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.
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.
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.