God

[Dice]

Re: God

hate to break it to you stark,
but your 'logic' means nothing..the basic limitations of our brain puts a massive restriction on what we can understand.
if we let go of this logic and voice in our head we call thoughts which is our ego controlling us and giving us the illusion of duality, then we have so much more clarity and what we percieved to be ourselves was actually a mental construct...this way we can feel the aliveness in ourselves, in our bodies...feel our connection with this world and with everybody. to me that is feeling your 'christ within' or 'buddha nature'. it's not something you can logicisize it goes beyond the limitations of this body.

you come from a standpoint of defending yourself...this is because these ideas you speak of...you actually identify with. you want to be right, superior, the best. that is ego...always striving for seperation and power.
whereas enlightenment(christ within or buddha nature) is realizing the oneness and conectedness of everybody; here you have nothing to defend or demonstrate...here you want to treat everybody with respect and give your love unconditionally.

Christ and Buddha were enlightened beings and offered a path to liberation and yet the world was not ready for them...over the years the teachings got twisted and altered through translations but if you look closely enough you can retrieve the essence of them and it's all positive and great stuff. one must find their own path to liberation(of the ego...to oneness) using these teachings as a guideline.

For this purpose alone I reccomend Eckhart Tolle's new book 'A New Earth' ... it attempts to unlock that within you.

hope this plants a seed in you

[jgk3]

Re: God

The only way people can determine that best possible understanding at any given time of the nature of the universe is by logic reason and the scientific method. Trusting God is not as credible as trusting in logic and the scientific method. (See above post.) Just saying something is fallible is vague and meaningless. The leap of faith for believing in a God is entirely, completely, totally, utterly unreasonable and illogical. And that fact can only be clouded by fallacious language manipulation.

What if your religion still prompted you to adhere to a quite secular scientific method in order to provide enhancements for society at large in productivity and learning, much like in the case of Confucianism?

Are logic and faith really diametrically opposed?

[Yedtarts]

Re: God

Mother Teresa was not very bright. Sorry.

Why, because she wasn’t making 500,000 a year?
Did you knew her in person?
On what/whom scale you were measuring her brightness?

[ara87]

Re: God

My response was to your opinion that a God must have existed at some point. I did not address your comments on morality.

oh, i had taken you comment about fence sitting as referring to my own about in case there is a heaven. My logic in the reasoning that there must be, or has been a supernatural power was because something must have come before nothing, in order for everything else that exists to come into existence. Now whether it is a god(s) or an atom that expanded, or some other non biological matter, that's up for debate. But for me it makes sense that something must have existed before nothing, and the idea that there is or was a god(s) that came out of no where to create the universe make more sense to me at least, than just non biological matter appearing out of nowhere developing into the universe we know today

[Stark Evade]

Re: God

Logic, Reason, and the Scientific Method may give the best means of understanding the specific workings of the universe, but this does not necessarily mean they are the best way of understanding the nature of the universe.

Yes, that is precisely what it does.

Basing one's world-view based on "Reason" (which can mean different things to different people) requires as much faith as it does for a theist to believe in God. The atheist sees Reason as his only means of understanding the world but can give no explaination as to why this is so or why Reason can necessarily be trusted at a fundamental level.

It does not require the same amount of faith. You need to be more familiar with logic and maybe even Occam's Razor.

Epistemologically speaking, we can never truly know that our senses are
giving us true data. We can never truly know if we are being deceived by our own body. We can only say - with reasonable certainty - that yes, what my senses are telling me is true.

Science is not based on the senses of an individual.

No its not "vague and meaningless" - admitting that your worldview is fallible is the first step. This is actually a part of the Scientific Method as you probably know: understanding the limitations of one's experiment.

I have already stated that science doesn't say anything is a 100%. You seem to not understand the goal of science and the fact that if it is shown that something is the best process for gaining knowledge and understanding, placing confidence in anything else is illogical.

It is true that many theists use fallacies (ever hear "Liar, Lunatic, or Lord"?) to support their faith in God but it does not have to be this way. Although there are certainly many things about God that are illogical, there are still many more that agree with Reason.

I am not new to this. There isn't a single argument that is not fallacious.

Also, just because one cannot prove something empirically does not mean it is untrue.

It means that belief in it is illogical.

For example, it is generally agreed that the Universe is infinite and continually expanding. We cannot prove that the Universe is infinite, this is actually non-falsifiable. However most scientists agree, with reasonable certainty, that it must be so.

It is generally agreed upon for concrete and logical reasons.

[Stark Evade]

Re: God

I understand science well enough to know that it doesn't "prove" anything, just disproves things. As for perdictability equaling fact, I think you need to review what a fact is, meaning 100% of the time it is so, not 99.999999999% or whatever else. Many of the things in string theory are not testable either, and may never be, but does this mean they shouldn't be further investigated. I do not think science will ever prove or disprove the existence of God, but I also do not think it should be the job of science to do so, therefore I use science for the material world, for the immaterial world, well there's other fields for that.

You have no idea what you are talking about. Good bye.

[Stark Evade]

Re: God

The potential of the human mind to do what? Sure you have your innovators and geniuses but they are far outweighed by mass murderers, rapists, dictators and other sorts of evils. The human mind could be equally called a "disgusting, festering disease".

I'll only quickly say that religion is responsible for a lot of killing and sexual crime stemming from sexual repression.

It is quite obvious that I meant the potential of the intellectual aspect of the human mind. Your argument red herring.

Life is depressing. If you follow a religion life is depressing but if you are an atheist life means nothing - no matter how great of an innovator you may be it will have been in vain as the world will turn to dust. Without God we cannot put a "fundamental trust" in either our senses or our reason. Without a God, life is essentially meaningless; we cannot give Ultimate Meaning to a world which is bound to disappear.

If you are an atheist you give meaning to your own life instead of having someone tell you what that meaning is.

See "The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality"

Regardless of what your view on religion is, it is not childish. There are very real reasons to believe in God such as the fact that logically the universe couldn't have just existed "without a beginning". There had to be a first cause, a Prime Mover, if you will.

It is childish.

Here's an intro for you on the first cause argument...

http://www.positiveatheism.org/faq/firstcause.htm

Christianity helped many victims and survivors of the Genocide cope with the atrocities around them. Is that childish to you? Are you going to call Genocide survivors childish for believing in an Ultimate Reality that they found in Jesus Christ?

This statement is vacuous. Religion was in great part responsible for the Genocide. And you assume two things: 1) that it is the only effective form of consolation and that it did in fact work. Where was God's consolation when Komitas needed him? Did he recover from witnessing his friends slaughtered? No. He lost his mind instead.

And consolation doesn't increase the truth value of something. Ideally they shouldn't have had those beliefs in the first place. Period.

The belief in things that cannot be shown to exist is childish in an age when information and knowledge are so readily available.

[yerazhishda]

Re: God

The only way people can determine that best possible understanding at any given time of the nature of the universe is by logic reason and the scientific method.

Logic, Reason, and the Scientific Method may give the best means of understanding the specific workings of the universe, but this does not necessarily mean they are the best way of understanding the nature of the universe. Basing one's world-view based on "Reason" (which can mean different things to different people) requires as much faith as it does for a theist to believe in God. The atheist sees Reason as his only means of understanding the world but can give no explaination as to why this is so or why Reason can necessarily be trusted at a fundamental level.

Epistemologically speaking, we can never truly know that our senses are
giving us true data. We can never truly know if we are being deceived by our own body. We can only say - with reasonable certainty - that yes, what my senses are telling me is true.

Trusting God is not as credible as trusting in logic and the scientific method. (See above post.) Just saying something is fallible is vague and meaningless.

No its not "vague and meaningless" - admitting that your worldview is fallible is the first step. This is actually a part of the Scientific Method as you probably know: understanding the limitations of one's experiment.

The leap of faith for believing in a God is entirely, completely, totally, utterly unreasonable and illogical. And that fact can only be clouded by fallacious language manipulation.

It is true that many theists use fallacies (ever hear "Liar, Lunatic, or Lord"?) to support their faith in God but it does not have to be this way. Although there are certainly many things about God that are illogical, there are still many more that agree with Reason.

Also, just because one cannot prove something empirically does not mean it is untrue. For example, it is generally agreed that the Universe is infinite and continually expanding. We cannot prove that the Universe is infinite, this is actually non-falsifiable. However most scientists agree, with reasonable certainty, that it must be so.

[Armanen]

Re: God

You obviously do not understand what a theory is in the scientific context. Wikipedia may be able to give you an idea of why I say that.

Your argument is just manipulating language as often occurs when a theist poses an argument to a non-theist. Sorry but it's not the same leap of faith. Science doesn't say anything is 100%. It says that certain things are predictable to a great enough degree that they are considered fact. Supernatural ideas are not testable and therefor cannot exhibit any predictability and are therefore not nearly of equivalent epistemological value.

I understand science well enough to know that it doesn't "prove" anything, just disproves things. As for perdictability equaling fact, I think you need to review what a fact is, meaning 100% of the time it is so, not 99.999999999% or whatever else. Many of the things in string theory are not testable either, and may never be, but does this mean they shouldn't be further investigated. I do not think science will ever prove or disprove the existence of God, but I also do not think it should be the job of science to do so, therefore I use science for the material world, for the immaterial world, well there's other fields for that.

[Stark Evade]

Re: God

I agree. I think that there are equally valid reasons for being an atheist and being a theist. The atheist puts fundamental trust in his own reason while the theist puts fundamental trust in God. Both the ideas of Reason and God have truth, but are simultaneously fallible. One takes a leap of faith when believing in God, but it does not have to be totally unreasonable.

The only way people can determine that best possible understanding at any given time of the nature of the universe is by logic reason and the scientific method. Trusting God is not as credible as trusting in logic and the scientific method. (See above post.) Just saying something is fallible is vague and meaningless. The leap of faith for believing in a God is entirely, completely, totally, utterly unreasonable and illogical. And that fact can only be clouded by fallacious language manipulation.