Does God Exist?

Fair enough, I was under the impression most Christians are offered the ultimatum to accept Jesus as the Son of God and savior or be banished to an eternity in Hell.

 

Am I looking for something in particular that's supposed to provide insight on our discussion or are you just mentioning to look at it because we were discussing it?

 

Did you watch the video past the first line? He addressed your points.

Are you disagreeing with him that religion is the only topic protected from criticism (you have examples of others?) or are you disagreeing with him that religion is at all protected from criticism (he means in very mainstream public discourse).

I hear this line about how atheists are evangelical all the time. So does sam harris, he addresses it in this full lecture.

It's very simple to understand why people would want their fellow human beings to not be misled by false beliefs. Imagine you met an old high school friend on the street one day, and he looked rather disheveled and troubled, and he told you that Elvis Prestley materialized in his waffles this morning and told him the end of the world was coming. Wouldn't you feel sad for your friend? Wouldn't a primary, gut level desire inside you, be to dispell this false belief he is under? Perhaps talk it out rationally with him, recommend a doctor, etc?

Atheists are not evangelical in the sense that we are spreading dogma; atheism has no dogma to spread. It is empty. Just like people who are not fortune tellers go around "evangelizing" about non-fortune telling.

With religion, the beliefs that people have, have real and serious consequences. Believing that Israel was promised to the jews, has tremendous geopolitical implications. Beliefs are powerful, they shape how we view the world and how we guide our actions. if you believed at this moment that your house was on fire, that would trigger very real and measurable changes in your physiology, in your brain chemistry, etc. This is no different from religious beliefs and what they claim, especially when those claims result in a yearning for the end of the world.

Nobody is claiming that the negative behaviors we see emerging from religion are generated out of thin air by religion; those behaviors are found in atheists as well, as well as in societies which do not worship a god per se but rather have a secular political worship structure (such as leninism, stalinism, maoism, naziism etc). What we ARE claiming, and what is painfully obvious to behold, is that religion is a reliable way to get all those horrible human behaviors to not only emerge from the woodworks, but to be given carte blanche to perform their horrors and indeed to be transmuted into noble behaviors.

 

I did not watch the rest, Writer. As i thought hmm this kind of stuff again. But I will now (later) that you elaborated on it! Getting back on it

Teehee! I think a lot of churches are just happy that people come visit.

No, I guess I mentioned it just because we were discussing the same things (and I was about to repeat several of those posts )

 

I have no interest in turning this into a Bible interpretation fiasco but this is the type of info I get on a quick google search.

Perhaps Christianity is vastly different in some parts of the world but it doesn't appear there is much room for dissent or even questioning in those claims.

 

The purpose of human is to protect the earth , the Life . Otherwisely , the destruction would've already happened
(since 1945 ) . Ya - it is seemingly risky that Life made us techno brainacs just to protect the planetary life-place
from dastardly asteroids . And by the time we have that task mastered , yes , our attitudinal 'worldliness' can be
expected to have quite a bit been transformed . And then ? we can relax , our humbleness assured .

 

Me neither, perhaps in another thread but I would not interprete it literally anyway. I for one certainly will never believe in the concept of hell or a God that convicts people to it.

It definitely is. Some branches or communities seem to emphasize strongly on other aspects. If ithey would be mainly like how and what they preach in that quote I would agree with anti-religious people much more often!

 

Are you sure you're speaking perfectly objectively? To me you seem to have a pro-Christian bias. I guess it might be difficult to have no bias at all.

But if Jesus is the be-all, end-all of existence, why do Christians have to get excited about it in secret? Why can't they let church be an exciting philosophical discussion based around Christ? After all, wouldn't that be the greatest tribute? Anyway, arguably it would be a tribute.

I don't think Christians are being upfront about their love for Christ. I think the reason they can't agree upon what it means to love Christ is because there's no good standard for how passionate you should feel about Christ. If there were, probably most people would be turned off and leave the congregation.

I think maybe I just came full circle. Oh well!

 

Good question, I am intrigued to see the descriptions/options of after life from a random search engine source from his country for Christians, to see how varied they are as he claims.

 

I am sure I am aiming to be objective, yes. I am also certain I don't have a pro-christian bias Perhaps it is difficult to have no bias for some. It is more difficult to be completely objective (for everyone). But I do try to be.
It is simply too tiring and a bit disappointing to see all these people (that I think generally come from good intent) that focus on the bad parts of religion (especially christianity), which I do not even try to go against, portray it that those are the only or main part of religion.
So I guess I took it upon me :dizzy2: to point out that if they're trying to look objectively at religion (maybe they're aware that they're not and don't care) and make a sound judgement that they're going wrong somewhere. Usually this seems to happen because they have not or at most a onesided experience with religion or religious followers. Or are confronted with just the negative and annoying aspects (especially if you're not religious almost anything CAN seem annoying or fake or negative, but that doesn't mean it is for a lot of those religious followers), like in the news or shocking background stories.

 

of all the religions that exist, christianity is in the least need of having slack cut for it.
i would have said that about islam, before it replaced judaism as everyone's favorite pariah.
that being said, they are all of course born of good intentions, and equally universally corrupted by less then good ones.

the thing is of course, everything that is claimed to be known about things that are neither physical nor imaginary, we cannot actually KNOW, one way or the other, at all.
only that it is possible for such things to exist, and not possible for anything to prevent them from doing so.

we each have our own personal anecdotal experiences though.

still, the idea of anything wishing to be worshiped, has the look, sound and feel, of something our own egos would be far more likely be the source of.

so why not a god, who's a jolly old blob of nonphysical energy, too big to be harmed, but not wishing harm to anyone?

why not indeed?

any why just one. why not if there is one bigger then all others, that its just a matter of circumstantial happenstance and nothing else?

whatever we come up with, whatever anyone in the past has come up with, we're still layering elaborations on the only thing that can be known, if even that isn't too strong, that such things CAN exist, and that they can, is the beginning and end of all that more then one of us at a time, each separately in our own way, can ever know about it.

 

It's not a blob, It's a Flying Spaghetti Monster.



Much like the FSM or flying teapots or whatever else we can imagine, there is an intellectual lazyness to these concepts if we are going to, at the same time, ascribe to the scientific method and the notion that anything can be objectively learned about the universe. The fact that those of us here all come to participate on these forums suggests, to me, that at some level, all of us think there is objectivity in the universe and that there are qualities about the universe which can be understood. That's not to say we currently understand everything in the universe or that everything can necessarily be understood.

I suppose if we feel that nothing in the universe can be objectively understood, we could run wild with all kinds of thoughts...

I Could claim that I exist in a separate dimension and I have a non-physical transdimensional chip implanted in my body and this whole world including you and all of what you think in "reality" is really a hallucinatory program from the non-physical chip or that in a parallel universe John Lennon, Jimi Hendrix, Roger Waters and Keith Moon have formed a supergroup with Stevie Nicks on background vocals.

There is an absurdity in these claims I think for most which would not lead them (or myself) to maintain these as teneable actual beliefs.


Also I want to point out, your blob not wishing to harm anyone gives God just as much ego as the God who wants to be worshipped. The ego may be more positive oriented in your example but it still maintains an identity as you are claiming.

I'm curious too when you say non-physical do you mean something which we cannot sense or do you mean something beyond the fundamental forces of nature and all the known and unknown stuff the universe is generally thought to consist of? (I.E. Matter, Particles, fields, dark matter, dark energy)

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fFSQv3SkUU

Start listening at 33:10 . . . he specifically tackles the difference between approaching religion as true, and approaching religion as useful, and also the relation between beliefs and actions, and also the very real problem of religious moderation.

 

God is not religion though Captain obvious in the house.

 

What is not real does not exist. Hopefully we can transcend the question as existence is established in fact at the level of conception.

We can make a case for transcendence. To transcend is to go beyond the perception of. We transcend our current learning when we learn something new. So we can allow for potential states that aren't seen as being a fact of our existence.

 

You're right, because while you can give me evidence that religion exists, you cannot give me evidence that god exists.

 

Faith in a God or Gods is not about evidence. It is always made about that when people's personal faith or beliefs are questioned or made a problem of.

 

If there was a god, how would it ever know it wasn't just created by the real god to believe it is the real god?

 

I don't believe that the spiritual being we percieve as "god" is anything like what we're taught in society. We're taught concepts and ideas that are already familiar to us.

It seems to me that one of the only consistency in all religions is the idea of us all as "One" as "brothers and sisters".

I believe we are all part of one consciousness which incarnates in pieces over and over again throughout time. We are God.

 

Evidence of god existing is not reliant on your conception but on it's observable aspects. The evidence for god existing, for having phenomenological presence, is that god is that which we invoke.