Is there a God?

[phoenixferret]

bodhi395 said:

phoenixferret said:

It's weird to me how the term "science" is used so disparagingly sometimes.

Some questions for you, Bodhi:

-What does a spritual "connection" involve? If chemical and spiritual love both existed, how would they differ in feeling and appearance?

I think there is obviously a chemical part of all human relationships. But my belief(and that all it is, a belief not proof) is that at certain times the simple chemical reactions in our brains are transcended into something more powerful and that is love. So hooking up with a girl for a one-night stand is all chemicals, yet finding that person you can't stop thinking about and who you feel incredibly deeply for, and who you want to marry, is love.

I never said love could not exist without the supernatural, read my last post where I said there are two different ways to look at love, one that is supernatural and one that is not. So the one that is not exists without the supernatural.

Lol, I wasn't thinking of one-night-stands as any form of love, but ok.

I'm just not getting what this supernatural element is supposed to BE. What is the difference between enjoying someone's company and liking a person because their mind works much like your own, and making a supernatural connection? Is friendship supernatural? Is acquiantanceship? Is the mere act of making eye contact a spiritual interaction?

I belive in a spirtual core to the universe, NOT LOVE POTIONS! ;D

Haha, that's not quite what I meant! But forget that question, anyway, lol.

I don't know, that's a good question.

Yeah, the hate thing is one thing that kind of gets me about spirituality. Some spirituality. It just seems like anger and peacefulness are sort of like yin and yang more than God and Satan, yet, you hear a lot of talk about how only love and togetherness is important. We've got opposites, we've got antimatter... there are precedents. Yeh know?

I think it shows that love is not an exclusive emotion. You can love more than just one person in your life. Its a powerful thing but its obviously not the only consideration in having a relationship. You can be madly in love with someone but for various reasons decide not to have a relationship. Using the cliche, "You always hurt the one you love."

What makes a person fall in love? The way I see it, there's a you-like-who-they-are-and-how-they-interract-with-you-and-with-the-world model, and there's the "magic spark" model, which you say isn't something you believe. In which case that brings me back to the liking-them model, in which case the attachment to the person and the way they make you feel and your empathy for this person you've come to know--isn't that enough for you to want to continue to be with that person for a long time (or as long as it makes you feel good to interract with them)?

Can sociopaths fall in love?

I don't have any knowledge of ideals or anything, I'm not a dogmatic religious person. I think sexual attraction is chemical but it can make people closer together and is not wrong to be included in a loving relationship.

I just meant your personal ideal. Not whether you'd prefer a sex-filled or sex-less relationship, lol, or even whether you think sexuality is right or wrong. I was basically wondering what role you believe sexual attraction plays in relationship involving spiritual love.

I never said spirtual love involved a spark. I don't know the nature of love and don't think believing in spiritual love means you believe in soul mates.

I'm unclear, then, what spiritual love entails..? My perception so far is that it's just that love is a very good and deep feeling, and things that are good and deep are spiritual. Is that about right?

You don't need to believe in the supernatural if you don't want to. Just some people find comfort in seeing a beautiful rainstorm and seeing that is might be part of something greater in the universe, some supernatural force guiding things to make that beauty. It becomes a symbol for that spirituality. Without the spiritual, how would you explain why a person would find a rain storm beautiful?

Lol, I'm not sure how I'd explain the human concept of beauty, but you certainly don't need to be spiritual to appreciate (or crate) beautiful things. I don't see why things that are mysterious or beautiful should be viewed as supernatural just for the fact that they're pleasing to us in some way.

People find comfort in a lot of things, but I don't think we're debating whether or not it's "good" or personally fulfilling to be spiritual; that's all down to context and opinion. As I see it, all we're debating is the viability of a spiritual view of the universe.

Really, in most cases, I would say that spirituality can be a very good thing on many levels. I've still got ideals that I know are impossible; I definitely understand believing in something because it makes your world a better place. I just have gotten to the point where I really *can't* put much stock in spiritual-type things; I've just come to accept that life can have individual meaning and depth just because it exists, rather than because there is some underlying connecting thread or plan. I'm not trying to shoot you down; it would give me no pleasure to kill someone's spirituality (though it might be nice to bring some fundamentalists and things down to Earth a little bit, lol).

(btw, is anyone else having issues with the "reply" button not copying all the text that the other person quoted? like it should read:

blah blah blah [ /quote] bonk bonk bonk [ /quote], but it deletes the blah blah blah part?)

[Bodhi]

One of the problems here is explaining 'love' since it is such an inherently ambiguous concept and hard to define, even the love that is not supernatural would be very hard to define in a clear and concise way. There's also the fact there are different types of love such as love of a romantic partner, love of family, love of humanity.

But I'm realizing that most religion is emotion--its based on what a person feels and has little relation to logic. That is why it is so damn hard to debate fundamental religious types since they are basing their belief on the good feeling they get from 'feeling Christ" They don't care about proving anything, and if you ask them why they believe without proof they will say they have faith(belief in spite of no proof) and most importantly they have 'felt God,' i.e. they have had some emotional experience where they think they have glimpsed the holy and thus they think everything in their religion is true.

I guess in some way i fall into that category, except I have felt some sort of spiritual experience but have not transfered that into a belief in any dogmatic religion. The problem is my spiritual experience does not transfer into any logical system of things, such as love. So you're always going to win in a logical argument about things. I fully concede that I have no proof about why I think there is a spirituality in the universe, only that I feel it.

I think the reason I continue to believe it without proof and only a feeling is two things. First is the whole leap of faith concept that Kierkegaard talked about. Here is a paragraph explaining it broadly,

"The leap of faith is his conception of how an individual would believe in God, or how a person would act in love. It is not so much a rational decision, as it is transcending rationality in favor of something more uncanny, that is, faith. As such he thought that to have faith is at the same time to have doubt. So, for example, for one to truly have faith in God, one would also have to doubt that God exists; the doubt is the rational part of a person's thought, without which the faith would have no real substance. Doubt is an essential element of faith, an underpinning. In plain words, to believe or have faith that God exists, without ever having doubted God's existence or goodness, would not be a faith worth having. For example, it takes no faith to believe that a pencil or a table exists, when one is looking at it and touching it. In the same way, to believe or have faith in God is to know that one has no perceptual or any other access to God, and yet still has faith in God."


So he realized that he had no proof for God's existence and yet believed in him anyway. If you would have tried to argue with him he would have conceded immediately and said he believed on faith alone and that all the other believers should admit that they only have faith and not any proof. I realize then the counter-argument is one could believe in any stupid thing, like fairies or elves, and all I can say is if someone wants to do that, go right ahead.

Second, is I read the book "Man's Search for Meaning" by Viktor Frankl. He believes that everyone needs to find a meaning in their life, otherwise they fall into an existential vacuum. So I guess right now I've chosen to take the spiritual path as my chosen meaning. It helps me and makes me feel better about my life and life in general and I am doing better. Anyone can chose anything as their meaning. If watching baseball games fulfills your life, use that as your meaning. People do this naturally I think, such as many parents find great meaning in having children and taking care of them, so much so they are willing to sacrifice their own happiness for the betterment of their children. While they might have much more fun and much less work if they didn't have children, they gladly sacrifice it for the sense of fulfillment they get by having children.

So the skeptic might conclude I'm believing in something without proof just to make me feel better. So be it!

[Orionation]

scotty, you are arguing from the point the position of knowing what god is
i keep trying to get you to see that its pointless to argue about the 'existance' of something that we do not know
we only need knowledge in order to relate to the outside stimuli - this knowledge however is not reality - its just a map

you can claim that you know god/reality/truth - but allow this to be met with skepticism

you may want to think that the emptiness you feel is 'god' calling you
ok, but it can also be a chemical imbalance in your brain and one way to mend it is to subscribe to some system of belief
however that it worked for you does not imply it will work for everyone and people do have the ability to filter out what they think will work vs what will not work
no one knows exactly what you went through in life and how it is related to your investigations of the bible


the fact is, millions of 'christian' are not very different from the non christians or atheists. all go through same emotions same desires
how they chose to explain things does not change their human nature

if you notice, people that are satisfied in life don't seek god
god faith and religion enter where there is trouble and discontent
its comforting thought that there is something out there that can save your ass in a troubling situation, something to make the suffering stop
this is why people believe
you have found meaning in studying the christian bible, some else found meaning in implementing communism and someone else found meaning in just traveling around the world seeing things

maybe that emptiness you feel just comes from the fact that we really have no purpose
that would perfectly explain why you would feel empty
so you chose to fill it with some christian concepts and you like it that way
good for you
its up to you what you want to believe in
once again, everything would be fine and dandy if everyone just stuck to their own beliefs without blaming their problems on the 'nonbelievers' and trying to force their beliefs down other peoples throats

I surely don't see anyone here trying to force their beliefs on anyone, read the topic title, it's a debate, if you don't want to take part in it then don't come to the thread, it's simple. You're argument has no basis ... you yourself said that you believe it is pointless to argue about God since everyone has their own idea of Him, so why do you bother? To some people God may be a myth or a fairy tail, or a little conscious sitting on their shoulder, but what I am debating about here is if there is a Creator of the universe. If you don't want to debate me then don't lol, but if you're going to then address the issue instead of trying to get around it.

I'm not claiming to know what God is. I am talking about the supossive Creator of the universe. It's simple. If there is a Creator, He would not be bound by anything, because if He was, He wouldn't be the Creator of it! A man can't invent his own brain, if He doesn't have the brain to invent things with lol. Logic, reason, science, gravity, right & wrong, flaws, etc., they all exist in our physical universe. If there is a Creator of the universe we live in, all these things would logically be under that Creator, made by that Creator, including logic itself. So if you say "God can't exist because such and such" it is naturally an illogical statement because we are talking about a domain beyond what we exist in. Therefore it is impossible to ever prove one way or the other if there is a God or not. That's where the point made in the exceprt I posted from that book ties in. The evidence of the world, of everything, is the same evidence used to draw any other conclusion. What matters is how we interpret the evidence to draw such a conclusion. Do we resort to skepticism and listening to what science and other people tell us and accept as fact, and then base our conclusions off of the statis quo or what appears to be most believable based on those things? Or do we go back even further, and look at the whole scheme of things with the realization that we are imperfect and do not possess all knowledge, and any fact could indeed have flaws? Some people just listen to what others say, or base their own conclusions of the evidence off of what others think or what is revealed to them from their point of view. But some people look at all the facts and draw the best conclusion based on what seems most objectable, rather than what seems most likely or believable, or most accepted by others. When I did this it pointed me to the existance of God. I'm not saying I'm right and I'm not saying everyone else would come to the same conclusion if they did the same thing. I'm saying you can't draw a logical conclusion without stepping back and looking at the evidences objectively.

For an example, if you're walking in a field all alone and you suddenly find a watch laying on the ground, would you think it just came into existance by chance? We know the watch has a maker. Yet everything around us, and our bodies, are far more complex than a watch. The watch is crafted and put together peice by peice in a short amount of time. It doesn't evolve over time into a complex machine, it comes together at once. The brain, eye, and heart, as a few examples, are a collection of many parts that work together, like a watch. They don't function if a peice is missing. Science currently claims that they evolved into these complex parts. So what was living while it evolved? A watch can't function if half the peices havn't been put in yet.

But to get back to my point, the big difference is, the watch is a part of our universe, our physical existance, we can see it and know exactly where it came from, so we know it was created by someone. We are not inside the watch without the ability to see and comprehend beyond it, the watch is not our universe. But our physical existance is ... we do not have the ability to see and comprehend beyond our existance. But if there is a Creator of our universe, it is beyond our existance. Just like the creator of the watch is beyond the existance of that watch ... it is outside of it (both literally and figuratively) and is not bound by any rules or laws that exist within that system. Therefore if we want to talk about God, we have to take this into account when looking at the evidence, regardless of whether He exists or not, because likewise, if something existed inside that watch and could not comprehend what was beyond it, would its limited understanding of its universe, and its skepticism, be able to account for it comming to a logical conclusion about whether or not there is a creator of its universe? Of course not. It would have no way of knowing for sure that there is a maker.

But the point is, IF there is a maker, it is a huge deal, in fact, it would be the most important thing about life. So if that little guy resorted to his skepticism instead of stepping back and thinking objectively toward all the evidence he has, he would not be able to draw a logical conclusion. So he'd be screwing himself over pretty badly because we know there is a maker of the watch. Likewise, IF there is a Creator of our universe, in order to draw a logical conclusion you'd have to step back behind what we know or think we already know, and face everything completely honestly and objectively, as if you're in a jury and the existance of God is what's on trial. We'll never know who's "right" and who's "wrong", that isn't even the issue. The issue is that you can't draw a logical conclusion without taking into account the nature of a Creator. We don't need to know a thing about Him, but it is just common sense that if there is a Creator of all existance, then He would not be contained within existance ... because if He was, then He couldn't have created it, in which case, we're not talking about the same thing. I'm talking about a Creator, not some other kind of supernatural force within the bounds of what was created.

Erg, I have no time but I just wanted to say to Orionation: you are not even trying to understand a word I've said. Please reread what I have written, and try to do it without the assumption that a. I'm "just trying to win a debate" (totally opposite of you, because you just want to "enlighten" everyone huh?) and that b. no one has a valid point if they haven't studied exactly what you have and reached exactly the same conclusion.

I'm banging my head against a wall here, trying to make things clear, and you are patently refusing to do anything but insist that I am "dodging" your supposedly excellent points when I clearly am not. Grrrrr, no time to respond now but this is the most frustrating thing ever... I've had logical debates about God before, and this one is no such thing. It just dances all over the place, playing hide-and-seek with definitions and major premises.

No offence meant honestly but I think you're being a bit arrogant about this. I came to this thread simply asking a question which has yet to still be answered, it has simply been avoided over and over. I'll be more than happy to address whatever it is you're trying to tell me if you'd be kind enough to do the same. Again, how is it that you think you can draw such conclusions about the existance of God and the validity of the Bible without studying it? (and when I say study I don't mean growing up with Christian influence, I mean taking the time to get deep into the evidence and look at it objectively to let it speak for itself) If you say you hold no possition in the existance of God or not, then why do you say you believe He does not exist? That's holding a possition. I hold a possition, I never said I didn't, that isn't the point I'm getting at. But not holding a possition isn't trying to defend or attack another possition, it is simply not holding a possition lol, not knowing what to think one way or the other. So if you then do hold a possition, that you do not believe there is a God, then how is it that you draw such a conclusion without all knowledge of the universe?

[MrNice]

I surely don't see anyone here trying to force their beliefs on anyone, read the topic title

then why did you post the case for jesus?

read the topic title, it's a debate, if you don't want to take part in it then don't come to the thread, it's simple.

lol

You're argument has no basis ...

what argument?

you yourself said that you believe it is pointless to argue about God since everyone has their own idea of Him, so why do you bother?

because its interesting

To some people God may be a myth or a fairy tail, or a little conscious sitting on their shoulder, but what I am debating about here is if there is a Creator of the universe.

no you are not - you are talking about the christian god - the bible and jesus

If you don't want to debate me then don't lol, but if you're going to then address the issue instead of trying to get around it.

stop making pointless accusations if you want to adress any issues

I'm not claiming to know what God is. I am talking about the supossive Creator of the universe.

this is the first time you put out such a definition

If there is a Creator, He would not be bound by anything, because if He was, He wouldn't be the Creator of it! A man can't invent his own brain, if He doesn't have the brain to invent things with lol. Logic, reason, science, gravity, right & wrong, flaws, etc., they all exist in our physical universe. If there is a Creator of the universe we live in, all these things would logically be under that Creator, made by that Creator, including logic itself.

ok, makes sense so far

So if you say "God can't exist because such and such" it is naturally an illogical statement because we are talking about a domain beyond what we exist in.

who is saying this?

Therefore it is impossible to ever prove one way or the other if there is a God or not.

if you agree with this then why do you argue?

That's where the point made in the exceprt I posted from that book ties in. The evidence of the world, of everything, is the same evidence used to draw any other conclusion. What matters is how we interpret the evidence to draw such a conclusion. Do we resort to skepticism and listening to what science and other people tell us and accept as fact, and then base our conclusions off of the statis quo or what appears to be most believable based on those things? Or do we go back even further, and look at the whole scheme of things with the realization that we are imperfect and do not possess all knowledge, and any fact could indeed have flaws? Some people just listen to what others say, or base their own conclusions of the evidence off of what others think or what is revealed to them from their point of view. But some people look at all the facts and draw the best conclusion based on what seems most objectable, rather than what seems most likely or believable, or most accepted by others. When I did this it pointed me to the existance of God.

ok, but you wanted to believe in god, and so you fit your evidence to it

I'm not saying I'm right and I'm not saying everyone else would come to the same conclusion if they did the same thing. I'm saying you can't draw a logical conclusion without stepping back and looking at the evidences objectively.

do you want everyone to become a bible scholar?
based on the evidence presented I do not believe in the christian system more then in islam
i do believe there is a 'creator', but it has little to do with the bible
it is beyond knowable - and we only think of things in terms of other things we already know
when using the word creator, or He - these refer to human concepts

I'm saying you can't draw a logical conclusion without stepping back and looking at the evidences objectively.

thats exactly what everyone is doing ;-)

The brain, eye, and heart, as a few examples, are a collection of many parts that work together, like a watch. They don't function if a peice is missing. Science currently claims that they evolved into these complex parts. So what was living while it evolved? A watch can't function if half the peices havn't been put in yet.

sorry, this argument was taken apart by scientists
it proves nothing
a watch can't function as a watch with half its peaces missing, however it would make a for a nice piece of jewelry
ID is nothing but a shameless attempt to force religion into science classroom. yes there are gaps in the theory of evolution, but saying 'god did it' does not add to our knowledge
we might as well attribute the rain to 'god did it' and it would be just as right and we would never gain all the knowledge concerning rain that we have
so far there hasn't been much actual research related to ID, just alot of PR

But to get back to my point, the big difference is, the watch is a part of our universe, our physical existance, we can see it and know exactly where it came from, so we know it was created by someone. We are not inside the watch without the ability to see and comprehend beyond it, the watch is not our universe. But our physical existance is ... we do not have the ability to see and comprehend beyond our existance. But if there is a Creator of our universe, it is beyond our existance. Just like the creator of the watch is beyond the existance of that watch ... it is outside of it (both literally and figuratively) and is not bound by any rules or laws that exist within that system. Therefore if we want to talk about God, we have to take this into account when looking at the evidence, regardless of whether He exists or not, because likewise, if something existed inside that watch and could not comprehend what was beyond it, would its limited understanding of its universe, and its skepticism, be able to account for it comming to a logical conclusion about whether or not there is a creator of its universe? Of course not. It would have no way of knowing for sure that there is a maker.

not sure what you are getting into
i never came to a logical conclusion that there is not a creator of the universe

But the point is, IF there is a maker, it is a huge deal, in fact, it would be the most important thing about life.

why is that?
this is where you get introuble with your argument
using your particular version of the maker - yes its important
but it doesn't have to be

So if that little guy resorted to his skepticism instead of stepping back and thinking objectively toward all the evidence he has, he would not be able to draw a logical conclusion.

what is that 'all the evidence he has'?
do you mean the bible?
draw conclusion about what?

So he'd be screwing himself over pretty badly because we know there is a maker of the watch.

how is he screwing himself over?

Likewise, IF there is a Creator of our universe, in order to draw a logical conclusion you'd have to step back behind what we know or think we already know, and face everything completely honestly and objectively, as if you're in a jury and the existance of God is what's on trial. The issue is that you can't draw a logical conclusion without taking into account the nature of a Creator. We don't need to know a thing about Him, but it is just common sense that if there is a Creator of all existance, then He would not be contained within existance ... because if He was, then He couldn't have created it, in which case, we're not talking about the same thing. I'm talking about a Creator, not some other kind of supernatural force within the bounds of what was created.

logical conclusion to what? What is the logical conclusion that you want everyone to draw? And what is this stepping back and looking at things objectively you are talking about?

You already thought for example that the emptiness within you was god calling you. Thats sounds like a huge subjective preconception to me.

[God]

Hey everyone, God here. A few points:

- Yes, I exist.
- Evolution is real. I mean, come on, it’s just common sense.
- Invoking logic when discussing Me is like dividing by zero.
- “Love” is a silly idea that I made up in order to trick you into perpetuating the species.
- Cincinnati chili > all other chili.
- Orionation, take the picture of your girlfriend out of your avatar; it’s creepy.
- Each member of SU should PayPal $500 to Me, care of the Prophet Buzzz.

Peace be with you all. I'll be back in 2000 years.

[TheDMan06]

I'm not religious but if, by some freak accident, I became religious, I think I would lean more towards Zoroastrianism than Christianity.

For a start Christian dogma is a bit ambiguous about equality, whereas Zoroastrians believe that everyone is equal regardless of sex, race or even your religious beliefs.

I also like their idea of hell. If you have done more evil than good then you go to hell but they also believe that eventually everything will be purified, even the people in hell. So everyone goes to heaven and not just the people that believe in that particular variation of God.

It's ironic that a religion like this was founded in Iran.

[Paulinus]

god said:

Hey everyone, God here. A few points:

- Yes, I exist.
- Evolution is real. I mean, come on, it’s just common sense.
- Invoking logic when discussing Me is like dividing by zero.
- “Love” is a silly idea that I made up in order to trick you into perpetuating the species.
- Cincinnati chili > all other chili.
- Orionation, take the picture of your girlfriend out of your avatar; it’s creepy.
- Each member of SU should PayPal $500 to Me, care of the Prophet Buzzz.

Peace be with you all. I'll be back in 2000 years.

Hahahahahaha

We just need a visit from Phil Collins now and we truly will be blessed. ;D

[Samantha]

orionation said:

Likewise, IF there is a Creator of our universe, in order to draw a logical conclusion you'd have to step back behind what we know or think we already know, and face everything completely honestly and objectively, as if you're in a jury and the existance of God is what's on trial.

Good idea.

I accept I do not have all the knowledge in the universe.
I accept I have not thoroughly studied the Bible.
I accept you have studied it more than me.
I accept I may be wrong.
I accept there may be a God.
I will try to face everything completely honestly and objectively.

Would you be so kind as to share what you discovered during your study? Would you please present your evidence?

Or at least present some of it to start with? I imagine there maybe quite alot of it, so maybe be should start one bit at a time?

[Samantha]

bodhi395 said:

So there are two different views of love and I was never trying to prove with absolute certainity either position. A person has to come to their own conlcusion as to which one they believe in. You were assuming I was writing some logical thesis to prove love was supernatural when I was just putting it out there that love can be seen in different contexts and I happened to believe it was supernatural and that I think most other people in the world think that too. I also think like I said earlier that love loses is power when it is seen only as bio-chemical reactions. It might be true though that it is.

What postion do you take Pap?

lol that was exactly what I thought you were doing, sorry about that Bodhi. I see where you are coming from now. I did start a longer reply but after being interupted a few times, I've lost the will to go back over it all again. So I'll just keep this one brief rather than just ignore your question completely. Although I might pop back again later as you have piqued my interest on a few issues, you piquer you.

What position do I take?

No I don't believe love loses it's power if it isn't supernatural, spiritual or mystical. Whether love is supernatural or bio-chemical, love is still love. The only thing that changes is it's context. So unless you are more into the context, the idea of love and what it means, the idea of being in love, then I don't see what difference it would make. I'm afraid I'm not much of a romantic ;D

[Samantha]

phoenixferret said:

(btw, is anyone else having issues with the "reply" button not copying all the text that the other person quoted? like it should read:

blah blah blah [ /quote] bonk bonk bonk [ /quote], but it deletes the blah blah blah part?)

No, I've had that a few times. Thankfully though it was just "Yadda yadda yadda" that was gone.

/wipes brow

[phoenixferret]

Speculating about an almighty creator outside of the universe is like speculating that we're in the Matrix (to bring back a favored analogy from this thread. Maybe there is a god, maybe there isn't; maybe we're all just dreaming, and maybe this is real. Maybe it's like in the Men in Black movie, and we're all living in the locker in a huge train station in another dimension. Technically all these things *could* be possible, since it is indeed impossible to know if there is anything "higher" than this existence, and if so what it is. This is going back to the idea that we accept every theory as equally possible since there's no way of ever testing what is truth and what isn't. Of course that means that all these things are equally not-possible, as well, if that makes sense. In which case, believing in *a* creator is perfectly valid within what we know/don't know about our world (we know that we can't understand existence beyond a certain point) and that simple idea of "something 'intelligent' created this universe" is an idea all of its own, and there's really nothing to argue there. [perhaps strictly I'm agnostic, but since I consider the idea of "God" to be no better than any other, atheism is the better word choice, I think.]

It's this idea of a specific god, with human characteristics (motives, desires, plans--the guy is going around getting humans to ghost-write his holy books fer goodness' sake) that just seems indefensible. I don't think you can take Christian beliefs (heaven, hell, a 100% benevolent creator, Jesus' divinity, the Bible) and tack them onto this concept of god existing because it isn't totally impossible. I understand the "gotta have faith" stance, even though I don't believe in it; but I don't understand this thing where the possibility of a god=everything in the Bible is literally true, and/or that scientific theories are totally baseless. Neither do I understand the fundamentalist attempts to discredit evolution or estimates of the Earth's age. This, again--it's kind of like a rider on a bill in Congress/Parliament whatever. You're starting off with this fine idea, that there may be a creator of the universe, and then adding on these provisions that he also made the world in six days a few thousand years back, and that he'd never allow a crazy thing like evolution (not sure why evolution and creation still can't coexist for fundamentalists; I should say I'm not sure why the Bible should be taken literally down to believing that the Adam and Eve story is historical fact, yet when men start throwing their daughters out to be raped by the mob, context suddenly and mysteriously becomes important. There *could* be a god. Yes. That's entirely unrelated to Christian claims, however.

The little bug-man living in a watch is an interesting example; all the faith in the world will likely not make a jot of difference to either him or the creators of his clocktastic paradise, nor would it lead him to any kind of truth. Wouldn't it be more likely that this bug-man would believe the world was created by an omnipotent bug-man, or even multiple bug-man gods? And he would be pretty wrong about it, considering that his whole world was created by some ordinary guy. Maybe the watch was even mass-produced in a factory. Even the little microcopically engraved part numbers and part names on the gears inside that watch are not holy texts, though we might expect that the little bug-man would be awestruck at his creator's greatness and feel so blessed that his creator thought of him in putting those words there just to help him grow in faith. Amazingly, some of the numbers seem to bear a relation to the way the gears move--so surely that is proof of the bug-god's omniscience.

Eep, I have to go home... there's going to be a class in here very soon. Darnit.... I'll be back!!

[pnoopiepnats]

Did Phil Collins invent Cincinnati chili?

I think I'll make some today if it isn't too wrong to make it here in oz.

[dog]

pnoopiepnats said:

Did Phil Collins invent Cincinnati chili?

I think I'll make some today if it isn't too wrong to make it here in oz.

Oooooh! Chili!!! Sounds good.


Be sure to make some for me too.

[jaeksmith]

:PWHOLLY CRAP! I am away for a bit due to moving and work busy-ness and I miss all the fun - Dang!

orionation said:

Is atheism not an intellectual position?

It can also be a choice...

orionation said:

What reasons do you have for holding that position?

I was raised a Mormon and was a very religious believer. I comprehended the world according to it's design as a place to prove ourselves. I struggled through the two-year proselyting mission, crying myself to sleep many nights due to the constant trauma it caused via my social anxiety (and ineptness) - but I (by my own choice) went on that mission and stayed in that mission because I believed (knew?) that, given eternity, it was reality.

After I came home, I continued college where I did fabulous in all my classes without hardly trying (since I had suffered the code as a child). However, anxiety started to abound and reality started to grow weak. I was crashing hard.

I started tossing away things that I couldn't grip tangibly. I was seeking reality (ability to think and comprehend answers without fuzziness). Without it I could believe anything and the world was out to get me. (Religion wasn't helping as I was (due to anxiety) failing to meet expectations in that domain - Mormonism requires alot of social interaction).

I dropped out of religion, I dropped out of college (where I was getting A's easily) ... I focused in a domain that allowed me to work in virtual domains of relative logic. I was able to stabilize somewhat and eek out an existance (where I'm very successful - though not socially).

I am the anti-case (not the anti-Christ). My situation is very similar, but opposite to ones who find religion and it saves him. I found the ability to reason by reducing noise caused by beliefs and other things we don't know.

Thus - as one answer, Oreination:

[glow=red,2,300]stability[/glow]

'course, I'm not suggesting that everyone needs this. But, I am suggesting that I do. My mind easily accepts strange ideas (which makes movies more effective on me) and, thus, I have to be more careful about what I allow myself to believe.

orionation said:

Atheism claims to be based upon logic, and/or evidence or lack of it. So, is there any reason/evidence for you holding your position that you defend?

Note: I'd suggest alot of atheists just say stop bothering me. It's the noisy ones that tend to represent the whole domain.

By the way, the magical poo men did create the universe. I'm one of them. We had a huge pizza last night and I've been poo'ing out a universe of ... uh... stuff... ever since!

{Edits for spelling}

[deadendphilosopher]

Orionation: Quite a while ago PheonixFerret and I questioned you about God, and you gave a short answer that didn't really seem to adress the questions we asked because you were on vacation and didn't have time to really get into it. Now that you're posting again, would you go back and adress all the points we made? (They are on page 13). Sorry to pester you, but I really do want to know what your response is. (Or anyone else's response, who has similar beliefs.) I would really appreciate it.