Does God Exist?

Ask a theist if he believes in the existence of other mythological things that cannot be proven to exist, including the numerous gods that are not part of that particular theistic belief system, and you will receive a resounding NO.

It makes no sense to continue to believe in god(s) when there is equal lack of evidence in support of fairies.

 

I just can't imagine God as a being with form. To me your own mental projections can form ideas of God, images and perceptions but that doesn't mean anything. I do not even think God is necessary to anyone that doesn't want power. Greater than human doesn't mean that any perception is that one and sole highest power. I don't think there is anything unifying existence other than the self.

 

I cannot imagine god being real at all.

With all the fictional concepts we have in existence, having been created by man, how is god not also considered as such where there is as much evidence for his existence as there is for a fairy?

 

We do not know enough about existence to say for sure where it comes from. People have gone crazy trying to figure out where existence comes from. All I know is I came from vagina, which comes from a long line of vaginas, which comes from enzymes that evolved from star dust.....which comes from gases, and these gases came from a Big Bang or some other existence which always existed. It can be simple and dumb, or mind baffling on the proper drugs.

 

From my experience a flower or a smudge on the wall can become a "God form", on the proper drugs. Even with the imagination I learned that's just how it is. But I do question existence, where it comes fro, and where it's going.

 

Sorry for the relatively late reply, I had some IRL stuff and wanted to cool down and think about how to approach some of my responses better. First let me say that I greatly enjoy these discussions, or I wouldn't participate in them, and with such gusto. Even if it's at times stressful and negative, at its best it can be absolutely transformative, educational, and sublime.


I want to clear up my "scumbag" comment. It was 100% in reference to this meme:



I did not mean that I think olderwaterbrother is actually a scumbag. I don't think he is one. I meant "scumbag steve" which can be a very innocent kind of insult.

My general policy for overtly insulting people is that when I want to do it, I instead opt to not post anything. can't say I've always followed this 100% but that's my general approach.

If OWB was my neighbour and I knew his beliefs I would avoid him as best I could and certainly not include him in my social life. Ditto if he was a fellow student in class, or whatever other analogy you want to make. Beliefs matter to me. I also do not befriend devout muslims or jews. This is not a strict matter of principle, I just do not forsee the relationship going well given what my own views are and how passionately I feel about them. For example if OWB was my neighbour, and he had a young child, I would be actually worried about the welfare of that child vis a vis theological indoctrination. I know that to OWB it would be a matter of teaching her the truth, and of saving her soul, and so I would understand 100%; nevertheless I would have concern at the back of my mind.

Have you considered that I am against faith on principle? That, in my opinion, faith is a profoundly negative social force? That I am not alone by a long shot in this view? I think that faith has an extremely good public relations and marketing campaign. People have faith in faith. People see it as a virtue. To me this is one of the great cognitive errors humans are making and therefore one of the primary sources of conflict in the world. Faith is believing in something without evidence because you want to. Now you can flower this up in pretty language, but that is what faith is. It can't have evidence, or it wouldn't be faith, it would be knowledge. And nobody believes in things which are harmful to believe, there is always some justification which results in net personal gain, or the perception of personal gain. To me an easy way to immediately improve the earth by a large degree would be to eliminate the human ability to have faith in this context.

Mindfulness predates even Buddhism by thousands of years; its sources are in Hinduism and even beyond that, in ancient Aryan philosophies. Testing does corroborate it, which cannot be said for the Abrahamic beliefs. We are in fact instructed that testing them is a kind of error; we are to believe on authority. A 'scientist' is anyone who will honestly and properly test a thing. People who 'take a chance' are inviting ridicule in my opinion; do you 'take a chance' on whether that meat is good to eat or not? Then why is it not just OK, but noble, to "take a chance" on the ultimate meaning and purpose of life? If we lost abrahamic scripture and knowledge, I highly doubt that there would ever come a time that we somehow rediscovered that Jesus of Nazareth was born of a virgin and had 12 disciples; this is not knowledge inherent to anything. Your comment about our technocratic culture not being into wisdom is simply incorrect, both for your conception of technocracy and for the idea that an entire culture can be or be not "into" something. You are a part of this culture, you are using technology right now, and you are into wisdom. Your existence has already disproved that point.

You are still struggling with the anthropic principle. This is actually very common, and is also, in my opinion, the source of a lot of the need for faith and religion in people, this misunderstanding.

Imagine that there is a rolling field in the country. One day it rains, and a puddle forms. Inside the puddle, some algae is born and grows. After a few days, there is enough algae there that it forms its first Society of Philosophical Algae. The Algae Philosophers get together and think: "Look at this puddle we are in. It is exactly the right depth, temperature, viscosity, substance, and age, to allow us Algae to form." Indeed, experiment after experiment shows that had those parameters been only a little different, there wouldn't be any Algae. The Philosophers conclude that this puddle was therefore engineered for their existence, and they are the meaning of the puddle.

This is the fallacy you are making. See, when you leave bread on the counter for a few weeks, it's going to grow mold. But you wouldn't say that the bread was finely tuned by someone for the growth of mold. Mold is just what happens when you leave bread on the counter. In the exact same way, Humans are just what happens when you leave a universe full of hydrogen alone for ~14 billion years. The Universe "Earths", and eventually the Earth "peoples". There is no need to invoke a mystery where there is none.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZbThJg6ehU

 

OWB has made a claim, with no evidence, that there is a creator of the universe. This creator has a name, Yaweh. He knows all this, because it says so in a book. How does he know he can trust that book? Because it says that in the book too. It also says that Yaweh is responsible for all the good things in the world, and none of the bad things*. All of the bad things, those are because of what humans do. But the good things are all thanks to Yaweh.

*Before I continue, this position should immediately offend you on the basis that it takes everything good about what it means to be human, the uncountable ways in which life is sublime, and it rips them away from human agency and assigns them to the actions of the particular diety which OWB believes. This is, on the face of it, offensive.

Continuing however, when asked for any evidence that 1) there is something called "yaweh" and 2) that yaweh is the one from which stems all good things, he gets very offended, and instead DEMANDS that you first prove that the bad things are not caused by humans; he does this because you will not be able to prove this, therefore you must agree that humans cause all the bad things, and not yaweh, and therefore he will conclude, yaweh exists and causes all the good things.

This position is both a) logically incoherent, b) morally bankrupt, and c) factually incorrect.

It is logically incoherent because the conclusion does not follow from the premises, and because the burden of proof rests on the one making a claim, and in this case, a claim of such, ahem, detail, requires a stupendous amount of proof indeed.
It is morally bankrupt because it defines mankind in such a way that we are only authors of misery, and that any beauty, truth, and good which we experience, are forever outside our own authorship, and belong to our invisible cosmic ruler.

Finally it is factually incorrect in two senses. In the first, Yaweh is clearly responsible for great misery and immorality even in the sacred texts which espouse him as the source of all good. In the second sense, it is factually incorrect in that all of its claims are simply not true. Now you can protest this, so I will give you a counter example. Take OWB's position, and put it over there in the corner for now. I have a new position to sell you. In this position, instead of dealing with something hard to believe, like Yaweh, I will only use a Flying Pig. This Flying Pig is not responsible for "all the good"; no, I have downgraded this portion as well. The FP is responsible for only that part of the good things which we call lollipops. See, it says in my sacred book, that the Flying Pig made all the lollipops on earth, and I believe this. You don't believe me, and require evidence? Ok, first prove to me that lollipops are not created by the Flying Pig, and we will talk. Good luck!

It's possible to be so open minded that the wind can blow in one ear and out the other.

Wow, I never looked at it that way. You continuously amaze me with your well researched analyses and retorts. Thank you for showing me the error of my ways! What's amazing is you didn't even have to actually explain what my error is, because that's just how honest of a man you are, and how solid your understanding of the world is.

Where's Asmo when shit like THIS gets posted?

Not all beliefs are worthy of respect. You are under no compulsion to respect all beliefs. You are the one who feels pressure from within you, to act in this way. When I encounter a belief which disgusts me to my core, I will display my revulsion with no shame. Keep some perspective here, this is an online discussion, I'm not stoning OWB to death for heresy, that's not really my sort of thing.

There's no way to be "right" but there are many, many ways to be wrong. Most of this discussion is pointing out the ways which are obviously wrong. I have no belief system I wish to persuade on others; I only ask the same be true of those convinced of their personal incidental theologies.

Invoking a god of the gaps. Just because we don't understand life today, doesn't mean Yaweh did it. Or Poseidon. Or "the sum of all mystery and profundity", or whatever other amorphous definition you give to god.

So first off, it must be acknowledged that for every ounce of joy offered by religion there has been a pound of terror and bloodshed. Second, Love, joy, peace, and hope, are all completely possible, plausible, and realistic within a purely secular framework. I didn't say "redemption" and "salvation", as those are completely a problem inside Abrahamic religions. Those are problems created by the holy books which profess to offer the solution to them.

When you take away a man's religion, it does not follow that you take away his hope, peace, joy, or love. In fact, as in the case of many, they find more of those things in life.

Shortly after we learn that, the israelites are told to massacre yet another ethnic minority. And god certainly seems immune from his own commandments, what with his frequent mass killings and genocide? Surely we can move past these facile arguments please?

 

Non existence cannot be proven..correct. Neither can existence
. No matter how many different ways its worded, we dont know shit.
Bud, youre right,it doesnt always take drugs to see a god form, what you refer to is known as pareidolia .

 

You can prove existence, dinosaurs are proven to have existed from the excavated dinosaur fossils.

 

What does exist does exist. We can use all of our senses to perceive that a rock exist. None of senses can be used in determining the existence of a god.

 

Acknowledgement or not, and I happen to aggree with much of what you say, the idea of god offers hope to people. Many, if not most cannot find that kind of hope in other things. Everyone has different ways of coping with life..be that as it may, right or wrong.

 

As eating is an unhealthy way of coping, so is resorting to religion a mentally unhealthy way of coping.

 

Fierce flower, that takes us right back to personal perception, as ive previously stated.Both of your repl7es actually. It might be unhealthy to you, and many others, but not unhealthy for all. Not a good comparison.Bad food is bad food. But ive seen theist that were quite healthy. Far and few..bit their out there.

 

Not at all, but nice try.

 

I stand by my post.

 

And sure it does. Your perception of it is not everyones. And it isnt necessarily the right one either.

 

The correct perception is always that of reality. You fail.

 

Heh heh, depends on the "reality" one percieves and lives through experience. You fail too.

 

We all perceive reality as the same. Only the mind through its delusions perceives it differently. You fail.

 

You can believe your perception is the correct one...and it is. For you. Obviously, not so for others. You see, thats the beauty that quantum physics shows us. That our perceptions arent necessarily the truth of whats going on.