To prove God not existing, atheists conflate God with invisible unicorns.

Discussion in 'Religion' started by Pachomius, Nov 8, 2014.

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  1. Jan Ardena OM!!! Valued Senior Member

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    James R,

    You’re simply attempting to explain it away. Why would you do that? Surely it’s something worth investigating.
    Belief in God is natural to humans, and by God I mean, the original source, the original cause. If Flew was off his rocker, his natural faculties would still be intact i.e. hearing, smelling, feeling… etc, and so would his capacity to accept God, and therefore believe.

    IOW, shut down any opportunity to comprehend and understand God.

    We must keep God out of the picture! Is that it James?

    One simply has to accept it without bias, then as one understands what is being said, one can therefore ask pertinent questions and make informed decisions as to whether it is feasible or not.

    Something like this, but accept a thought without believing it.

    "It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." - attributed to Aristotle (Nichomachean Ethics).

    I dare say we’re all stupid in the light of the truth. But I didn’t say that atheists are stupid. Stupidity does not necessarily arise through a lack of intelligence, neither through ignorance. A child isn’t stupid be he doesn’t understand that his parents have to pay the mortgage, the reason why he can’t get Xbox One.

    In all his campaigning, Flew didn’t stop to think about God, and his relationship to God.
    He effectively wasted his time sprouting, what eventually became for him, nonsense, and affected others with it.

    If you don’t accept God, for who and what God is (character), then how can you decide that the notion of God or belief in God is absurd?

    Acceptance is different from belief. Acceptance means you suspend belief or disbelief, and take everything at face value. Then as you begin to understand, you begin to make informed decisions on the whole idea.

    If you accept that God is the original cause, then you must accept that everything IS evidence of God. If at this point you decide that is illogical, and has no basis in reality (lest it be proven within the logical framework), then you have effectively cut yourself off from understanding how the whole thing works, and now see God purely as some illogical idea with no basis in (your) reality. This is the level at which the ghostly teapot is aimed. It has no basis in informing one who or what God is. It serves to cut ones acceptance of God, and increase ones non acceptance (ignorance).

    I’m not redefining the term, I’m looking beyond the term. Theism is a real thing in that there are people who believe in God. But that’s all, the term ‘’theism’’, can offer.


    Faith is a different thing. We all have faith, because we all (or at least most of us) have goals that we want to achieve. The goal dictates how much faith we must have. If we want to eventually get married, make a family, buy a nice home, and so on. That doesn’t require as much faith as wanting to be a famous rock star.

    I don’t see the point of getting hung up on the existence thing. Experience tells me one cannot prove God’s existence to someone else without that person accepting that proof. But that is unscientific and does not really satisfy the enquiry. And it works the same for non-existence.

    As it is said ‘’ "the absence of evidence is not theevidence of absence".

    Reality checkpoint: There will never be any evidence that lead every person to God exists or does not exist. Therefore, to keep bringing it up, is simply a waste of time.

    But is that belief in God, or belief in what i been told. If it is belief in God, then at some point that person will carry on inquiring about God, because the person believes in God. It stands to reason, if you believe in something, you want to know about that thing. If you believe in what you were indoctrinated with, it stands to reason that you will shun everything that contradicts what you were taught.

    The bolded section is incorrect in my opinion.

    Belief that God exists is not something the human being has to cultivate, as it is a natural aspect. History bears witness to this. One does not need science, or scientific evidence to believe God exists.

    Scriptures are more than just words. In fact good books, whatever the subject matter, are more than just words. Have you never read a book or article which physically/mentally affects you beyond your immediate control. Make you laugh, cry, angry, feel horny… Those words, upon understanding, affect different parts of your psyche, filtering down through your body. Scriptures does that, but it also affects you, the observer, the one who wills the mind and the body. In that connection you realise thta though you are attached to this body, you are not this physical body. This is the beginning of knowledge of self and God. All the great spiritual Masters, Jesus included, sought to wake people up to this.

    Belief in God does not mean one has knowledge of God, or one is better, safer, or happier then one who does not believe. It is neither something that one can choose to do. What we can do is control how we perceive it, we can ignore it b occupying our time in ways that render it dormant, allowing us to forget about it.

    Belief in God means we can access that information (scripture) easier than if we didn’t believe.

    There are different levels of belief, as many as there are people. No two people can believe at exactly the same level, just as no two people are exactly alike.

    To sum up, belief is something that is activated (or not) according to individual. Atheism and Theism are simply gross categories we put ourselves, nothing more, nothing less.

    This is my opinion.

    Jan.
     
    Last edited: Nov 20, 2014
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  3. Jan Ardena OM!!! Valued Senior Member

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    Pachomius,

    My concept of God is that God is the original person, and from this person everything comes into being.

    If you can do that, it would be great because it would mean we rise above arguments of there is no evidence for god, theists are delusional, who created god, and a whole host of what will eventually become waste of time arguments.
    It will be interesting to see how you do this.

    I find it strange how there are different concepts of God, when really there is and can only be one concept of God.
    Are all the concepts derived from the one concept, or are they whimsical concepts? But why have a whimsical concept for something that has it's own concept?

    jan.
     
    Last edited: Nov 20, 2014
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  5. Motor Daddy Valued Senior Member

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    I'd say they probably started worshiping fire, the sun, the stars, lightening, etc. At some point someone probably said, this is a bunch of crap! Since we can create things on earth, then somebody must have created the earth too! None of us could have done it, so it must be some guy in the sky that created earth. The other people looked at him and proclaimed him to be the king! Long live the guy that figured out that there is a guy in the sky!!

    Edit: And then, of course, the people will fight to their grave over defending that guy in the sky! They will kill people in the name of their guy! History has been about defending the guy in the sky! Current daily activities revolve around the guy in the sky. "In God we trust" is printed on our money. Christmas (present season) brings joy to merchandisers financial statements!!!! Without it, well, let's just say it would be a bad year for store owners, and the gubment!
     
    Last edited: Nov 20, 2014
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  7. Captain Kremmen All aboard, me Hearties! Valued Senior Member

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    What about visible unicorns?
     
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  8. Aqueous Id flat Earth skeptic Valued Senior Member

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    You know that's not true, so why post it? Atheists disbelieve that. The concept is an ancient one, handed down through millennia of tradition as superstition, myth, legend and fable. Atheists do not accept it, usually because they recognize that it's all fiction. In any case, religious people do not necessarily believe it either. You are trying pigeonhole all the world's religions into you personal (Christian?) belief system. That's stupidly egocentric.

    No. Not all religious people are "theists" and not all of them have a concept of the universe, and not all of them have a Creation Myth that is compatible with yours.

    False. Atheists merely reject the belief in God, regardless of what they think about the origins of the Universe.

    What is that supposed to mean? Is that your personal fantasy of how the collision of conflicting ideologies plays out? Because it has little or nothing to do with the real world. In actuality, there are societies that make war on one another and commit heinous atrocities in the name of their so-called religions. There is no universal peaceful dialogue between conflicting ideologies as you naively presume.

    That sounds childishly moronic. Science texts in the early education programs teach Big Bang theory, evolution, the need for stem cell research, the woman's right to abortion, the current trend toward accepting gay marriage, and anthropogenic climate change. All of these are bitterly opposed by certain religious groups.

    Get real, man.

    No. They will continue to hold up anonymous myth, legends and fables as reference material, and in some cases they will stubbornly oppose all evidence from science sources about the origins of the Universe, and the origins of humans.

    You seem to be in denial of the culture wars.

    No. Atheists will disbelieve in God, regardless of what they think about the Universe and its origins. More childish nonsense, as if you are living under a rock or something.

    I already answered this, but you ignored it. The "nose" evolved from nares in fish, which an adaptation to improve their motility in changes depths and pressures. That is, by surfacing and filling air sacs through their nares, they become more buoyant.

    Gibberish.

    That's ridiculous. There is nothing to agree upon here except the fact that atheists reject the belief in God.

    That willl never happen. But dream on.

    There is no template. As you have been repeatedly told, atheism is a rejection of the belief in God. Period.

    No, you simply need to get real, come u off the nonsense and childishness.

    I am an atheist, so I think I speak on behalf of the majority of them when I tell you: we reject the belief in God. Period.
     
  9. Captain Kremmen All aboard, me Hearties! Valued Senior Member

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    Religious faith has historically part of most (all?) societies, but I suspect that it is due to culture rather than genetic inheritance.
    I could be convinced otherwise.
    The existence or otherwise of God, is not of central importance as regards religion as a cultural phenomenon.
    Would you agree?

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture
     
    Last edited: Nov 20, 2014
  10. Captain Kremmen All aboard, me Hearties! Valued Senior Member

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    People sometimes believe in things which are contradictory.
    Belief, and truth, are not necessarily the same thing.
     
  11. sculptor Valued Senior Member

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    They are pink!
    and
    I don't know wtf they eat, but their farts could identify them to a blind man.
     
  12. Jan Ardena OM!!! Valued Senior Member

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    Captain Kremmen,

    ''Religious faith'', and straight up ''belief in God'', aren't the same thing, and the way you entwine them here, confuses the issue, rather giving clarity.

    Religion really isn't the issue here, unless you take one religion and examine it.
    From a theistic perspective, trying to prove the existence of God in a way that can satisfy a skeptic, is a waste of time. One simply gets drawn into a world of diversion. If one believes God does not exist, I doubt there is anything that can be said, or done by another, to change that person's position. I would encourage the atheist to stay as he/she is, rather than change because of what I say or do.

    jan.
     
  13. spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

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    You keep saying the same thing over and over. And I've already addressed your concept, so let's get on with the debate.

    Stating that God is the creator doesn't prove anything. We know how complex things can come about without a creator.
    Stating that he is the operator is slightly more interesting, but we don't see any evidence that any part of the universe requires outside operation.
    Stating that things with a beginning require a creator is also a non-starter. We don't know if the universe had a beginning or is eternal. If God can be eternal, then the universe can be eternal with a God. We do know that things with a beginning don't always require an intelligent cause.

    I don't care what your concept of a God is, we can start from any assumptions.
    My concept of God is that it's a fable to placate ignorant and fearful minds. It is an offshoot of an evolutionary trait, which is to seek the agent of any complex event or change in the environment. Because in nature, it is advantageous to be able to understand the behavior of life forms based on the evidence they leave.
     
  14. Yazata Valued Senior Member

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    I don't either.

    My concept of 'God' goes something like this:

    First, there's the word itself. It's a word from the English language. Other languages have words that seem to be used in similar ways, more or less.

    In some cases the similarity in range of meanings is close, as between English 'God' and German 'Gott'. In other cases it's much looser, as with the Japanese word 'Kami'. This creates problems when text from one language is translated into another language, since the range of connotations associated with words that translators are treating as equivalent might actually be significantly different. That's doubly true when we are considering ancient texts written in very dissimilar cultures thousands of years ago.

    And second, within every language community words are used in a whole variety of different ways. What a word is intended to convey can vary a great deal, depending on who is using the word, who that person is addressing, and on context.

    The English word 'God' is notoriously slippery in that regard. At one end of its range of meanings, we find the 'God of the philosophers'. In this usage, the word 'God' refers to whatever it is that fulfills a set of metaphysical functions: the reason why there is something rather than nothing, first-cause, the source of cosmic order, and so on. And at the opposite end of the spectrum, we find the 'God of the Bible', a 'person' who appeared to Moses at Sinai, formed a covenant with the Jewish people, revealed the Jewish law, inspired a whole series of prophets, and in the New Testament, incarnated in human flesh in the person of Jesus Christ, announcing a new path to salvation. Between these two extremes lie an almost limitless variety of hybrids, varying by theologian, denomination and religious writer. In addition, the Muslim 'Allah' has been included within the scope of the English word 'God' since medieval times, and more recently pretty much any even vaguely monotheistic deity has been embraced by the word, from any culture or any period of history, no matter how different the original mythology and philosophy.
     
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  15. Captain Kremmen All aboard, me Hearties! Valued Senior Member

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    Would you say that you can have religious faith in a God that does not exist?
    Would you say that a Hindu, worshipping Krishna, for example, has religious faith?
    Or does such a person merely believe?
     
  16. Captain Kremmen All aboard, me Hearties! Valued Senior Member

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    That isn't so unless you want to assert that a particular religion is different to the others,
    If religion is a part of the culture of a society, then they are equivalent.
     
  17. spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

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    You can have religious faith in a concept that is not theistic.
     
  18. Captain Kremmen All aboard, me Hearties! Valued Senior Member

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    You can certainly have something very close to a religious belief.
    But Jan distinguishes between faith and belief.
    I was wondering if he thought that faith involved other religions, or just Christianity.
     
  19. Jan Ardena OM!!! Valued Senior Member

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    I don't know what religious faith is, but if someone say's that they have faith in something that doesn't exist (God or anything else), I would be dubious of that person.

    If one worships Krishna, then they have faith in in Krishna.

    jan.
     
  20. Jan Ardena OM!!! Valued Senior Member

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    All cultures have a system of education, but the education itself differs from society to society. It is the same with religion, it is one thing in it's pure form, but it differs from institute to institute
    jan.
     
    Last edited: Nov 20, 2014
  21. Motor Daddy Valued Senior Member

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    I think what you're saying is that people are taught to be religious, probably at a very young age? That sounds like child abuse!
     
  22. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    Unless, of course, you believed in God, and have a working memory.

    Indeed it is - but the predatory and unethical and amoral nature of evangelical Abrahamic monotheists is so well established throughout history that the likely lesson is a redundant one.
    When the majority of humans have lived and died without adopting monotheistic belief, calling it "natural" is not a simple assertion. Many odd presumptions are natural to humans in particular circumstances - it's natural for a small plane pilot falling out of the sky in a cloudwrapped descending spiral to pull up on the stick to get out of the descent, for example, and only with careful training and practice will they automatically avoid making that lethal mistake - and the particular circumstances in which belief in a singular deity co-morphic with the God of the Abrahamic tradition becomes "natural" are worth investigating. But clearly such a belief is not universal or even very common, anthropologically.
     
  23. Jan Ardena OM!!! Valued Senior Member

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    James R,


    If God exists, then He is your God too, but your denial of Him, despite not believing He even exists, is noteworthy.

    If God exists, I would have thought everything we perceive to be a clear demonstration of His power. . Wouldn’t you. What is it that atheists doubt exactly?

    Regarding messing with the laws of nature, are you telling me that anything that occurs within nature wouldn't be deemed natural by God deniers? Would we still not be in the same argumentative position?

    Come back with something that can only be caused by God.

    I know. It’s a bummer isn’t it?

    Better to just get on with your life, than trying to prove God’s existence by occurrences that could be have their explanation in the natural.

    Maybe they want the mainstream humans to remain ignorant so that they have a better chance of totally controlling them.

    I’m still left wondering why you choose FSM’s, and celestial crockery.

    It just seems weird. But if I was looking for magical singing and dancing knives and forks, I would need to see them, or hear about them from people who have seen them, but there doesn’t seem to be much instruction on how to find them.
    Fortunately the situation is completely different with regards to God. Although we cannot see Him with our mundane senses, we have enough intelligence, and the ability to understand who and what He is.

    Thank God for these human husks. Eh?

    Theists don’t struggle with the wording of that explanation, because the wording is silly and childish. Even you know that even though you won’t admit it.

    The struggle comes in discussions when the atheist begins to go down that silly route, putting an end to the discussion. Nobody benefits man.

    So what’s your problem?

    The atheist argument does not have a good criteria for knowing what would be good evidence. The only thing they can come up with is something purposely done in nature that wouldn’t normally occur.

    But as I said before, you will just explain it away, or order everyone to put it in the - 'I don’t know box', until you come up with an explanation that satisfies your atheist palette. That's what you guys do.

    I get what the overt idea, is.


    I’ve no problem with that. But it still does nothing with regards finding the truth, and it’s only the truth that we can rely on. If thousands, hundreds, even tens of peoples testimony have similar explanations, I would be more inclined to believe them than the skeptics who reduce everything to ‘’tricks of the mind’’. At least vary your oppression.

    Why? One can accept the concept of something without believing in it. Do you agree?

    How does one voluntarily believe IN something? Do they say: Hm! I think I’ll believe that aliens visit earth’’?

    What is it about ‘’magic’’ that leads one to believe in ghosts?
    Does it follow that if you don’t believe in ‘’magic’’, you can’t believe in ghosts? And what does ‘’laws of physics’’ have to do with ghosts?

    Just letting you know I didn’t say that.

    Obviously this is your own perspective, so I will try and address from that pov. If it’s evolutionary, it’s natural, then ghosts exist because humans see ghosts, and humans are purely natural products. In that case everything humans do is absolutely correct as it all exists purely within and by, nature.

    I call that, the answers at the back of the book. I suppose from a religious perspective that could be seen as the mercy of God. Ultimately everyone can be liberated, regardless of ther condition.

    God is essential, because only through Him can we liberate ourselves from the bondage of material existence.

    As opposed to The Spaghetti Bolognaise Monster and, The Dodgy Supernatural Milk Jug.

    How do you know He isn’t your God too?

    One just doesn’t KNOW stuff. That’s not how it works, not even in the world of science.

    Jan.
     
    Last edited: Nov 20, 2014
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