show me where I ever have.

I do not, and have never, claimed that my beliefs are objectively true. You are not the first atheist that has had trouble getting his head around that concept, but that doesn't mean either that I am lying about the way I perceive and understand what I think, or that my way of understanding these issues is wrong.

It is blatantly dishonest to repeatedly claim that what you believe is true and then, when backed into a corner, say "but I can't prove it and never said I could".

Again; "true" and "may be true" are two different things, just as a fact is different from an opinion.

I realize that most theists, especially here, do not think, nor believe, nor express themselves in this way. I am not among their number. Get over it.

The way I learned it, I get to think, believe, understand and speak as I choose, not as other people think that I should, whether they be theists or atheists.

The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, to coin a phrase. You are again claiming an objective, proven fact where none has been demonstrated.

You can't read well, can you? I said that there was no objective evidence and in that, I'm absolutely right, you even agree with me. You really need to stop sticking your foot in your mouth.

If you had said only that there was no evidence, and stopped there, you would be quite right; but you haven't been doing that. You have been saying, and very consistently, that there is no evidence, and therefore there is no God nor the slightest possibility of His existence. That does not follow logically, that is what I am disputing, and you know both of those things.

My beliefs are intellectually based, and have to be, because I am incapable of emotional bonding to anyone or anything, including a religion.

If they were intellectually based, you'd be able to support them intellectually, which you have utterly failed to do.

I disagree. My only claim is that I hold an unverifiable, unprovable, provisional, and subjective belief. Again, the fact that you don't understand how, or recognize that, such a thing could be doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. I say that it does, and that I hold such a belief, and you have absolutely no reason to claim, and most certainly cannot prove, that it doesn't and I don't.

You cannot come to a reasonable belief in the existence of the supernatural intellectually, it just can't be done because there is no evidence whatsoever that would lead you there.

The word you are looking for there is "logically," not "intellectually." They are not the same thing. Once again; you don't get to tell me, or anyone else, how to think.

You *WANT* there to be a supernatural, you *WISH* there was a supernatural, you *FEEL BETTER* thinking there is a supernatural, therefore you believe in one.

Mindreading again? How supernaturally gifted you are.

You might reflect on the fact that, excepting only the bare existence of an all but entirely undefined God, I do not accept the reality of any supernatural phenomena whatever. None. Zero. Nada. Zip. I don't even believe in the existence of a human soul that is separate from the body and brain. How does all that factor into my supposed wants and needs?

The fact remains, from a purely intellectual basis, there is no reason for thinking that the supernatural actually exists.

Which is why I don't believe in it. God, I place in a different category, as I hope by now you have grasped. More precisely, I don't know if God fits any categories at all. Can the ultimate source of natural law be "supernatural"? Beats me.

Like many atheists, you insist on faulty and false, not to mention calculatedly insulting, analogies.

No, they're very accurate analogies, you simply don't like having the ridiculous nature of your beliefs pointed out.

If I believed as you insist that I must, you would be right; my beliefs would be both analogous to unicorns, etc., and ridiculous. But I don't.

Belief in things without a shred of objective evidence is ridiculous, whether it's ghosts, aliens, Bigfoot or God. You just single one of those words out for special treatment. Ain't gonna fly, my friend.

And you, as always, assume that my beliefs are essentially the same as those of fundamentalists. That ain't even gonna walk.

I think "says you" about covers it here. I don't agree. Can you provide some objective evidence to convince me of that, other than your bald assertions?

Agreeing is irrelevant. If you disagree, prove it. Show that God is actually an objectively better explanation for what we see around us. Oh wait, you can't prove anything objectively, can you?

Good. You are beginning to get it. Unless you're being sarcastic, of course....

Wait a minute. This example was given to address your contention that no thought about something that isn't real could be rational. That Gandalf and the hobbits aren't real is central to my point; even if God isn't real, thought and writing about him aren't necessarily irrational. You are here conceding that point.

Belief that god(s) are real is central to theism, if you don't believe in the existence of god(s), you're not a theist. Are you suggesting that Jewish rabbis don't think that God is real? What's the point of the stupid hat and hairdo and all the pathetic bowing and scraping if God isn't real?

And here I was thinking you were better than this. Guess not.

Yeah, I thought you were better than that too.

Let me spell out the argument, step by step:

1. You said that no thought about anything that isn't real could possibly be rational.

2. I gave the Tolkien example to show that that is not true.

3. The point was, clearly, that thought about God, even if He isn't real, could still be rational.

I was in no way suggesting that rabbis, or any other theists, think that God isn't real. The point was about rational thought, not God.

Were you really unable to follow that simple line of reasoning, or were you deliberately twisting it to score a fake point?

Excuse me, but I don't do that. Few modern, liberal theists, whether Christian or Jewish, do.

Actually, they do, at least in part. There are a lot of parts in the later Old Testament that likely are historically accurate, but they have nothing to do with the supernatural, they are just a recording of ancient Jewish history.

Give me a break. Those weren't the parts that either of us were talking about, and you know it.

Your problem is with theists who read the miraculous and supernatural accounts in the Bible as literally and historically true. You know that, and so do I. I told you, and will be most happy to prove, that few modern, liberal Jews "do that," as I don't. You are blatantly dodging the point here, and you MUST know that.

And you accuse ME of being dishonest?

Do you have any arguments that are actually about modern religion as it is actually practiced, or only about strawmen, caricatures and fundamentalism?

Do you have any arguments that would differentiate liberal theology from these things? Certainly, there might not be as much silly ritual, but the basic beliefs are still as irrational and illogical, you just don't dress up in robes and swing a lightsaber.

Let the record first show that you did not answer the question.

As for "arguments that would differentiate liberal theology from" strawmen, caricatures and fundamentalism--how long a list do you want?

1. No belief in the literal, historical truth of Scripture.
2. No resistance to science, e.g., evolution.
3. No doctrine of a literal fiery Hell.
4. No doctrine that only the proper belief in Jesus will save one from that Hell.
5. No insistence that all other religions are 100% false and likewise doom their believers to Hell.
6. No insistence on one, single, correct and acceptable interpretation of the Bible.
7. No insistence on one, single, correct and acceptable understanding of the nature of God.
8. No insistence on one, single, correct and acceptable detailed code of moral behavior.
9. No insistence that the Bible is the "Inerrant Word of God."
10. No refusal to acknowledge the multiple and cross-cultural origins of the Bible, e.g., the J, E, D, and Priestly sources and the influence of documents from other ancient cultures and religions.
11. No emphasis on proselytization and evangelism.
12. No appeals to primitive emotions and induced mass euphoria, as in many "crusades" and "revivals."
13. No "pat answers" and simple solutions to personal problems.
14. No allegations that Jesus will solve all one's problems if one only accepts him as one's "personal savior."
15. No interest whatever in supernatural phenomena, e.g., "faith healing," "gifts of the Spirit," prophecy, visions, speaking in tongues, etc.
16. No lockstep, unquestioning obedience and reverence paid to any living human as a Great Spiritual Leader or Teacher.
17. No insistence that one must be "filled with the Spirit," "spiritually awake," or some such in order to properly understand the Bible, be "saved," or whatever.
18. No insistence that the "Last Days" are upon us.
19. No insistence that any one culture or nation, like the US, is ordained by God to be the leader, greatest power, best, holiest, most Christian, or whatever, in the world.
20. No teachings about a personal, actual, literal Devil or Satan, or demons and evil spirits.
21. No teachings about a genuine, literal, personal relationship with or access to God.
22. No teachings about how God can be manipulated or induced to give "blessings" through special prayers or devotions or otherwise be controlled.
23. No denunciations of those who believe differently, or not at all, as agents of evil or Satan.
24. No denunciations of those who believe differently, or not at all, as being intentionally obstinate and clinging to Sin.
25. NO SIMPLISTIC BELIEF IN GOD AS A BENEVOLENT OLD MAN IN THE SKY.

Shall I go on? I certainly could.

Now, as I asked in the first place: do you have arguments that address a faith or belief that includes none of these?

Even if God does not exist, it is possible to think and talk about Him without necessarily being irrational.

Depends on the context. I can think and talk about Harry Potter in the context of a literary character, I can examine the motives that J.K. Rowling gave him and what I think he should have done based on what I read in the books. If you want to limit religion to that, that's fine, but that's not what religion does.

Actually, when modern theists are discussing the characters in Biblical accounts, that is exactly what we do. We acknowledge that those accounts are probably not historical, but discuss them as moral examples (or counterexamples) and as symbols of theological concepts anyway.

Religion PRAYS to these fantasy characters.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but the plural here is inappropriate. We pray to one "character" only, and as I have said, He is in a different class from either Moses or unicorns.

(As a Jew, I obviously have problems with the idea of praying to Jesus. But that's rather a theological dispute among theists, and probably not germane to our debate.)

Religion thinks these fantasy characters are real.

Biblical literalism again.

Religion imagines that they're special because they were doted upon by one of these fantasy characters.

Note what I said about "personal relationships" with God, above. I keep saying; theism is not identical to fundamentalism. Of all the parts of your argument, that assumption is the weakest.

If you want to do literary criticism of the Bible or Harry Potter, feel free but once you start taking the stories contained within seriously, you've crossed the line to irrationality.

Depends on what you take seriously, doesn't it? Taking the idea of, say, the sun stopping in the sky seriously is of course irrational; taking "Thou Shalt Not Murder" (the correct translation from the Hebrew) seriously is not.

Which proves my point. Love, you admit here, is irrational, and therefore the fact that talk about it is not considered so shows that talk about God shouldn't be, either. But as I say, you've already conceded the point.

You really need to stop lying. I never said that love is irrational, in fact I pointed out that it is EXTREMELY rational in that it has a naturalistic explanation. If you can't be honest, stop responding.

Thanks for the direct insult and ad hom, but you know better.

Are we defining "rational" as "resulting from organized rational thought," as in a belief or decision?

Or are you switching to "rational" meaning "exists and can be understood"?

If you mean the former, then by saying that "love" is an electrochemical reaction in the brain, you are agreeing that it is not rational, as you allege religious belief is not rational. Therefore, if writing about love is not irrational, writing about religion isn't either. That was my original point--but you have conceded that, as I said.

If, on the other hand, you mean the latter--why, then, religion is rational too, because it also clearly exists and can be naturalistically explained; by cultural and family influences, by the various "needs" and "wants" and "wishful thinking" that you have yourself proposed as its causes, and so on.

Which is it? It can't be "the result of rational thought" with religion and "exists and is explainable" with love. Those are two separate and distinct definitions, and you don't get to have it both ways as it's convenient to your argument.

Either way, you had absolutely no warrant or rational reason to call me a liar. If you don't understand your own arguments or can't consistently make them, that doesn't make ME dishonest.

---

Well, that was fun; now let's take a brief look at some of my points and arguments that you didn't care to address. I won't speculate on why not; why, that would be mindreading.

1. "There are some of us who think there is, or at least may be, more to "reality" than objective, proven facts. We make room in our lives and thoughts for the transcendent, the speculative, the metaphysical; the dream, the hope, even the wish.... There is value in all those things. Are those aspects of reality really there, or do we create them? Who cares? In this life and this world--and I do not claim to know if there are others--we humans must make our own meaning. That perspective may make no sense to you. Too bad. That does not make it wrong, nor me a primitive-minded idiot."

2. "The hundreds of thousands of volumes written on the subject of religion argue pretty strongly that belief in God is just a bit more complex and nuanced than belief in Santa Claus or monsters under the bed. That analogy is not based on reasoned argument, but on pure contempt and a desire to demean and humiliate your opponent. It is a very thinly-veiled insult, and was intended to be... I respect the atheist point of view, and say so often. It's puzzling to me that so many atheists, who claim to believe in tolerance and freedom of thought, can't find a way to respect mine."

3. "If you were stating all this as your own opinion and admitting the possibility of the rationality of my own, we would have no argument here. You aren't doing that. You are stating that your opinion is The Ultimate Definitive Truth and mine is childish, idiotic and indefensible. I don't think you've quite established your credentials on that score, and you haven't come within a light-year of proving, as you said, that the existence of God has "not the slightest possibility of being true."

4.

While we cannot completely disprove the existence of God...

"You contradict yourself. "Not the slightest possibility of being true," remember? Everything else you say here is in direct contradiction to the sentence above.

"And: who's "we"? Just wondering. Are you alleging that there are no competent scientists, logicians or philosophers--or any people who make their living with their intellect--who believe in God?"

5.

...we cannot completely disprove anything...

"Nonsense. Science has completely disproven all kinds of things. The inheritance of acquired characteristics. That tuberculosis is caused by a particular temperament. That wearing copper bracelets is an effective treatment for arthritis. Creationism."

6.

...science isn't about proof, it's about the best available evidence and that evidence does not support your God.

"How can nonexistent evidence support or not support anything? How can there be any evidence of a transcendent being in the first place? Surely someone has proven that there is no such thing as "transcendence"--no?

"If you can't prove that there is no God, why can't you just accept that there are people who don't believe as you do that are not fools or mental defectives because of that fact?

"Gee, I can; and I'm supposed to be the intolerant, doctrinaire, and closed-minded one. How does that work?"

7. "You are essentially saying, "WE (?) cannot prove that God does not exist, but it's absolutely certain that He does not, therefore," etc., etc. How rational is that?

"...You have here admitted that you absolutely and without question believe something that you cannot prove.

"?"

8.

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.

"...Some theists seem to believe that "Good" is "Good" only because God says so, but not many, in my experience, and no theologian or Bible scholar in modern times believes this that I have ever heard of. God Himself is constrained by a moral code. That is apparent in the first book of The Bible... The passage in question is in Genesis 18....

"God may or may not have handed humans a code of morals; but either way, it is not arbitrary. God could no more make evil good and good evil than He could have made a world where two and two make five. Morality is built into the nature of reality."

9.

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.

"As I said, that can happen. It's happening in Islam now, when the mass murder of innocents is declared to be a sacred act.

"But it's not integral to religion itself, and is absolutely foreign to a religion like Judaism (and most liberal denominations of Christianity) which encourages and even requires critical thought and taking responsibility for one's own moral judgments."

10.

All of these [theological]works, all religion, starts from the unfounded and irrational assumption that there is this God out there.

"I disproved that with several specific examples. You ignored--and deleted--them."

...it just has to be accepted without question.

"False again, and so proven in the parts of my post that you deleted....

"You are rejecting my arguments and examples and insisting on the accuracy of your own phony caricatures over my informed and well-founded objections. How is that logically or rationally different from a fundamentalist who does the same thing in the opposite direction?

"I thought you preferred to talk about reality. Why, then, can't you address the reality of religion as it actually is, instead of setting up textbook examples of strawmen and attacking those?"

11.

When your assumptions and axioms are unwarranted, it ruins everything it touches.

"If you don't even know the axioms and assumptions, but only cartoon versions of them--as you keep proving out of your own mouth--how can you possibly know they are unwarranted?....

"You have proven over and over that you know nothing about actual theology as it is actually practiced today, but only the stereotypes and caricatures of it that you cling to, even when shown that they are demonstrably false."

And, finally, this:
12. "I'm a religious Jew myself, and I am struggling right now with the following questions: in what sense, exactly, I believe in God; what role, if any, He played in the formation of the Hebrew Bible; whether that book has any authority, considering my recent thoughts on the matter, and if so, in what way; whether my devotion to Jewish tradition and culture either requires or implies a belief in a personal God; and if my personal reasons for believing in God as I have and (so far) still do are still sufficient as these ideas change and evolve, primarily from interactions on this forum.

"Question: If all theists are as invariably and inarguably childish, complacent, unreflective, doctrinaire, and fricken irrational as you insist we have to be, then where the hell did I come from?"

Be it noted that I have not called you a liar, claimed to know your true beliefs or motives or otherwise presumed to read your mind, questioned your intelligence, sneered at or ridiculed anything you have to say, or otherwise demeaned or denigrated your ideas or your position. I don't even say that you are wrong; I don't know that.

I do question either your willingness or your ability to deal with modern, liberal religion as it actually exists, and your willingness or ability to tolerate and/or respect views that do not mirror your own; but those are not insults. They are observations, and accurate ones.

[cnorman18]

And we do. Some people build their lives around such things. They are called "artists." Is life an art or a science? Could it be that there are other ways than yours to look at things?

Hey cronman, I figured I would chime in here as well.

Feel free.

The statement above appears to be an appeal to authority. I dont think artists are experts in "the real"

I didn't say they were, and I didn't say they are necessarily right, which would be necessary for it to be an appeal to authority. I'm only saying there are other ways of looking at things, and there are.

I am not convinced that they are not true. That is, as I say, YOUR subjective judgment. It is not mine. Your position is no more objectively provable than mine, though you seem to think so.

Well, I, for one, like to reserve the use of the word objective because every single one of us have our biases.

Very wise.

However, the non-existance of god doesnt need to be provable in order to be a valid point. It only needs the absence of evidence.

A valid opinion, most certainly. A fact--not so much.

There are some of us who think there is, or at least may be, more to "reality" than objective, proven facts. We make room in our lives and thoughts for the transcendent, the speculative, the metaphysical; the dream, the hope, even the wish. I'm sorry you're not one of them. There is value in all those things.

I would disagree here. I dont think there is value in them other than personal comfort. There are very few times when I would say personal comfort is more important than the truth.

You're entitled to your opinion, but bear in mind that such things as "justice," "freedom," "democracy" and "equality" started out as hopes and dreams. They didn't exist as part of reality in the ancient world.

Personally, I think a world without art or metaphysics would be much more than merely uncomfortable. "Comfort" of that kind is essential to being human. We are more than machines; of course, that is a metaphysical concept too. Feel free to reject it. I disagree.

In fact, I think they hinder progress and do a disservice to all of us. I think that they are the primary reason we will never reach our fullest potential.

You are here speaking of religion only, I acknowledge that that opinion exists, and in part, at least, can be accurate, though as a general principle I disagree with it.

As far as the rest, that's hard to see as rational. If there were no dreams and hopes and wishes, we would still be living in trees.

An exaggeration? Surely. But you see my point, I hope. If someone had not dreamed and hoped and wished for a better way to understand the world and how it worked other than accepting the tales told by their ancestors, this thing called "science" would never have begun. Mathematics is metaphysical; those concepts, as even Cephus has pointed out, do not exist in the real world.

Who cares? In this life and this world--and I do not claim to know if there are others--we humans must make our own meaning.

I care! I consider myself a truth seeker!

So do I. Is there no truth in a good novel or painting? "Truth" and "fact" are related, but they are not synonymous.

Reality is like the Bible in this way; it does not comment on itself. We have to understand it and make its meaning clear. Logic itself is a metaphysical concept. Those rules and laws and truths were worked out by human minds. Rocks and trees and lightning--reality--do not explain them. Facts alone are nothing. Their meaning is truth, and we have to figure that out on our own.

Religion, e.g., the Bible, was one such effort. It was not the last or the best, and those who think so are plainly wrong; but just as Aristotle and Galen, who were also very often wrong, remain a part of the record of humankind's efforts in that regard, so does the Bible. Modern humans can study all of those, and do, without regarding them as Ultimate Authorities or infallibly correct.

Which proves nothing, of course, as you will finally admit presently. Perhaps there is more to "reality" than objective fact. Thoughts are real, for instance. Dreams can become real. Hopes can be fulfilled.

This is completly different than claiming the reality of the supernatural.

True. And other than God, Whom I place in a different category anyway, I don't.

As for claims; I make none. I freely acknowledge that, as objective fact, I do not know for certain that there is a God. I certainly think it possible, and I choose to live my life in light of that possibility. I do not seek to prove it to anyone, nor do I recommend it. It is up to the individual to decide for himself what to believe, or not.

Possibility =/= reality.

Not always, certainly. But sometimes it does. What is a "hypothesis," in science, if not a possibility?

We must use the best tools we have available for determining what is real and apply them. As it stands, I simply can see any reason to believe in a god.

And I have always acknowledged that as a perfectly reasonable and valid opinion. For all I know, you might be right. But I don't know that for sure, and neither do you.

Anyway, how so? The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, to coin a phrase. You are again claiming an objective, proven fact where none has been demonstrated.

This is the thing, no one ever has to prove a negative (unless the positive has been shown)

If the positive has been shown, the negative has already been disproven. Ergo, negative proof is not generally possible.

Generally. Proof than a particular idea is false is certainly possible in specific situations. It has been proven, for instance, that Bubonic Plague is not caused by evil spirits or as a punishment for sin, because the actual cause has been found and proven.

Note, now, that this does not constitute a general proof that evil spirits do not exist, only that they are not the cause of that particular phenomenon.

Imagine a world where we had to disprove the existence of something before we could suspend belief. We would have to disprove the small aliens orbiting my head, the flesh eating mini dinosaurs in my butt, etc...

Imagine if I told you I had 25 corvettes. You would say "prove it!" And I would say "Prove I dont!" There would be no way for you to prove I dont have 25 corvettes. I could have hid them on mercury, or underground. They could be invisible. A much more rational approach is to dismiss me as a total liar until I provided you with evidence of my ownership of 25 corvettes.

Occam's Razor. Of course.

Whether that applies to the general idea of the transcendent is a matter for debate.

The idea that "God has not been proven nor disproven" is rather more complicated, logically speaking, than it looks. The proposition is that no proof is possible, which rather renders the whole matter of "proof" moot. If no proof is possible, then its absence is wholly irrelevant and no conclusions can be drawn from it.

It remains true that one may legitimately say, "absent proof of any kind, I see no reason to believe." That is certainly reasonable. It is NOT reasonable to say that anyone else ought to be required to reach that same conclusion, since proof of the matter, either way, is impossible and therefore irrelevant.

As a matter of fact, that is not and cannot be true in my case. Because of my peculiar neurology, I am emotionally impaired. My beliefs are intellectually based, and have to be, because I am incapable of emotional bonding to anyone or anything, including a religion. If I were so capable, I would most likely still be a Christian.

Emotionally impaired, but not absent. This also still doesnt mean you must act rational.

I never said so. My point was that I do not think, act, or believe on the basis of emotion, which was alleged.

Like many atheists, you insist on faulty and false, not to mention calculatedly insulting, analogies.

Ad hom!

I deny that. It was a general observation on the tactics and attitude on the part of many atheists, not an assault on Cephus's character.

Not to mention a generalization.

I said "many," not "all."

The hundreds of thousands of volumes written on the subject of religion argue pretty strongly that belief in God is just a bit more complex and nuanced than belief in Santa Claus or monsters under the bed.

Another appeal to authority.

Wrong again. I am not arguing for correctness, only complexity, which is an inarguable fact.

An equivalent to Santa Claus, intentionally disrespectful and merely another veiled insult.

Do you think its an insult because its obviously clear santa doesnt exist?

No. It's an insult because belief in Santa Claus is childish, simplistic, and not accepted as a legitimate belief by anyone over the age of eight or ten. Belief in God is not necessarily any of those things. It's analogous to saying that atheists believe in nothing at all, including morality, ethics, honesty and regard of any kind for the needs of others. That is true of some, but as a general allegation, it is a falsehood.

I think "says you" about covers it here. I don't agree. Can you provide some objective evidence to convince me of that, other than your bald assertions?

Think of the corvettes. Do you have any evidence, since you are claiming something does exist?

Read more closely. I make no such objective claim, and never have. I say that God is possible. You say He is not. That is a positive claim. Can you prove it?

As for your Corvettes, for all I know, you do. Jay Leno has about that many, I think. I have no interest in the question, or reason to prove whether or not you're lying. I remain unconvinced, of course.

If you're giving them away, I'll take a cherry '68 coupe with a fuel-injected 427. About 4 mpg, but what the hell. If I want to get to the 7-11 in nine seconds flat, that's my ride.

That it's in conflict with YOUR "intellectual understanding of the Universe," I do not doubt. But is yours the final authority? Are you really asserting that your own perspective and judgment are the only ones, that you hold the authority to declare what is and is not rational and logical?

The basis of his argument follows the rules. Its equivalent to saying "do you have the authority to claim that 2*2=4? Logic works like math, there are certain rules for which hold true, one doesnt need to claim authority.

I was referring to the contention that there is no such thing as a subjective belief that makes no claims of objective, factual truth. That is NOT prohibited or proven false by the rules of logic. It can't be. I hold such a belief, and claiming it cannot exist is a claim of authority over what is and is not logical and what can and cannot be thought.

You are switching arguments here, and not for the last time. If you can't prove your premise, as you admit, then what remains is the rationality of the process of making a decision about it. The decision to believe in God is influenced by all the same factors as the decisions listed above, and they are not considered "irrational." Therefore, neither is a decision to believe in God based on those factors.

What you do and what you marry are hardly compareable with what you believe.

In the influences that determine such a decision, they certainly are, as I have shown. I personally think that those comparatively mundane decisions are actually of far greater importance than whether or not one believes in God. That is essentially trivial.

God Himself is constrained by a moral code. That is apparent in the first book of The Bible, when Abraham rebukes God for planning to destroy the righteous along with the wicked in Sodom. The passage in question is in Genesis 18 (and it does not matter, of course, whether this is a "teaching story" or literally true. The principle is established there, and elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible, either way).

God may or may not have handed humans a code of morals; but either way, it is not arbitrary. God could no more make evil good and good evil than He could have made a world where two and two make five. Morality is built into the nature of reality.

What does it matter to be constrained by a code you make. If you can define it, there essentially is no code.

That is the point. God did not, does not, and cannot arbitrarily define it. If I teach you mathematics, that doesn't mean I thought of it myself, much less that I can change it if I choose.

No, I did not. I said that it can neither be proven nor disproven. If it could not be challenged, then how is it that Jews still debate it?

Do I, or do I not own 25 corvettes?

Beats me. Now ask me if I care.

What does that have to do with the statement above it?

Another veiled insult if no probative value. Equating talk about God with talk about unicorns is another caricature.

In all seriousness, how is it any different? Simply because not as many people believe in unicorns? What makes a religion, or a belief in a god and more valid than a belief in mythology? Many people say thats the only difference between mythology and religion. People still believe in one.

And they may be right; but belief in unicorns is not even comparable to ancient religions that were based on myth, let alone modern liberal theology.

Belief in unicorns comes from nowhere and leads nowhere. It has no significance outside itself. It carries no ethical implications, no historical or philosophical perspective, no heritage, no body of thought or scholarship or speculation, is the foundation of no institutions or organizations or schools or even houses of worship. It is just there, by itself, with no significance at all.

Tell me, how many Jewish Torah studies have you been in lately? Any Episcopal Bible-study sessions? Read any religiously-oriented newsletters or periodicals? Up to date on readings in Reconstructionist and Humanistic Judaism? Do you know how fast those movements are growing?

Another appeal to authority?

No. A query about the extent of knowledge and understanding that was implicitly claimed.

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.

Im in NY, and I know more atheist jews than theist jews!

Which proves my point that belief in God is not essential to being a Jew. Ask some of them why, if they are atheists, they still consider themselves Jewish. They will speak to you of tradition, heritage, culture and community.

That is a separate issue. Here, we are speaking of the characteristics and rationality of modern religion generally, and the opinions and beliefs of secular Jews are irrelevant to that. As I said, they do not concern themselves much with theology as we are discussing it here--except perhaps from the atheist side, in which case they are not speaking for the Jewish religion but against it.

On the other hand, you have made it clear that you see no significant difference between my beliefs and worldview and those of Jimmy Swaggart. That gives me a pretty accurate picture, I think, of your depth of understanding of the subject of actual religion; and your responses to my comments tell me much about your commitment to "learning more" and "revising your ideas," even about what people do and do not believe when they tell you, first-hand. You prefer to cling to your caricatures and stereotypes, and think in terms of strawman unicorns and Santa Claus as opposed to addressing the reality of religion as it is.

Hopefully by this point you will have already addressed my unicorn assesment, but I think his comparison has some value if its taken in a very, very broad sense.

Broader than is meaningful, in my opinion.

The one thing in common between you and Jimmy is you both claim god exists. To me, thats where the beef is. Im quite sure from reading your posts thats about as similar as you two are as well!

I will go even farther than that. As far as Jimmy Swaggart's God is concerned, I am an atheist too.

I recognize his right to believe as he chooses, but in my estimation, the only thing we have in common is not that we both believe in God, but only that we use that same word.

Thanks for your comments and questions. As with all, they help me clarify my own thinking and sometimes correct it.

[Word_Swordsman]

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.

I throw down the gauntlet. Faith has made a positive claim. Either back up this claim with evidence or withdraw it.

On a less confrontational note, do atheists reject religion and God because they are ignorant of religion as many staunch religionists claim?

I've engaged in many discussions with atheists in "live" chat forums, and have come to the strong belief few have bothered to read the Bible through. The reason I believe that way is while I carried on using the Bible, they couldn't find anything there that fit the discussion, relying instead on writings of skeptics they listen to. They post the comments, not their own, stringing them together, often without giving credit to the authors. I've run their lines through Google often to prove they are parroting some skeptic. When forced to discuss the Bible most simply can't do it live. They might come back the next day after looking some scriptures up. The arguments they tend to cite are the same word-for-word challenges (sometimes re-worded slightly) listed in books by atheists or their websites. All of those have been many times answered well through the years, but they keep coming back up like crabgrass.

Another tactic I see a lot of is atheists like to gang up and wear Christians down by the raising of those old defeated objections. When they can't overcome simple reason/logic, or the facts, they retreat to their familiar case of simple denial without substantive support to hold up a denial. I note how they often pick a fight with one-liner statements that require the writing of a book to answer fully, again attempting to discourage Christians from engaging. I've learned to limit my responses to the length of their one liners when I have found the Christian answers on the site have already been made to reflect my own take on an issue.

The Bible will remain a large mystery to atheists. God says there He will prevent them from coming to a natural understanding of Him, even though we use natural things to explain small spiritual concepts. The parables there are for the ones seeking to truly understand and build their faith. The laws and commandments were put there for and on account of sinners, so of course those offend atheists, while seen by the Christian as just and holy commandments for the betterment of mankind. The stories are there to increase our faith, while driving the skeptics farther into derision and ultimately into insanity, as happened to Voltaire on his death bed.

[nygreenguy]

A valid opinion, most certainly. A fact--not so much.

Actually, i believe its a rule of logic.

You're entitled to your opinion, but bear in mind that such things as "justice," "freedom," "democracy" and "equality" started out as hopes and dreams. They didn't exist as part of reality in the ancient world.

True, but not all beliefs are created equal. You are equating a belief in the supernatural with beliefs in social change. I dont see how they are at all comparable.

Personally, I think a world without art or metaphysics would be much more than merely uncomfortable. "Comfort" of that kind is essential to being human. We are more than machines; of course, that is a metaphysical concept too. Feel free to reject it. I disagree.

Why do you lump art and metaphysics together?

An exaggeration? Surely. But you see my point, I hope. If someone had not dreamed and hoped and wished for a better way to understand the world and how it worked other than accepting the tales told by their ancestors, this thing called "science" would never have begun. Mathematics is metaphysical; those concepts, as even Cephus has pointed out, do not exist in the real world.

I know some mathematicians that would disagree.

So do I. Is there no truth in a good novel or painting? "Truth" and "fact" are related, but they are not synonymous.

The problem is I accept the fiction of the novel. If I were to start believing it true, we would have problems!

Not always, certainly. But sometimes it does. What is a "hypothesis," in science, if not a possibility?

My point exactly. Belief must be suspended upon further investigation.

If the positive has been shown, the negative has already been disproven. Ergo, negative proof is not generally possible.

Not necessairly true. We could argue the validity of evidence and such.

The idea that "God has not been proven nor disproven" is rather more complicated, logically speaking, than it looks. The proposition is that no proof is possible, which rather renders the whole matter of "proof" moot. If no proof is possible, then its absence is wholly irrelevant and no conclusions can be drawn from it.

If no proof is possible, the disbelief should be the default state. But to claim existence infers that proof is possible/

It remains true that one may legitimately say, "absent proof of any kind, I see no reason to believe." That is certainly reasonable. It is NOT reasonable to say that anyone else ought to be required to reach that same conclusion, since proof of the matter, either way, is impossible and therefore irrelevant.

Actually, they are required to also come to the same conclusion. Like I illustrated before, 2*2=4. 4 is the only possible conclusion for that statement. Logic, in many ways, works the same way.

I deny that. It was a general observation on the tactics and attitude on the part of many atheists, not an assault on Cephus's character.

Even worse! You used anecdotal evidence to create a fallacy!

I said "many," not "all."

Have you met a significant amount of atheists to come to that conclusion, or is this based upon more anecdotal evidence?

Wrong again. I am not arguing for correctness, only complexity, which is an inarguable fact.

I think this is an argument to complexity. Because its more complex doesnt make it any more valid.

No. It's an insult because belief in Santa Claus is childish, simplistic, and not accepted as a legitimate belief by anyone over the age of eight or ten.

Appeal to age, appeal to popularity and an appeal to complexity.

Belief in God is not necessarily any of those things. It's analogous to saying that atheists believe in nothing at all, including morality, ethics, honesty and regard of any kind for the needs of others. That is true of some, but as a general allegation, it is a falsehood.

Atheism, by definition, is the lack of religion. When you make an assertion, like a belief in a god, it comes with all sorts of mental baggage. The analogy simply is not there for atheism, but is for other mythical creatures.

Read more closely. I make no such objective claim, and never have. I say that God is possible. You say He is not. That is a positive claim. Can you prove it?

First, I never said he isn't possible.
Secondly, its still not a positive claim because its the default belief in the absence of evidence.

If you're giving them away, I'll take a cherry '68 coupe with a fuel-injected 427. About 4 mpg, but what the hell. If I want to get to the 7-11 in nine seconds flat, that's my ride.

Heh, I wish I did! But if I owned 25 corvettes, would 4mpg really be that big of a deal?

I was referring to the contention that there is no such thing as a subjective belief that makes no claims of objective, factual truth. That is NOT prohibited or proven false by the rules of logic. It can't be. I hold such a belief, and claiming it cannot exist is a claim of authority over what is and is not logical and what can and cannot be thought.

huh?

That is the point. God did not, does not, and cannot arbitrarily define it. If I teach you mathematics, that doesn't mean I thought of it myself, much less that I can change it if I choose.

God changed what was, and wasnt moral in the bible. And if he cant change it, what type of god is he?

What does that have to do with the statement above it?

I dont really remember!

And they may be right; but belief in unicorns is not even comparable to ancient religions that were based on myth, let alone modern liberal theology.

Belief in unicorns comes from nowhere and leads nowhere. It has no significance outside itself. It carries no ethical implications, no historical or philosophical perspective, no heritage, no body of thought or scholarship or speculation, is the foundation of no institutions or organizations or schools or even houses of worship. It is just there, by itself, with no significance at all.

Once again, argument from complexity

Which proves my point that belief in God is not essential to being a Jew. Ask some of them why, if they are atheists, they still consider themselves Jewish. They will speak to you of tradition, heritage, culture and community.

Absolutely, I know atheist orthodox jews. They follow are the traditions and rituals and even go to the temple. Its simply a cultural tradition for many who I have met.

Thanks for your comments and questions. As with all, they help me clarify my own thinking and sometimes correct it.

Ditto!