hahaha, i thought that would probably fire you up! still, you obviously have no answers. your whole position is: i believe the bible cos it's god's word, i know god is real cos the bible tells me so. if you can't see the idiocy of that position, then, for your own sake, i hope your new job doesn't require you to think too much...
Wow, Originally posted by goldenarm The Bible is NOT proof of God. No argument there. Everyone in agreement here! Originally posted by goldenarm Because I believe in God and I was raised a Catholic. In other words.... he holds a belief irrationally based on his upbringing instead of his own factual observations of reality. You gotta give goldenarm some credit for being completey honest and explaining that the reason he believes in god is because he was raised that way. End of discussion with goldenarm. I think we are all in agreement here. I have not encountered any evidence that discredits Christianity, my belief system still stands. This part is debateable. How do you explain the jesus stories being BORROWED from previous, older, religions? There is a lot of evidence that discredits Christianity. Some posted in this thread. Would you like us to summarize this? But this should not be necessary at all. As I have explained earlier, rational belief does not depend on the fact the no one has discredited your position. If this were the case, I would believe in Santa and the easter bunny because no one has proven THEY DONT EXIST. If only all the other theists would come out and admit the reasons they irrationally believe. This thread would be completely over peace axeman
I'll tell you one thing in relation to this debate that is absolutely true: You cannot prove a negative. What does that mean? It means that you cannot use logic to prove that there is no such thing as God or a soul or the afterlife or a zillion other spiritual things. The real truth is that we have absolute freedom to believe in anything that we want. Some people can't handle that freedom and they want to nail everything down tight. If I want to believe that God is big purple Dinosaur singing "I love you, you love me" ( which isn't far from the beliefs of some new agers ) then I can, and you can't do anything about it, and you can't logically say that I am wrong.
Look, I have no answers and I don't claim to have them. That's why people are attracted to religion in the first place. To fill any void they may have in their life that science alone can't appropriately answer. You have your beliefs and I have mine. I don't begrudge you that. I agree that many crimes against humanity have been perpetrated in the NAME of religion and that's a sad commentary on mankind's inherently evil nature. But to blame religion is a vast oversimplification. Rather, the blame rests on the myopic fools who were in power. Religion works for me and I'm at peace with myself. I'm generous to people and kind-hearted (usually!). I really can't prove to you that God exists any more than you can prove He doesn't exist. We're at a stalemate and I don't see any foreseeable resolution to this quandary. Can't we all just git along?
by the way I like ancient greek mythology, it would be weird for your gods to be like characters in a grand soap opera all the time, screwing each other, etc. At least it was entertaining and seemed to relate to every day life.
Yes buddy, it is because our ability to understand the objective universe is small compared to all that there is to understand. It is not just that we can't know everything, but rather what we know is an infitessmal fraction of what there is to know. ANd this is far more than a meaningless statement if you actually ponder the point. I made the freaking statement because, as I've explained MANY times, our semantic games are useless in trying to disprove something that we CANNOT disprove (in this case the concept of an omniscient being)!
get real 'Boat! just ask yourself if you have free will do whatever you want? if you do, you MUST reject the concept of omniscience. if your god KNOWS what you are gonna be doing, say, 5years from now - THEN YOU HAVE NO CHOICE BUT TO DO IT. you may THINK you do, but if god is to be infallibly correct, you DO NOT. you would be merely acting out a predetermined script. there's no way around this.
my purpose isn't really to "prove" that god doesn't exist. as people have said, it's proving a negative. the more important question is, what is man justified in believing. he most certainly is not justified in believing in god. as i've said, the main reason for my rejection of religon is precisely so that we can all "git along". unfortunately your bible, and other holy books (more so), provide man with a REASON NOT TO get along. you either understand that, or you don't. to me it's very obvious.
Once again you inaccurately accuse me of making a fallacious argument (you've done this many times). The word "fucking" does not inherently make for an ad hominem attack. In fact, I did not make one. What's more, I was rightfully frustrated by your incorrect accusations of unsupported statements (that I'd supported multiple times in the past) and non-existent fallacious arguments. If it offended you (even though you have been rude to others, and I don't mean the couple of people or so that deserved it) then I apologize. My point was never that "I" don't exist. I was saying that YOU don't know that I or anyone else exists. I know that I exist. I don't know that YOU exist. All that I know is that I think and that I exist! All arguments to prove that anyone of us knows more than that require assumptions that a God exists and that a God would not deceive us. Since most of us would agree that the latter requires faith, then we would agree that we can't KNOW that we know anything more than our existence. You say we enhance what we can't perceive with our senses. Well there are many things that we can't even perceive through science (and other things we can perceive but never prove). Math, as I've said, is the most objective tool we have (and for our purposes a very good one of course), yet it is still flawed. Add our limitations to perceive and comprehend with the fact that we only have around 40 years to seriously learn in our lifetimes (give or take) and we are that much more limited (in this case by volume, rather than by depth of understanding). Are you really unable to acknowledge our limitations, and with it the fact that there are many things (including serious concepts) that we will never disprove???