A question for christians #2

[MultilingualMessenger]

Tell me how an all loving God torturing souls for eternity is not a contradiction with two diametrically opposing linguistic terms, then we'll talk.

The idea of Hell doesn't become untrue or even unjust just because you don't like it. Nobody goes to Hell who doesn't deserve it. And frankly, we are not entitled to an eternity in Heaven, nor are we entitled to an eternity at all. God literally brought us into this world and He can take us out, point blank. He's done it before, and the fact that He hasn't since Noah (after which He made a covenant not to) to me sounds pretty merciful given how bad it can get down here. Also, Hell is eternal separation from God, and so the phrase "separation from God" implies that God does not reside in Hell. Even that most basic understanding of Heaven and Hell would give you to know that God resides in Heaven and the devil resides in Hell. The devil is the one who tortures.

Wanna talk now?

It's self fulfilling. You are commanded to believe or threatened with torture, so you do what is commanded and attempt to believe. You attempt to believe fully because you are commanded to believe fully and anything contrary you discard because you must believe. Your belief is circular, self-validating, not of rational deduction.

You don't get to decide my beliefs or how I've come to them. Heck, you don't even know what they all are. But I will tell you this, simply to correct your humongous assumption: I was never threatened with torture and in no way, shape, or form am I being a good girl or saying "Yessuh Massa" to someone who commanded that I believe. It seems that you have the impression that I've been force-fed Christianity to excess and I've never strayed from the path, never questioned, never doubted and never rebelled. I know for sure that I'm not the only one around here who has been around the block and came full-mindedly (back) to Christianity. We are to love God with all of our mind, yet you insist that we have been not only commanded, but forced to love Him without it. Simply put, you can't tell people what their faith is or how they came to it. Yet you have so much faith in your belief that you know Christians better than they know themselves.

I seek information, constantly.

But why do you seek information from sources you have already decided are inherently false and unreliable through-and-through? Seems to me like if you want to know about faith, you go to people with faith, open to their experiences. I just don't understand why you're looking for truth from a source you think is completely and utterly false from the get-go.

That is why I'm at university, that's why I do anything really. I, like you, ask big questions. ''Is there a God'', ''Is this what we're here for?'' Everyone asks these. And as I ask these I realize that as humans on this tiny planet in the middle of an entire universe, we are disconnected; we are impotent in the face of the scale of the cosmos, and so we look to the sky, see the rain, and ask ''what's the purpose?''

But when we really think about it, asking ”what is the existential purpose of raindrops?” is sort of like asking ”what emotion is a cloud''. Raindrops don't have any reason beyond simply the antecedent factors that led to their existence.

I mean, raindrops do lots of wonderful things — they bring water on dry land, give lifeblood to the plants and soak us when we least expect it, but it is not a valid question to ask ”Who meant for them to do so?”

Why is it your belief that "who meant for them to do so" is not a valid question? Why does your questioning have limits? And if it's perfectly reasonable for you to limit your questioning, then why do you criticize what you perceive as the same limiting intellectual behavior coming from faithful people? And why do you think it unreasonable for a faithful person to have questions themselves on matters of faith, as opposed to all the answers to your liking? It seems that whether faithful people question or they don't, you take issue.

It seems to me that questions like these take our desire to ascribe meaning just one step too far. We know the raindrops nourish, we know they provide water, we know they wet the landscape and bring rainbows that amuse us, but I don't believe that the raindrops are designed for our amusement just because I'd like to think myself so important. Our amusement is just a product of our perception of the rainbow; the antecedent physical factors that led to the raindrops falling are reason enough for their existence; that they water the plants and feed the rivers is actually purpose enough to satisfy me.

What you're answering is a question of mechanisms, not origins. We don't disagree on how raindrops, rainbows, plants, rivers, and water work. But where they come from is another question entirely. A reasonable person you must be, so I'm pretty sure you wouldn't deny cause-and-effect. So I'm curious as to why you believe that there is no Cause for this Effect. You being one who asks questions and seeks explanations, I'm honestly curious as to why "it just happened" is enough for you. Why does "we're just here" satiate your mind, but any kind of answer like that on any matter of Christianity or from a Christian would not be sufficient to that same mind?

You and I both see the blue sky. Everyone does. Reason dictates that there is a blue sky. You and I do not see God. Now, please enlighten me as to the last time God visited you in a burning bush, spoke with a booming voice from the heavens, parted seas for you to cross, where you did ''greater miracles than Christ'' and healed the sick with just your touch, turned water to wine, or the last time you created a snake from a staff and a staff from a snake, saw prophetic visions that came true, led the largest slave labour workforce in the history of mankind out of Egypt on a forty year trek across the Egyptian deserts and managed to leave absolutely no archaeological evidence behind whatsoever, survived a global flood after hearing God's instructions to build an ark of such size that it is physically and fundamentally unable to bear the force of torsion, or indeed got that new car you prayed for one week.

This is what I was talking about before. Because you don't see it, it must be true that I don't see it either; likewise, if you see it then I must see it. That's simply false. I do see the blue sky. But that's not what makes it blue, a sky, or even visible. There will always be people who don't see the sky (literally blind people), but it's there. You are not talking about reason. You are talking about natural knowledge, that which is taken in by one or more of the five senses. It doesn't take a five-year-researched thoroughly-reasoned dissertation nor a compelling leap of faith to believe in the sky. But what I'm saying to you is, just as you and I both experience the sky, there are multitudes of people beyond the Biblical ages who have experienced God, in a real and personal way. Maybe you have not, but it is not a requirement for you to have experienced God for others to have experienced Him. The problem is you are not open to others' accounts of their experiences because you have held fast to the belief that they fundamentally can not have those experiences.

We are not the only ones holding fast to beliefs here.

Only if there is no clear evidence so suggest it wasn't a delusion. Occam's razor; heard of it?

It sounds like you have pre-diagnosed everyone with experiences of faith as delusional, and have put the burden of proof on them to prove to your liking that they are in fact, not delusional--their answers which you discard as you attribute them to those people being delusional. That is what I would call circular. "They are delusional, so they should prove to me that they're not delusional, but they can't, because they are."

I understand the concept of faith perfectly well, as do you. That I don't indulge in the faith -- which is an acceptance of an unproven notion contrary to both evidence and my natural sense as a result of a variety of emotional and psychological factors -- is not evidence that I cannot make sense of what faith is.

You say that you understand the concept of faith, but it wasn't even an entire sentence later that you blew that statement to pieces. Not only is that definition incorrect in theory, it also holds not a drop of water when applied to the Christian faith. There is a multitude of historical evidence of the existence and crucifixion of Jesus Christ. To recommend just one source, I'd check out "More Than A Carpenter" by Josh and Sean McDowell (Josh was an information-seeking skeptic himself). As an information-seeking person, I'm sure you'd be more than open to it; it's a short read, just under 170 pages. But all in short, "I don't see the evidence" =/= "there is no evidence". That goes back to that "I don't see it, so you can't either" mentality.

Nobody sees it. When was the last time you healed the sick with a touch of your hand? When was the last time you saw the face of God or heard his voice?

Daily. I can't support it and you can't refute it, though you may try to do so as the self-appointed author and editor of all human experience. I have the sole right to speak on my experience.

I know about reason, I understand the common psychological factors inherent in the mass religious. I know that ultimately we ascribe a meaning to our lives because honestly, in the face of a universe that has never paid any attention to us, it is a human need for all of us to create from it some sense of human purpose, otherwise life seems dark and meaningless. The difference between you and I is that I am learning to accept that that I am just a temporary occurrence. I will die, and it will be after a rare existence full of rain and sunshine, within which I make my own purpose (as do you, actually. Yours is religion).

You and I, MM, are small on a cosmic scale, but learning that the universe needs nothing from us, that it pays us no attention, just makes it all the more beautiful to think that we, you and I, the people on this planet, are each others' entire universe.

That's a great thought I think.

You seem to have good intentions with this. While I appreciate the sentiment, I know that it's simply not true. And we will have to just fundamentally disagree on this point.

Faith in reasonable ideas is a reasonable form of faith. I believe such a faith could thrive with reason, yes.

Okay, let's go with that condition. If faith in reasonable ideas is a reasonable form of faith, then you must use reason to judge an idea as reasonable to have reasonable faith in it. Whatever you judge as reasonable must be not only within your power, but also within your willingness, to reason. Therefore anyone's faith in anything would be determined by their power and willingness to reason. Under that condition, would it not then be true that those whose reasonable faith in their reasonable ideas that go beyond your reasoning would have to reason beyond either your power or ability to reason?

I wouldn't call psychological child indoctrination a decision, nor cultural indoctrination. I wouldn't call emotionally bullying people into accepting a millennia old exploitation of natural human fear of death much of a decision either.

You are working under the assumption that I, or even the majority of believers, came to believe after someone beat them with the God bat. Experiences like that are what draw people away from faith, not to it. People are much more drawn in by love and peace. Ask any saved person. It is always a decision to believe or not believe. We may also fundamentally disagree there too, and that's okay. (I appreciate that you have shown concern about me possibly being bullied or exploited, but it was not like that.)

Blind faith is to be so convinced in something without tangible evidence that a person accepts it as fact. This belief can get to a point where a person can consider themselves to be in a metamorphosed state of understanding beyond natural human reason, and this type of conviction is extremely dangerous because facts are no longer able to contend with fiction.

I agree. To be so convinced in the belief that the universe comes from nothing and that we are here for no reason by way of no one with no tangible evidence that anything sprouts from nothing and that that must be true because otherwise a divine creator that I don't believe in tortures people in an afterlife that I don't believe in in a place that I don't believe in because it would be unjust as defined by my metamorphosed state of understanding of things that I don't believe in that I have come to by seeking out the information that I discard on sight would be blind faith and extremely dangerous indeed.

Now, lack of faith in a particular idea is not because the faithless (that's me) don’t understand what ”faith is”. On the contrary, I understand the notion of faith perfectly well. Nor is any person’s natural reason - the reason that allows them to think freely - born out of deliberate, willful opposition to some eternal, cosmically objective religion; our sense of natural reason exists before many of us even encounter religion.

Agreed. That's why it is not a strange notion that reason and faith can go together. As you said, it is not opposition to faith.

It seems to me like people with unshakeable faith in something would say that the faithless (that's me again) are simply too ”worldly” and ”scientific” to be able to cultivate faith. The faithful (that's you) will deny anything that goes against their own faith and attempt to impress their faith upon others, often by force. But actually, it is not from some inability to think big that I don’t have faith, nor is it from some deliberate rebellion against God. The reason I don't faith is because the idea of faith lies firmly within, and subject to, my natural reason. The acceptance of the ”faith” contrary to reason does not make natural sense.

NO. There are many scientists who are Christian, and in fact many early scientific discoveries that came out of one's motivation to understand what they acknowledged as God's creation. Trust me, you can be as scientific as you want, and anyone who tells you otherwise is simply incorrect.

 

[MultilingualMessenger]

It seems to me like people with unshakeable faith in something would say that the faithless (that's me again) are simply too ”worldly” and ”scientific” to be able to cultivate faith. The faithful (that's you) will deny anything that goes against their own faith and attempt to impress their faith upon others, often by force. But actually, it is not from some inability to think big that I don’t have faith, nor is it from some deliberate rebellion against God. The reason I don't faith is because the idea of faith lies firmly within, and subject to, my natural reason. The acceptance of the ”faith” contrary to reason does not make natural sense.

Have you not denied all that goes against your experiences or lack thereof in this very thread? Are you not attempting to impress your faith (or lack thereof, however you conceptualize it) onto others here? As a questioning person, have you never questioned your own motive for seeking out a Christian forum with an evidently closed mind to Christians' experiences?

 

[Human]

The idea of Hell doesn't become untrue or even unjust just because you don't like it.

Then God supports torture, and my morals (and yours I would imagine) are better than his.

Nobody goes to Hell who doesn't deserve it.

Then you support torture, and my morals are better than yours.

And frankly, we are not entitled to an eternity in Heaven, nor are we entitled to an eternity at all.

Then you're under the thumb of religion and self deprecate yourself, needlessly.

God literally brought us into this world and He can take us out, point blank.

God must have been too impotent, lazy or busy to bother bringing me into the world then, because my mother had to do that part.

He's done it before, and the fact that He hasn't since Noah (after which He made a covenant not to) to me sounds pretty merciful given how bad it can get down here.

No, he hasn't. No evidence exists for the flood, or for God.

Also, Hell is eternal separation from God, and so the phrase "separation from God" implies that God does not reside in Hell.

Hell is a fiction, ''gehenna'' (the word used for translation) is a real place near Jarusalem. You don't understand the book you're reading.

Even that most basic understanding of Heaven and Hell would give you to know that God resides in Heaven and the devil resides in Hell.

Heaven is not in the sky, ''it is within you''.

The devil is the one who tortures.

The devil, is the inherent dark nature of man. See ''the entirety of historical Judaism'' for further information.

Wanna talk now?

More nonsense?

You don't get to decide my beliefs or how I've come to them.

I don't have to, you're brain already did that. All I have to do is witness circular, self-fulfilling illogic.

Heck, you don't even know what they all are. But I will tell you this, simply to correct your humongous assumption: I was never threatened with torture and in no way, shape, or form am I being a good girl or saying "Yessuh Massa" to someone who commanded that I believe.

Your version of God threatens you with torture, unless you submit. For you I imagine, that worst torture ''is being separated from God'', as you say.

It seems that you have the impression that I've been force-fed Christianity to excess and I've never strayed from the path, never questioned, never doubted and never rebelled.

Obviously not enough.

I know for sure that I'm not the only one around here who has been around the block and came full-mindedly (back) to Christianity. We are to love God with all of our mind, yet you insist that we have been not only commanded, but forced to love Him without it.

Not without it, just in spite of it. What's the greatest commandment? What is the punishment for disobedience?

Simply put, you can't tell people what their faith is or how they came to it.

I know, but I can certainly make a logical argument about its circular nature.

Yet you have so much faith in your belief that you know Christians better than they know themselves.

I don't know anyone better than themselves, just like God doesn't know you better than yourself.

But why do you seek information from sources you have already decided are inherently false and unreliable through-and-through?

To see if maybe someday, some one of you can actually logically convey your profound penchant for illogic.

Seems to me like if you want to know about faith, you go to people with faith, open to their experiences.

I know about faith. I want to know why you reach for it. It's like reaching for air to grasp in your hand, impossible ever to attain. You'll spend your whole life believing this nonsense and then you'll be gone -- wasted.

I just don't understand why you're looking for truth from a source you think is completely and utterly false from the get-go.

I didn't always think it was false. I certainly do now. Religion is a bane on humanity, a hinderance, not a help.

Why is it your belief that "who meant for them to do so" is not a valid question?

Because such a question is simply a reflection of our own need to ascribe meaning. It doesn't mean anything, and it can't be answered with any meaningful, rational, real conclusion except what we imagine in our own heads.

Why does your questioning have limits?

It is not that my questioning has limits, it's that human egos often don't.

And if it's perfectly reasonable for you to limit your questioning, then why do you criticize what you perceive as the same limiting intellectual behavior coming from faithful people?

This is twisting the premise. My limitation as a rationalist isn't on questions, it's on the acceptance of fanciful, fairytale answers. It's a limit on ego, the kind of ego that demands that there must be some expressed purpose to everything ''just for us''.

And why do you think it unreasonable for a faithful person to have questions themselves on matters of faith, as opposed to all the answers to your liking?

I think it pertinent that they have questions, and I hope they keep asking them with the fervency that I am, until they, seeking logical answers as I do, refuse to accept anything less than a logical answer.

It seems that whether faithful people question or they don't, you take issue.

Questioning the degree of something's validity, its degree of easy, or uneasy, settlement within common sense, should preclude acceptance of its validity. To question is good. To question while simultaneously holding in mind the answer ''it's a matter of blind faith'' is not good. It defeats the purpose of questioning -- to arrive at settled conclusions.

What you're answering is a question of mechanisms, not origins.

The mechanism might as well be the same thing as the origin. It is by mechanism that things ''are'', by mechanism that things change, by mechanism that things progress.

We don't disagree on how raindrops, rainbows, plants, rivers, and water work. But where they come from is another question entirely.

We know where they come from -- clouds. Clouds come from water vapour. Water vapour comes from Earth. Earth comes from space. Space comes from expansion. Expansion comes from singularity of potentiality. Potentiality is always existent.

A reasonable person you must be, so I'm pretty sure you wouldn't deny cause-and-effect. So I'm curious as to why you believe that there is no Cause for this Effect.

Because the laws of the universe tell me no energy has ever been created or destroyed -- simply changed in form.

You being one who asks questions and seeks explanations, I'm honestly curious as to why "it just happened" is enough for you.

It happened like it happened.

Why does "we're just here" satiate your mind, but any kind of answer like that on any matter of Christianity or from a Christian would not be sufficient to that same mind?

Because it is actually far easier to explain things by reason of what they are and do than it is to wrap peoples' heads around in pretzels trying to mentally logistically manage the idea of some exterior being outside of what exists.

This is what I was talking about before. Because you don't see it, it must be true that I don't see it either; likewise, if you see it then I must see it.

But you don't see it. You lie, or you're deluded.

That's simply false.

False because you're saying what I didn't say. There is a logical concept called context, that we sometimes use. And context is broken when you take arguments that are specific, relative and referential, pull them out and make universal statements from their premises that render them sufficiently different form their contextual meanings that they are no longer valid.

I do see the blue sky. But that's not what makes it blue, a sky, or even visible

I didn't say it was.

There will always be people who don't see the sky (literally blind people), but it's there.

I never said blind people saw the sky. I said you and I and everyone sees the sky, now surely you're not so stupid as to be unable to understand I obviously meant people with the ability to see. Nitpicking.

You are not talking about reason. You are talking about natural knowledge, that which is taken in by one or more of the five senses.

I am talking about reason. We see the sky, and because we see it, we know and believe that it exists. We see the stars, we know likewise. These are verifiable and natural realities, not fictional fantasies or delusions.

It doesn't take a five-year-researched thoroughly-reasoned dissertation nor a compelling leap of faith to believe in the sky.

No, it doesn't.

But what I'm saying to you is, just as you and I both experience the sky, there are multitudes of people beyond the Biblical ages who have experienced God, in a real and personal way.

When beliefs are shared by others, the idiosyncratic can become normalized. Religious beliefs and delusions alike can arise from neurologic lesions and anomalous experiences, suggesting that at least some religious beliefs can be pathological. Religious beliefs, however, exist outside of the scientific domain; therefore they can be easily labeled delusional from a rational perspective.

Maybe you have not, but it is not a requirement for you to have experienced God for others to have experienced Him. The problem is you are not open to others' accounts of their experiences because you have held fast to the belief that they fundamentally can not have those experiences.

I never said people couldn't have faith, or an intense personal psychological experience interpreted religiously, in fact I know that they certainly can have those experiences. That's what delusions are -- believable experiences that only exist within ones mind. One could say everything is a delusion, in that regard.

We are not the only ones holding fast to beliefs here.

Everyone believes something.

It sounds like you have pre-diagnosed everyone with experiences of faith as delusional, and have put the burden of proof on them to prove to your liking that they are in fact, not delusional--their answers which you discard as you attribute them to those people being delusional.

The burden of proof is on them.

That is what I would call circular. "They are delusional, so they should prove to me that they're not delusional, but they can't, because they are."

To prove to me you are not delusional, you would have to prove the existence of this omniprescent creator God you believe in, who created humanity with the ability for imperfection with the premonition that they would be imperfect, predestined to be less than expectations, an unavoidable event for which he would firstly cast upon them death, disease and all the vicissitudes of life, and second create a torturous devil-den to throw any of them in who didn't believe that he sent himself to endure torture and sacrifice to appease himself for what he himself created -- all this among various stories and tales that cannot be historically verified -- like an Exodus of which no archeological evidence exists -- within a several millenia old text written by an unknown author in one of the most backwards and barbaric areas of ancient Earth.

Yea ....

You say that you understand the concept of faith, but it wasn't even an entire sentence later that you blew that statement to pieces.

Faith is believe in something that you can't have evidence for. ''A leap of faith'' as you put it. And it is, by all rational accounts, a belief not grounded in reality.

Not only is that definition incorrect in theory, it also holds not a drop of water when applied to the Christian faith. There is a multitude of historical evidence of the existence and crucifixion of Jesus Christ.

The existence of a man called Jesus I don't dispute. It's the existence of God I dispute.

Daily. I can't support it and you can't refute it, though you may try to do so as the self-appointed author and editor of all human experience. I have the sole right to speak on my experience.

Yes, you do. But the burden of proof for your extraordinary claims -- claims that go against all the known laws of nature -- that God speaks to you on a daily basis, rests squarely with you.

Okay, let's go with that condition. If faith in reasonable ideas is a reasonable form of faith, then you must use reason to judge an idea as reasonable to have reasonable faith in it

Correct.

Whatever you judge as reasonable must be not only within your power, but also within your willingness, to reason.

There's no contortion in natural reason. Logic has laws, you obey them or don't. You can ''willingly'' contort logic all you like, but then it isn't logic.

Therefore anyone's faith in anything would be determined by their power and willingness to reason.

If we lived under your definition of logic -- which is clearly something other than logic - then yes, we would. But we do not.

Under that condition, would it not then be true that those whose reasonable faith

You haven't established the faith as reasonable yet. You've established that someone needs a lot of willingness to believe something like the bible. I already knew that.

in their reasonable ideas that go beyond your reasoning would have to reason beyond either your power or ability to reason?

Their reason doesn't go ''beyond'' my reason. Their ability to believe fiction goes beyond my willingness to believe it.

You are working under the assumption that I, or even the majority of believers, came to believe after someone beat them with the God bat.

If a pastor doesn't beat you with the God bat, one read at the bible certainly will.

Experiences like that are what draw people away from faith, not to it.

Yet you all seem so willing to preach down everyone's throat.

People are much more drawn in by love and peace. Ask any saved person.

Love and peace until someone denies your God, that is. Christianity is one of the most historically violent religions on Earth, more-so than Islam. It's nonsense. It's done nothing for humanity but hinder us.

It is always a decision to believe or not believe. We may also fundamentally disagree there too, and that's okay. (I appreciate that you have shown concern about me possibly being bullied or exploited, but it was not like that.)

I am concerned, deeply concerned, that a young woman with the fundamental analytic ability for intelligent argument uses it in such dishonest ways to defend such illogical premises, such as:

I agree. To be so convinced in the belief that the universe comes from nothing and that we are here for no reason by way of no one with no tangible evidence that anything sprouts from nothing and that that must be true because otherwise a divine creator that I don't believe in tortures people in an afterlife that I don't believe in in a place that I don't believe in because it would be unjust as defined by my metamorphosed state of understanding of things that I don't believe in that I have come to by seeking out the information that I discard on sight would be blind faith and extremely dangerous indeed.

Agreed. That's why it is not a strange notion that reason and faith can go together. As you said, it is not opposition to faith.

Buddhism and Islam aren't ''opposites'' either, but I wouldn't call them ''compatible''. You and I aren't opposites, we probably aren't very compatible though.

NO. There are many scientists who are Christian, and in fact many early scientific discoveries that came out of one's motivation to understand what they acknowledged as God's creation. Trust me, you can be as scientific as you want, and anyone who tells you otherwise is simply incorrect.

You took one word, a word that wasn't the point, it wasn't even close to the point of the context, in fact is was nothing but a minor, irrelevant word that could have been replaced with ''sinful'' or ''technological'' or ''analytical'' or whatever, out of an entire paragraph loaded with genuine arguments, so you could write three longs sentences creating a disputation full of lines I didn't actually assert anything contrary to, rather than address the body of the text as it was intended.

That's intellectual dishonesty, and it's rife in this place. You're better than that.

 

[Human]

Have you not denied all that goes against your experiences or lack thereof in this very thread? Are you not attempting to impress your faith (or lack thereof, however you conceptualize it) onto others here? As a questioning person, have you never questioned your own motive for seeking out a Christian forum with an evidently closed mind to Christians' experiences?

Jesus Christ, I like. Christianity, I do not.

 

[RickyZ]

Jesus Christ, I like. Christianity, I do not.

I'm with you on that with a modifier -

Jesus Christ I love. Religion, I do not.

 

[MultilingualMessenger]

Then God supports torture, and my morals (and yours I would imagine) are better than his.

Then you support torture, and my morals are better than yours.

Then you're under the thumb of religion and self deprecate yourself, needlessly.

God must have been too impotent, lazy or busy to bother bringing me into the world then, because my mother had to do that part.

No, he hasn't. No evidence exists for the flood, or for God.

Hell is a fiction, ''gehenna'' (the word used for translation) is a real place near Jarusalem. You don't understand the book you're reading.

Heaven is not in the sky, ''it is within you''.

The devil, is the inherent dark nature of man. See ''the entirety of historical Judaism'' for further information.

More nonsense?

I am just shaking my head right now. There's really nothing to say here but to express my fundamental disagreement with the above statements.

I don't have to, you're brain already did that. All I have to do is witness circular, self-fulfilling illogic.

Your version of God threatens you with torture, unless you submit. For you I imagine, that worst torture ''is being separated from God'', as you say.

Obviously not enough.

Not without it, just in spite of it. What's the greatest commandment? What is the punishment for disobedience?

I know, but I can certainly make a logical argument about its circular nature.

I don't know anyone better than themselves, just like God doesn't know you better than yourself.

Wow. Who is forcing beliefs on who here?

To see if maybe someday, some one of you can actually logically convey your profound penchant for illogic.

I know about faith. I want to know why you reach for it. It's like reaching for air to grasp in your hand, impossible ever to attain. You'll spend your whole life believing this nonsense and then you'll be gone -- wasted.

I didn't always think it was false. I certainly do now. Religion is a bane on humanity, a hinderance, not a help.

Because such a question is simply a reflection of our own need to ascribe meaning. It doesn't mean anything, and it can't be answered with any meaningful, rational, real conclusion except what we imagine in our own heads.

That is an assertion of your belief, which I've already asked you about, which you have not answered with any meaningful, rational, real conclusions supported to my liking so it must be unreasonable and a result of blind faith. See what I did there? Are you liking this game? Do you even realize you're playing it?

It is not that my questioning has limits, it's that human egos often don't.

This is twisting the premise. My limitation as a rationalist isn't on questions, it's on the acceptance of fanciful, fairytale answers. It's a limit on ego, the kind of ego that demands that there must be some expressed purpose to everything ''just for us''.

I think it pertinent that they have questions, and I hope they keep asking them with the fervency that I am, until they, seeking logical answers as I do, refuse to accept anything less than a logical answer.

"I hope that they do what I do as I do it to come to what I've come to." Again, who is pushing beliefs on who? You are the one who believes that everyone who does not come to your conclusions is illogical.

Questioning the degree of something's validity, its degree of easy, or uneasy, settlement within common sense, should preclude acceptance of its validity. To question is good. To question while simultaneously holding in mind the answer ''it's a matter of blind faith'' is not good. It defeats the purpose of questioning -- to arrive at settled conclusions.

Sure is. Yet that is exactly what you have been doing here. You have questioned others while holding in mind the answer "it's a matter of their blind faith".

The mechanism might as well be the same thing as the origin. It is by mechanism that things ''are'', by mechanism that things change, by mechanism that things progress.

We know where they come from -- clouds. Clouds come from water vapour. Water vapour comes from Earth. Earth comes from space. Space comes from expansion. Expansion comes from singularity of potentiality. Potentiality is always existent.

No. How something works does not explain how something came to exist. Even how something keeps existing doesn't explain how it came to exist in the first place. Those are fundamentally different questions. I bet you would never believe that any house that exists was not once built, and if someone asked how it got there, no way in the world would you say "it just is" or "well, let me tell you what materials are in it and what it's good for". The first is not a sufficient answer for anyone who believes in cause and effect. The second is not an answer of origin; it's simply an answer of description.

Because the laws of the universe tell me no energy has ever been created or destroyed -- simply changed in form.

You believe in the word "form" only as a noun, but not a verb, and no way a transitive verb with a direct object other than the subject.

It happened like it happened.

You would never accept that blind faith answer from a theist. On anything. And it's funny, because I gave no such answer yet you accuse me of blind faith.

Because it is actually far easier to explain things by reason of what they are and do than it is to wrap peoples' heads around in pretzels trying to mentally logistically manage the idea of some exterior being outside of what exists.

"It is too hard my by logic, so I will not try, and anyone who tries is not using logic at all if I can't by my logic." You repeatedly and predictably measure everyone else's capabilities and possibilities of experiences by what you have experienced.

Again, what they are and do are not known through reason; they are known through observation. Those are what our natural senses tell us. I stress this point because it is important to know the difference.

But you don't see it. You lie, or you're deluded.

You are not the authority on what I see. That's what your problem is. You think that if you don't see it, all others are lying or delusional. Why not just settle with you not seeing it? Why are you dead-set on convincing me that I don't see it either? You can't possibly know that. Instead of respect my or anyone else's experiences, you have resorted to not only calling me delusional, but now a liar, even. Let me ask you this: if I lied (which I didn't), would that be a bad thing to you? And if so, why? By what moral laws? The ones in the Bible that you don't believe in, or the ones written on our hearts by the Creator that you don't believe in? What makes the accusation of being a liar so insidious if a set of books you believe to be false is one that convicts liars, as you've (falsely) convicted me?

False because you're saying what I didn't say. There is a logical concept called context, that we sometimes use. And context is broken when you take arguments that are specific, relative and referential, pull them out and make universal statements from their premises that render them sufficiently different form their contextual meanings that they are no longer valid.

I didn't say it was.

I never said blind people saw the sky. I said you and I and everyone sees the sky, now surely you're not so stupid as to be unable to understand I obviously meant people with the ability to see. Nitpicking.

Did you not in this very thread define "seeing" as "a metaphorical concept in the bible for 'recognizing' or 'understanding'"?
So by not considering blind people, are you not then limiting this discussion to people who can see? What are you then doing differently than the people you accuse of limiting this discussion to people who can "see"? Is it really nitpicking or is there a flagrant hypocrisy in your argument that you will likely refuse to address?

I never said people couldn't have faith, or an intense personal psychological experience interpreted religiously, in fact I know that they certainly can have those experiences. That's what delusions are -- believable experiences that only exist within ones mind. One could say everything is a delusion, in that regard.

You seek truth, but nothing to you is true. Why are you seeking what you reject? Or are you rejecting what you're seeking?

The burden of proof is on them.

To prove to me you are not delusional, you would have to prove the existence of this omniprescent creator God you believe in, who created humanity with the ability for imperfection with the premonition that they would be imperfect, predestined to be less than expectations, an unavoidable event for which he would firstly cast upon them death, disease and all the vicissitudes of life, and second create a torturous devil-den to throw any of them in who didn't believe that he sent himself to endure torture and sacrifice to appease himself for what he himself created -- all this among various stories and tales that cannot be historically verified -- like an Exodus of which no archeological evidence exists -- within a several millenia old text written by an unknown author in one of the most backwards and barbaric areas of ancient Earth.

Yea ....

Faith is believe in something that you can't have evidence for. ''A leap of faith'' as you put it. And it is, by all rational accounts, a belief not grounded in reality.

No. You have made a claim that I am delusional, for which you have the burden of proof. And it seems to be too big a burden for you to carry, because you have not provided any proof that I am delusional. Or a liar, for that matter. The deal is, nobody can prove to you anything if you walked in dead-set on disbelieving whatever anyone gives you because it is most certainly delusional in your mind already. That is blind faith in others' delusion.

The existence of a man called Jesus I don't dispute. It's the existence of God I dispute.

Yes, you do. But the burden of proof for your extraordinary claims -- claims that go against all the known laws of nature -- that God speaks to you on a daily basis, rests squarely with you.

You are not open to that. That's really what it comes down to, and that's what has been said in this thread before. When you ask someone of their experience, your source is them, and your proof is what they say about their experience. That's all you have when it comes to other people's experiences. Period, the end. Now if you come to the source with immediate disdain and judgment and no confidence in its trustworthiness in the first place, I really don't understand why you went to that source. Seems to me if you're so set in your belief that the source is a piece of crap you would just disregard it entirely.

If God spoke to you through a blow horn as He spoke to me and gave you every word of our conversation, you still would call me delusional and/or a liar.

If a pastor doesn't beat you with the God bat, one read at the bible certainly will.

I'm sorry you had such a bad experience with a pastor and with the Bible.

Notice how I didn't claim that you didn't or couldn't have such an experience simply because I didn't.

Notice you I didn't call you delusional or a liar for believing that it happens to some.

Notice how I didn't call you unreasonable, though there is no way for you to prove that other than saying it happened, or it happens.

Love and peace until someone denies your God, that is. Christianity is one of the most historically violent religions on Earth, more-so than Islam. It's nonsense. It's done nothing for humanity but hinder us.

Oh trust and believe that Islam and Athiests alike have done their share of atrocities. It is quite devastating that atrocities happen in the name of Christianity (or any religion for that matter), but the fact that fallible people do fallible things fallibly does not negate people's true experiences of God, and still doesn't give you license to tell others what or how they believe and can or can't experience.

If hospitals, orphanages, soup kitchens and many scientific discoveries count as nothing but a hindrance, then sure.

I am concerned, deeply concerned, that a young woman with the fundamental analytic ability for intelligent argument uses it in such dishonest ways to defend such illogical premises

Keep your faux pity. Straight up.

You took one word, a word that wasn't the point, it wasn't even close to the point of the context, in fact is was nothing but a minor, irrelevant word that could have been replaced with ''sinful'' or ''technological'' or ''analytical'' or whatever, out of an entire paragraph loaded with genuine arguments, so you could write three longs sentences creating a disputation full of lines I didn't actually assert anything contrary to, rather than address the body of the text as it was intended.

That's intellectual dishonesty, and it's rife in this place. You're better than that.

No, that is actually a very important word, in light of the ever-lasting debate of religion vs. science, as if it's a zero-sum game. Too many times I've seen too many people assert that religion and science are opposite, or if you will, "incompatible". I would guess that you would be privy to those debates and would know the importance of exactly what I previously pointed out. You simply refuse to acknowledge it or address it.

You have prejudged us at CC as fundamentally dishonest and intellectually incapable. It's no wonder you see CC that way with those glasses on.

Jesus Christ, I like. Christianity, I do not.

Really?...Jesus, who? Jesus the Son of the God you don't believe in? Jesus the teacher of lessons you don't believe in? Let me guess, your Jesus was a great guy, a great teacher. But if you don't believe His teachings to be true, which do you believe: that He was lying or that He was deluded? If we who quote Him are lying and deluded, isn't He also so from your point of view, in which case you would be admitting to liking someone who is lying and deluded?

So who do you like more, liar Jesus or deluded Jesus? Or both, as long as He's Jesus, the Son of the Big Nothing?



I'm hopeful for a response that addresses anything I've written. But if it's more of the same I'm gonna have to just pull a Matthew 10:14 and shake the dust off my feet here, as it would be un-Biblical for me to continue speaking where one is not listening. I hope you will understand, even though my potential choice of action came from a set of books you refuse to understand, or evidently even read.

 

[blue_ladybug]

...............

 

[MarcR]

Not all doubts are concerning God! If I have an opportunity to change jobs and better my financial position, God may lead me to doubt the wisdom of the move. Perhaps the likelihood of better job security on my present job outweighs the benefits of the move.

 

[Elin]

I'm with you on that with a modifier -

Jesus Christ I love. Religion, I do not.

That's a big modifier. . .and brings the whole thing into true perspective.