For some religious people, it seems like it’s not enough to have faith. No. You have to have “proof” that there is a God. And it’s not enough for just you to worship God. No. You have to emotionally blackmail everyone else by telling them they are going to hell because they are an atheist, or they’re incapable of being decent people because only God can judge who is decent and God hates atheists, or, the latest one I’ve seen, a guy gets on here and says it’s only “logical” for an atheist to conclude that they ought to kill themselves. ???
OMG, poor atheists! Theists constantly badgering atheists that they are basically worthless. Is that the holy spirit in theists? To condemn and misrepresent what atheists “must” believe in order to be “atheists”? Atheists cannot possibly be happy or content or decent people or at least feel at peace in what are inevitable sorrows of most human beings?
As an agnostic, it’s cringeworthy to watch some theists talk shit about atheism. It makes me feel more compassion for atheists than I do theists.
Telling atheists that their only “logical” conclusion is to kill themselves doesn’t seem very brotherly to me. Nor is telling atheists that they can’t believe in atheism and then present a clearly fallacious dodgy argument for why that is. Is lying and fallacious arguing a necessary evil of theism? If there is a God, would God approve of stuff like that? It sounds kind of hypocritical to me. But I’m just a mortal so what do I know about God. Maybe God is the great asshole in the sky?
Before I became a Buddhist I was an atheist for over a decade. I certainly understand the mental sentiment.
I learned long ago arguing with atheists is a fool’s errand, people believe in or don’t believe in whatever they want to. It’s as simple as that and there’s no way around it.
As for material evidence of spirituality, faith, or religion I find it unnecessary, there are limits to empiricism and scientific materialism where the human experience transcends both.
Buddhists exist because they need to exist to claim that they don’t exist so if they claim that they don’t exist then they are merely liars that exist.There is no life in the physical body binary processing machine which exists whether its a liar or not.
Buddhists misrepresent reality by claiming that they are a misrepresentation of reality (an illusion).
You are wasting your time with inward only meditation Mr Authoritarian.You will never understand consciousness and reality with such cognitively biased practices.
For some antireligious people, it seems like it’s not enough to have historical evidence and philosophical arguments supporting your belief in God and the resurrection. No. You have to say there IS no evidence, no deductive arguments. And it’s not enough for just you to deny the evidence and arguments, not to mention refuse to follow the evidence where it leads. No. You have to shame everyone else by telling them they are leaning on a crutch in bad faith because they’re incapable of being decent people without knowing God loves them regardless, and that somehow, AT THE SAME TIME, they actually think God hates atheists.
It makes me think the “spiritual but not religious” agnostics are a lot more rational than the “freedom from religion” apologists.
There may be a God but it’s a matter of faith, not one of evidence. Evidence can go both ways and proof of either God or no God is unattainable at all.
Which evidence supports both atheism and theism, or whichever alternate positions you have in mind?
If you are saying intellectual assent is not the same as trust/faith, I agree. I believe my elderly dad exists (this is not a matter of faith), but would I trust him to (have faith that he would) catch me if I tripped? No. He would try, but his ankle, back, etc., is shot. Does that lack of trust serve as a defeater of his existence? Only if not having a shot ankle is a prerequisite for his existence (so, no, it’s not a defeater).
Evolutionary processes as understood currently leave a person open to believe either atheism or theism depending on how one interprets the evidence. If you believe there is a God, then you may be right. If you believe there is no God, then you may be right.
If something can happen on its own, how would that be an argument against God‘s (or anyone else’s) existence? That’s like saying free will is an argument against God‘s existence. But we wouldn’t even exist to act freely if God wasn’t sustaining the existence of everything that is contingent.
But I think there are a lot of good arguments for design (and not just your average design from humans subject to time). I think a lot of systems are irreducibly complex.
But I can also vibe with theistic evolutionists. I don’t think this is one of the “essential“ doctrines of any faith.
I don’t remember the real Satyr being so bad at grammar. …but my memory is going to crap.
What you did just now was not to argue against omniscience. Your argument was against free will, given God’s omniscience. But it is a crap argument. This is about both omnipotence and omniscience. Think of all the wars fought to obtain or maintain freedom. We would not have those freedoms without those wars—we know what conditions we need to secure in order to allow for those freedoms to flourish. A show of strength, and granting that knowledge is power, does not negate freedom. In fact, true power sets free. You can absolutely know what someone is going to do in particular conditions and make sure those conditions happen or don’t happen … due to their freedom to act, which can be both from their character and shape their character. If they had no freedom to act, they would just be doing action-reaction like an apple falling from a tree, rather than being the one to catch it before it gets to the ground … or throw it at your head and turn it into apple-flavored brain sauce.
The biblical story of Adam and Eve is how we had all access to quality, but we gave it up for alienation…and we’ve been dealing with the cognitive dissonance poorly ever since. It took a dude dying on a cross to try to drive the point home to us that we don’t earn quality… that all we need is restoration of relationship… and we’re still missing the point.
The necessary is in every moment a new beginning subsuming possibility. This thing began whole.
Atheism is (somewhat) irrational when it comes to the nature of reality, which seems to adhere to George Berkeley’s Idealism. But existence is so strange that atheism cannot be entirely ruled out, even with Idealism. But given the latter, and the example of parentage in biological species, it is more likely that the consciousness of a human being is generated by a Parent consciousness, as opposed to the brain having the power to magically conjure consciousness from sheer nonexistence.
I think atheists are blind and suffer from a cognitive distortion of how reality actually works, but even so it is either fair warning or dirty pool to threaten them with Hell. Perhaps both. It’s just how some theists go about it, really.
Yeah, but if it were true and they were really going to Hell, at least someone warned them!
As for the OP, where do I start? Feel sorry for everyone. We’re all going though stuff and a lot of it we don’t even talk about. Doesn’t matter what side you’re on atheist/theist….doesn’t matter. This isn’t what religion is about. The religious are typically very compassionate and caring as Jesus Christ tells us to be in the Bible. Sorry you had a bad experience with these kinds of people. They’re what we would call hypocrites that obviously are not following scripture where we are supposed to love one another and give a damn about eachother because Jesus said for us to. People are assholes. Christians can be the worst because they can be hypocrites and not listen to Jesus. Anyway, read the Bible and pray. That’s going to be a loving a experience with God and with Jesus and the angels.
So a magical agency…rather than a biological source…which you cannot comprehend ans so dismiss, because you so desperately prefer the magical external agency hypothesis.
So, rather than saying I do not know, you say…I do know….but I cannot justify what I pretend to know, right?
Isn’t that what man has been doing from the dawn of time?
Fire was mysterious, so it was ascribed to spirits,….then earthquakes, solar eclipses, the sun itself…anything man cannot udnerstand and makes him feel insecure, becomes metaphysical…magical…..supernatural.
He gives it a name, and professes to know its nature….Just because he cannot cope with the incomprehensible….So dependent he becoems that even when the incomprehensible is given a rational explanation, he dismisses it…because ti is not certain enuogh….not comforting enough…..
His anxieties are not placated sufficiently…..he needs something hopeful, positive, self-serving….so he creates mass beliefs or mutually supportive delusions.
If there is a God, then I cannot believe that a good God would send people to hell just for doubting God’s existence. But if that is the case, then send me to Hell. I’d rather be sent to Hell than go to the Heaven of a cruel and malicious God.
The world is a shit show. When God actually does something good to alleviate the suffering of all those who suffer in this world of his, then I’ll actually believe in a good God. Until then, I’m agnostic. Heck, maybe there’s no God at all.
“But if that is the case, then send me to Hell. I’d rather be sent to Hell than go to the Heaven of a cruel and malicious God.”
The situation could very well be that absurd. There could be some giant energy monster (i don’t call it ‘god’ because a world like this would not be created by a ‘god’) that is quite willing to send you to hell forever for whatever reason after you die.
Now, if this were true, one certainly wouldn’t want to be on its side. As a matter of principle (unless you are a sadist or a masochist), you would distance yourself from anything to do with this creator.
Also don’t forget the other possibility… which i had explained at PN so long ago. Everything we believe could be perfectly backward; god does exist, and the true test by god could be to see who had the balls to reject religion. Those who grovel their entire lives hoping to gain the approval of some god that will let them keep living after they die, etc., are the mortal ones. These invalids just die, and there’s nothing left of em. But those who lived true to their convictions get rewarded with more life.
