There is no question of believing in God, if God's existence isn't a forgone conclusion. The atheist mind set has set the standard as to what God's existence must be, and entail. Yet the atheist is a person without God. The standard for what constitutes God existence, cannot be dictated by a people who are without God. Yet that is the demand. It is a speculative demand, based on an idea, or ideas of what God is. And that is the best. We have been conditioned, thinking the atheist mindset is the standard, when in fact they are without God (the emperors new clothes). We believe that this advancement in science and technology, brilliant as they are, negate the need for theism. So we try and explain God in a secular way, that will appease the atheist mind, and therein lies the difficult. We are trying to describe the clothes on the naked emporer, rather than just tell the truth, regardless of ridicule,. The emperor is naked. Jan.
I believe that is how you see yourself. I believe that is the best explanation from your perspective. Jan.
I will put it differently, an atheist tries to see the God from his understanding of worldly concepts, and discards immediately because it does not satisfy his preconceived notion of existence and objective reality (worldly concepts). The argument between a theist and an atheist about the existence of God will always remain inconclusive. Good that this thread is smooth and without serious abuses.
Isn't that the point? That defines an atheist. The whole idea of looking for God as though God is somehow an entirely separate entity, is what it means to be without God' Jan.
I Might As Well Tell You Five and Three are Equal Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!Neocogito: Ergo, click to ask why. If you cannot discuss religion and religious behavior without erasing religious people from the discussion, it isn't a discussion. At the heart of the issue is a simple, straightforward question: • Why do you participate in these discussions at all, Dave? Let us skip back about a week, when we traded posts about definitions↑; in the end, you made a certain point, and I held myself answered. That you ended up irrationally claiming both sides of the coin isn't surprising; at Sciforums that's pretty much what atheists do when presented with the question. And you made your point well↑; it's just that you basically leave only one reason to participate in these discussions, which in turn is to troll them. Really, it's not constructive. Our example arises in the current phase of our discussion. And, you know, I should probably mention, for the record, it really is a strange thing to witness someone who is, technically, correct, blowing it by not comprehending their own argument↑. To you, apparently not. Congratulations. What, exactly, is that worth to anyone you might be telling it to in this discussion? Well, it is useful as a signal that one would be foolish to expect rational discourse. You do not get to define a religious person's values, Dave. We discussed this. You even skipped out on a specific example↑ in order to pretend confusion about what it exemplified. It's easy enough to let such bad faith pass in the moment, but here we are, right back to dealing with your problem. You do not get to write the values for religious people; you do not get to define what the symbols mean to them. To wit, you do not get to decide that God and unicorns mean the same thing to other people: Thank you for clarifying. You are exactly correct: You get to hold an opinion. In any context that you might use the word "academic", the word "fraudulent" is also in play: If you wish to discuss religion and religious behavior, you cannot reasonably exclude what religious people say. It is exactly irrational to insist that you can define religious people's values. You want to call that academic, I'll call it academic fraud. So let us get this clear, DaveC426913: If you require exclusion of a large and valid data set in order to have an academic discussion, you are an academic fraud. Your refusal to recognize other people is your problem, Dave; it is how you invalidate them. Think of it this way: Self-reporting studies are often problematic, but the solution is most assuredly not to eliminate the self-reported data and just make up the results yourself. Yet it's nothing more than you demand. You might not be able to tell the difference between God and a unicorn, and perhaps that's actually a deliberate result; the problem is you have to ignore large and fecund records literary and historical in order to justify inflicting your value assignments unto others. In the end, sure, I get your argument, but, you know, congratulations, it's exactly worthless. And, you know, it's one thing to note your right to speak your mind, but at the same time we should also consider your responsibility to avoid willful antisocial behavior. "Let me tell you what you think" is not an academic discussion, Dave: "Without God" and "without unicorns" are only remotely equivalent in a perspective that cares none what belief in either actually means. In the end, you render your own argument unreliable; your critique of other people's beliefs has nothing to do with those other people." It just seems you're trying to post woefully uneducated tinfoil in order to disrupt discussions; calling it "academic" is terribly fraudulent. Childish caricatures of religious people, crafted to serve your sentimental and aesthetic needs, does not an academic discussion make. When your argument is more about denigrating what you hate instead of actually comprehending a phenomenon, it isn't scientific, academic, intelligent, or even decent. And if you're just going to pointlessly muck up threads like that, then, we can only wonder why. You aren't capable of having the God/unicorn discussion in a proper academic context, so stow the self-righteousness. Bigotry is as bigotry does, Dave: If you can't have a discussion about religion without silencing religious people, why do you bother at all, and why should anyone else? Let me know. I'm very interested in the answer. Meanwhile, I might as well suggest that five and three are equal. And when you point out that five and three are, by definition, precluded from being equal, I will remind you that such definitions are, by your own expressed academic outlook, irrelevant; that is to say, five and three are equal if anyone is allowed to write their own definitions regardless of the real ones. Functionally, it's only problematic to do so if one obliges others to the irrational, sentimentally and aesthetically prioritized make-believe. By no definition, however, is such behavior "academic".
That argment could be applied to any discussion where two people disagree. "I think you are wrong in your belief of X." "Don't you dismiss me." "Were I dismissing you, we wouldn't be talking about this." I disagree with the views. That is not dismissing the people. Expressing my views doesn't "erase" anyone. This is a discususon where we are discussing our viewpoints. How is it possible to hold a discussion if you're going to try to tell me I can't hold or express my views on the matter? (It's a rhetorical question; I already know the correct answer.) It is quite possible to respect people while at the same time disagreeing deeply with them. A meta-question. I am discussing it, and that's really all that's important. - as if I have to defend why I am participating in a discussion on a forum. This seems to be another one of your attempts to silence an opposing viewpoint. Now, viewpoints with which you disagree "irrational"... And now viewpoints with which you disagree are "trolling"... Stay on-topic. The topic is "faith", not me, or my reasons for participating.
Are you really saying that one can't 'believe in' God unless one believes for no reason? I think that most members of the theistic traditions would probably disagree with that. Atheists make up their own minds about whether they believe in something. Isn't that true of you too? How could it be any other way? The standard for what will convince a particular individual of something is going to be up to that individual. If theists want atheists to agree with them, the theists will have to convince the atheists. If atheists want theists to agree with them, the atheists will have to convince the theists. That's just how it works. And why can't atheists be the judge of what will convince them? Not believing in the existence of God doesn't necessarily invalidate their judgement. Psychiatrists set the standard for what constitutes a psychotic delusion and (hopefully) they are without psychotic delusions. If you think that the atheist is using the wrong criterion, if you think that they should be conceiving of the whole subject in a different way, explain how they should be conceiving of it and why. It's up to you to make that argument and to do it convincingly. So once again, what is YOUR 'mindset'? What do you believe that you 'have' but all the rest of us lack? That's especially problematic if you are unwilling to even consider the question of God's existence. How are you so sure that you aren't just deluding yourself? Is 'God' just a personal subjective feeling or belief? Or is God supposed to be something more than that, something with cosmic significance that (unlike psychotic delusions) possesses objective reality in the broader world we all share? Everyone already has their own subjectivity and if you want other people to recognize your subjective views as better and more authoritative than their own, then you will have to venture out into the world of objectivity. You 'believe in' God, I fully acknowledge that. In itself, that fact isn't interesting. (Neither is the fact that atheists don't.) The question that interests me is what 'believing in' God means and whether 'God' is something that people other than you should believe in too. I'm interested in what kind of arguments and explanations you can produce in God's behalf. It's potentially a very important question. After all, if God and God's role in the universe is anything like theists claim, then God would be the most important being in existence. It would obviously be tremendously important to have the right ideas about and relationship to God. I don't think that humanity forming a better understanding of how different parts of the physical universe are structured and interact even addresses many of the motives that religion (not necessarily theist) addresses. I think that Stephen Jay Gould might have been close to being right with his 'non-overlapping magisteria' idea. How would you rather 'explain God'? How should that be done on your terms, in a non-secular way? And there you go with the suggestions of your own superiority, because you believe that you 'have' something that you are unwilling/unable to talk about. Apparently it's your own conviction on this point that supposedly gives you what you believe is special authority on the subject of religion. I'm not convinced that you have any authority on the subject.
Says you, but it's only functionally true if we ignore function. How can you call a fallacy a discussion? • Expressing my views doesn't "erase" anyone ― That's true insofar as it goes, but it is not a complete expression of the circumstance: Your critique of other people's beliefs has nothing to do with those other people. You've already agreed with that statement. Expressing your views is not in and of itself a discussion; the only thing you can discuss, it seems, is yourself. • How is it possible to hold a discussion if you're going to try to tell me I can't hold or express my views on the matter? ― I think you need to stop with the fallacies, Dave. You use the word "academic", but here's the thing: Whenever I put considerations of other people in front of you, all you can talk about is yourself. Consider #177↑, in which you truncated the quote in such a manner as to skip out on the comparison and redefine the quesetion according to your own perspective. I will now offer you a comparison from the real world: → In 2005, Stephanie Coontz published a book called Marriage, A History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage. It's a fascinating volume, and very well researched at that. But here's the thing about behavioral and social sciences: There is a record to attend. Consider, please, a paragraph from the introduction: Worrying about the decay of marriage isn't just a Western habit. In the 1990s, sociologist Amy Kaler, conducting interviews in a region of souther Africa where divorce has long been common, was surprised to hear people say that marital strife and instability were new to their generation. So Kaler went back and looked at oral histories collected fifty years earlier. She found that the grandparents and great-grandparents of the people she was interviewing in the 1990s had also described their own marital relations as much worse than the marriages of their parents' and grandparents' day. "The invention of a past filled with good marriages," Kaler concluded, is one way people express discontent about other aspects of contemporary life. For her own part, Coontz gets a pretty good line in, as well: Reviewing the role of marriage in different societies in the past ... I came to reject two widespread ... theories about how marriage came into existence ... the idea that marriage was invented so men could protect women and the opposite idea that it was invented so men could exploit women. Instead, marriage spoke to the needs of the larger group. It converted strangers into relatives and extended cooperative relations beyond immediate family or small band by creating far-flung networks of in-laws. Now, the reason I'm putting this in front of you is just to make a point. Kaler, for instance, wanted to know the what, how, and why of prior beliefs, so she looked at the record, and compared it to the record she had from the current generation. Coontz actually makes that assertion about in-laws as a strangely exasperated result; it seems the only consistent aspect throughout her review of the record, that marriage is virtually inherently socioeconomic and sociopolitical regardless of psychosocial or psychomoral framework. And this is the key: "Only to a theist. To an atheist, not so much." Your assessment↑ deliberately ignores function. Yeah, we get "not so much" to an atheist, but, okay, so ... why are we discussing this, then? Your critique of religious belief and behavior ignores actual religious people. By comparison to, say, Kaler and Coontz, your exploration starts by dismissing the record and redefining the belief and practice of other people according to your aesthetics. It's not a question of whether you can hold or express my views on the matter; it's a question of how you express your views on the matter. Respecting other people requires acknowledging them. By comparison, what you're doing is pretty much asserting anthropology according to your aesthetics and only hostile regard toward the actual record. We get, for instance, that you see no functional difference between the monotheistic godhead and the unicorn, but for believers the difference is massive. Your critique of their beliefs and behaviors should probably account for what they believe, instead of write the script for them. If, for instance― This is exquisite in its naivete. You have, in a very succinct nutshell, captured the essence of subjectivity. (#162↑) ―you should deign to criticize Jan Ardena, then― Only to a theist. To an atheist, not so much. (#177↑) ―your critique probably ought to attend his context; as perpetually wrong about logic, philosophy, and history as Jan Ardena seems to be, I can assure you that the absence of God would be a far more significant belief to him than the absence of unicorns. In order to establish your equivalence, you functionally dismiss the entire historical and literary records regarding how people treat either concept. So let us set something straight: You are not being "academic"↑. But what are you discussing? I think it's pretty difficult to complain that someone is trying to silence you when the question is why you're trying to erase others. Your critique of other people's behavior and beliefs has nothing to do with those people; that's not academic, Dave, nor is it a discussion―it's just you spouting excrement for the sake of expressing yourself. Which, in some context, is probably just fine in its own way, but you should probably make it clear, when you address people, that your critique of their outlook has exactly nothing to do with them, and you're just saying all this random crap to them because you need to express yourself as such. I suppose I should take my own advice↑; there really is nothing to discuss with you. I mean, seriously: I tend to hold viewpoints requiring the dismissal of historical and literary records in order to redefine fundamental components in such a manner as to create and demand circular justification for said viewpoint irrational. To be particular: Fallacious excrement posted for the sake of mucking up a thread is trolling. Actually, see, that's the thing: At some point, with you insisting so much of your critique of other people be about you, it does at some point beceome to some degree about you. In which case, perhaps your critique of other people's beliefs and behaviors should attend those actual beliefs and behaviors instead of changing the subject. It's pretty blatant this time, Dave. (No, really, go back to #87↑-88↑; you skipped out on a practical example in order to scamper back to safe ground where you didn't feel any need to put any effort into any manner of academic consideration regarding "a list of infinite things that are superfluous". Honestly? There was a great discussion waiting there, but it's true, it's a lot more difficult than simply making stuff up about other people's beliefs in order to justify your own uneducated critique. Pretty much predictably, you skipped out. To the one, the only thing that doesn't seem to fit is the context of return on investment; to the other, time and experience remind this is not a reliable context when dealing with what passes for "academic" discussion on the internet. I've seen this pattern before, and for some reason it's never as clever as the other would rather.) ____________________ Notes: Coontz, Stephane. Marriage, A History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage. New York: Viking, 2005.
And are you now going to have the decency to answer the questions I asked you? Or continue to evade? The question wasn't about me, or about you convincing me of anything, but a matter of sharing perspectives, for that way discussions progress. So I am asking you, not for you to convince me, not for me to necessarily disagree with you, but because I would like to know: what do you think (your) faith is founded upon, and results in some having faith and others not? And please, no further evasion.
What "religious person" has been "erased" from the discussion? Can you point to particular posts where you think that's happened? It can't be Jan Ardena, who probably has more posts in this thread than anyone else. For page after page it seems like the thread consists of little besides Jan and people replying to Jan. Jan is anything but 'erased', he/she is the center of attention. (Which is exactly how Jan likes it.)
I already have↑: We get, for instance, that you see no functional difference between the monotheistic godhead and the unicorn, but for believers the difference is massive. Your critique of their beliefs and behaviors should probably account for what they believe, instead of write the script for them. If, for instance― This is exquisite in its naivete. You have, in a very succinct nutshell, captured the essence of subjectivity. (#162↑) ―you should deign to criticize Jan Ardena, then― Only to a theist. To an atheist, not so much. (#177↑) ―your critique probably ought to attend his context; as perpetually wrong about logic, philosophy, and history as Jan Ardena seems to be, I can assure you that the absence of God would be a far more significant belief to him than the absence of unicorns. In order to establish your equivalence, you functionally dismiss the entire historical and literary records regarding how people treat either concept. While I get what you're after, you're looking at a different context. Lots of people make noise, but Dave's specific critique of Jan Ardena assigns object values for Jan, conveniently presuming them to accord with Dave's personal aesthetics. In critiquing Jan Ardena, one should attend Jan Ardena's beliefs. If the critique requires that Jan Ardena actually believe and behave differently, such as we see in DaveC's refusal to acknowledge the problem with comparing the monothestic godhead to unicorns, then it's not a functional critique. I am generally dubious of any argument requiring such vague commonality that I might comparatively suggest that a vaccination injected into the arm, a gunshot wound to the chest, and the astounding anal sex act I witnessed on video last week are all the same. You know: penetration. Think of it this way: That Jan Ardena is perpetually wrong about logic, philosophy, and history does not automatically make anybody else right, correct, validated, or justified. I tried↑ addressing the difference; DaveC↑ skipped out on it. In the question of religious faith and behavior, apparently the faithful are disqualified from answering, and their beliefs and behaviors must be defined according to DaveC's aesthetic measure. DaveC's critique of other people's beliefs, such as Jan Ardena's↑, has nothing to do with those other people. He has already acknowledged this point↑; indeed, he celebrates it. Given the record, Yazata, both your question and its pretense seem rather quite extraordinary.
Tiassa, if you won't express your views without name-calling and foul-mouthing opponents, then this is not discussive, it is incitment of trolling. I won't continue to entertain it. The topic is faith - whether it makes one stronger or weaker. I have my views on the effect of faith. Feel free to express yours about the topic. Your views about me are off-topic.
A, No evasion, why should I ? You certainly can take pleasure in my inability as a theist to defend my stand, because I am not required to and I do not feel apologetic about it. But, still if you recall I very clearly stated that I do not know how I became a theist. That answers your question. What you are seeking is like..I have faith in my brother's ability to finance me, if I am in trouble because he has helped me in past and he is financially sound.....I have no such cause or belief on which my faith in God resides. Hope that answers. I will take it a bit forward. I have come across couple of people who get disillusioned in God because of extreme painful situation in their life (there are people too who become closer with God in such cases), but I have not seen them completely abandoning the God. On the other hand, I have noticed certain casual (a)theist (sort of indifferent) people, getting more into belief in God after certain personal experiences / incidents. If you ask such people about reasons behind d their faith in God, you will get your answer, but longer their connect with the God, they will also find this question irrelevant.
They are not. It is very insensitive of you to compare the God with unicorn, and still expect people not to roughshod you. These are very sensitive and emotive issues, in forum you are ok, but you know what blasphemy is and what it can fetch. So I urge you, please use words carefully if you get into such discussions in real life. In such tumultuous times, it is wiser for an atheist not to show off his objectivity on the matters regarding God/faith in public life.
You tell me, you continue to do it. I'm not asking you to defend your position, I am enquiring as to your reasons. Please don't start being defensive. No it doesn't. I didn't ask about how you became a theist. As you stated, you had already mentioned this previously. What I asked, and I am asking again, is what you consider faith to be founded upon. Please don't second-guess as to what you think I am seeking within your answer. And please also try not to answer with what you think (your) faith is not founded upon, as we could be here forever as we go through things: it is not founded on cats, or dogs, or on athletics, or on chocolate etc. No, my question is what do you think (your) faith is founded upon. You have dismissed such faith being based on objective evidence, as discussed, so what is it founded upon? So, what do you think such faith, such as your own, is founded upon?
Do not start acting smart, pl. I have not asked you to become the theist and neither do I care, you can go and collymoddle your pet puppy, instead of being a snob here. This is a thread, where personal views closed to the heart are being discussed. You are free to express your views about yourself, you are being rude and inconsiderate by asking the basis of my views. I have very clearly stated and it is a basic unquestioned aspect, that faith in God is not open to objective scrutiny. If you find it difficult to comprehend, I cannot help you any further.
