The religious talk of this thread is almost reminiscent of Landover Baptist Church, so i'm not sure if any of it is legitimate or not.
The religious talk of this thread is almost reminiscent of Landover Baptist Church, so i'm not sure if any of it is legitimate or not.
Yes, punny.Meowcat may act as a Poe but i assure you he's not, he's an overly devout Catlick.
By the by, this may also be useful:I think it's quite a bit more complicated than that.
I think this makes much more sense given the range of different beliefs people hold. It allows for the more rational position on both sides that fall short of absolute certainty, yet still express an opinion on the matter. It is particularly useful in explaining to theists, who actually do occupy the "absolute theist" position in large numbers, that Atheism is not necessarily the polar opposite of their own beliefs. In fact, most atheist likely occupy the "Strong Atheist" position, which is quite a bit different than "Absolute Atheist".
Edit: Also, to give credit where it's due. I got this scale from a book by Richard Dawkins. I know a lot of people knock him, but this is the best explanation of the spectrum of belief I have come across.
By the by, this may also be useful:
Though agnostic is and can be used as a standalone term, it also stands as an adjective or modifier as well. I'm just iterating the same thing you said but with different words, since gnosticism deals with knowledge. Agnostic can just be the name for someone who holds the belief that the existence of a god cannot be known, or it can be used as a modifier for atheism or theism, giving a bit of a spectrum as to whether they're a "hard" or "weak" a/theist.
Though I'm probably telling everyone something they already know. Lol.
Oh crap, I forgot.Hey, don't try to steal the Agnostics thunder, the important part of being Agnistic is that you can look down on BOTH atheists and theists while actually being an atheist at the same time.
Oh crap, I forgot.
Nah, I think apathetic agnostics have more privilege in looking down on generally everyone because not giving a shit (while still being atheist) makes things a whole lot easier.
I am god.
Prove i'm not.
If you can't prove i'm not then obviously, i am god and you have to obey me.
There is only one God, the God of Moses, YHWH.
And if you were God you would know what I am thinking at all times. Yes, God knows what is on our mind, our thoughts and intentions for the future.
So tell me, JohnOfSheffield, self proclaimed "god", what will I be thinking at 12:00AM on July 27, 2017?
You are not God.
You are a foolish atheist and confused human.
I guess we can skip your posts then. We're having a thread about logic and rational thinking here, so "who cares what religious people think?" :hmm:bah. humbug.
In my experience God is great - and I love Him! :wub:
Who cares what atheists think?
But, what the heck, I might as well still reply anyway.You really go off on a tangent. God is not mortal, he is immortal. To try and consider him a man and apply to your lowly logic is a failure of your atheism.
God's plan is simple - to get you to heaven. He sent his Son, Jesus, to help us get there. Thats the only plan. Your conclusions and deductions beyond that are wrong.
I would call it "practical certainty," just as I'm quite certain that I can't run through the wall that's near me, no matter how many times I try, or that all of the radioactive elements on Earth will not spontaneously decay at the same time tomorrow, or that Earth's motion about the Sun will not abruptly stop tomorrow.Yes. I know it's sometimes defined that way, but it's silly since it's literally impossible to be certain. No true atheist would claim to know the unknowable, and if they do it's in the same sense as they say there aren't any unicorns (he means there probably aren't).
:thumbsup:I had cancer two years ago and was flooded from family members and friends with messages like "Keeping you in our prayers" "Praying for you" etc. I got letters from churches I'd never heard of, though their cards were nice but I'd never met these people.
When I was cured much of my family used language such as "Praise God!", "God is good!", "Thank the Lord!", etc...I am not religious in any fashion. I don't claim any religion, nor atheism nor agnosticism. I'm just simply not spiritual in any way and do not concern myself with religion much at all.
What bothered me most was hearing Thank God or Thank the Lord after I was cured. I wanted to say "No, if you want to thank someone send my oncologist, surgeon, and nurses some cards. I can give you their names and where to reach them. Also thank my insurance company who paid out over $120,000 on my treatment, and my mother who covered the rest."
For people to say God is Good because I was cured usually angers me. I know I am alive today only because I happened to be born in this country to a middle class family who happened to have good health insurance and the money to cover my treatments. I happen to have gotten cancer in 2011 when an effective treatment had been well tested and had proven results. Had it been back in 1991, or worse earlier, I likely would not have lived two years post diagnosis, as I am now.
Yet I rarely confront anyone over it. I know it's just a way of language, some people say such things without even being very religious themselves. For others it's the only thing they know to say and they realize that they have no real way of helping and so put faith in a God to help me for them.
I was not looking for a God, nor did I find a God through my cancer. For me to believe in a God I'd have to believe he caused the cancer, as nobody was involved in that. I would not be able to believe he cured it, as that means he would have done so in a very convoluted way of going through multiple physicians and large amounts of money. I would have to believe he lets countless others die all the time from the same cancer. That, or I would have to believe in a God who is completely hands off.
But I don't fault others for believing. Sometimes I wish I could believe in something the way they do, but I just don't.
Stem cells: MeowCat, you've got stem cells in you right now. Ruh roh.stem cell testing - proven to help stroke victims, create new organs for people and reverse alzeimers...yeh shit choice
gay marriage - you know who you can blame for this...blame straight people, they're the ones that have gay babies! and if being gay is a choice, why don't you choose to be gay for a week and see how it is, choose to be attracted to another person of your sex and see how it is.
gun grabbing - no comment, I've lived in Switzerland, Germany, France, Canada and the UK...all have reasonably strict gun laws (UK especially), but perfectly fine and good for protection of house and home. Not sure on how it is in the US.
If I say I have faith in you, does that then mean that your assertion is valid?I am god.
Prove i'm not.
If you can't prove i'm not then obviously, i am god and you have to obey me.
Why is your religion's assertion of "ours is the only god" correct? What about the other religions which say that they are the only correct religion, and that all others are wrong? What lets you dismiss their claims? Is it that evidence thing?
There is only one God, the God of Moses, YHWH.
And if you were God you would know what I am thinking at all times. Yes, God knows what is on our mind, our thoughts and intentions for the future.
So tell me, JohnOfSheffield, self proclaimed "god", what will I be thinking at 12:00AM on July 27, 2017?
You are not God.
You are a foolish atheist and confused human.
You were talking about miracles happening earlier.
God could cure your cancer? Yes? God could prevent your cancer? You said he cures some people. He could do so with pretty much no effort on his part. Him choosing not to cure some people either means that he thinks that they deserve to have cancer or he's an arsehole who doesn't really care.
Either way he's coming across like an arsehole.
Atheism isn't a belief. Please don't misrepresent atheism.
I guess we can skip your posts then. We're having a thread about logic and rational thinking here, so "who cares what religious people think?" :hmm:
But, what the heck, I might as well still reply anyway.
Applying human ideals to gods: People have done that to their deities ever since the concept of a deity was first conceived.
In any case, I'm not seeing the tangent. Lousy things happen to our species, on a regular basis, and with this god being in charge of things, right down to the creation of every last subatomic particle, and who allegedly has knowledge of everything, there aren't a whole lot of options to explain why things happen. If God does know everything throughout all of time, then he knew exactly how every part of his creation would proceed, including Adam and Eve's doings in the Garden and their subsequent punishment, including having to format&reinstall during the Flood, and including the requirement for the whole Jesus arrangement.
If he doesn't know everything, that contradicts one of his basic properties (omniscience), so I don't think we can say that.
If he sits idly by while horrible things happen to people...well, our own culture doesn't look so kindly on that. "That's right, I do know CPR and I have a cellphone that could have been used to get an ambulance here in less than 10 minutes, but frankly, he's not my kid, so I didn't want to help, otherwise I might have interfered with his free will." God does that on a regular basis, yet he receives praise for it.
On the subject of the only plan being to get to Heaven, via Jesus: Per an ancient text about our origins, it was the very god who created this species which also condemned it to an Earthbound life of suffering because of a minor transgression of a mere two individuals. Then the story says that his only path to salvation was to have another individual suffer great torture and then death, and people simply had to say, "Yup, that guy did those things, which was his only purpose for existing." Then that somehow functions as the key to getting into Heaven, but only after enduring a lifetime of our unearned condemned sentence of Earthbound suffering.
It just seems like a terribly bizarre and convoluted system, which functions like it was written by a sadist, as so much of it involves suffering, and even places immense value on it.
If you're a species which is bound to a harsh environment, such as where we find ourselves living right now, what's one way of coping? "Living in these lousy conditions is a good thing! Someone out there must love us a lot if he's willing to put us through this." If you're dying of thirst in the desert: "You know what? I like the feeling of imminent death. This is a great! Some entity is probably doing this for our own benefit."
We've got a term for that, and it's not "faith."
I would call it "practical certainty," just as I'm quite certain that I can't run through the wall that's near me, no matter how many times I try, or that all of the radioactive elements on Earth will not spontaneously decay at the same time tomorrow, or that Earth's motion about the Sun will not abruptly stop tomorrow.
I'm sure there's a probability of each of those things happening, but it's quite incredibly low, such that I can practically say that those things will not happen.
:thumbsup:
Exactly.
Say nothing of how he failed to prevent the bad situation from occurring in the first place.
Say nothing of how he permitted suffering and uncertainty of death to occur in the meantime.
Praise him for letting someone get to Heaven early when he decides not to intervene to save a life.
Praise him for "curing" an ailment.
So he gets an automatic ticket for zero accountability, despite the fact that he should be the most accountable entity in the Universe, and he gets praise regardless of the outcome.
That's not a god. That's a very spoiled child.
My job would be so much easier if I had to work under those conditions: Nothing's ever my fault, I only have to treat problems and not prevent them, and no matter how it turns out, I'm awesome.
Stem cells: MeowCat, you've got stem cells in you right now. Ruh roh.
Or maybe stem cells are bad because they get in the way of God's plan of letting people suffer and die whenever they need to.
Gay marriage: Wasn't there only one thing in the Bible about gay people? And wasn't it in that "doesn't count" part of the Bible? (Old Testament)
Guns: The Bible guarantees our right to bear arms? I could've sworn that was in some other document. :hmm:
If I say I have faith in you, does that then mean that your assertion is valid?
If so, welcome aboard, Deity.
Why is your religion's assertion of "ours is the only god" correct? What about the other religions which say that they are the only correct religion, and that all others are wrong? What lets you dismiss their claims? Is it that evidence thing?
Or is it that "faith" thing, which allows people to say, "I have no rational reason to believe this, but I'm going to do it anyway. This is not a sign of insanity."
"Yes, God knows what is on our mind, our thoughts and intentions for the future."
Ok, so let's roll with this: So God knew what Adam and Eve were going to do - and they were his own design. So he knew what he had designed them to do, and then he punished them for functioning precisely as designed, and condemned all of their offspring (a whole species) because they functioned perfectly.
He knew that humanity would eventually turn sour, and that he'd have to kill 99.9...% of them by way of drowning, again, because they functioned exactly as they were designed. And since he knows our thoughts and intentions in the future, we lack free will; we are simply following the scripted program which has been in effect since God first made it.
Have you ever seen discussions of Star Wars or Star Trek, or Lord of the Rings?@Jeff7 Do you believe God exists?
If not, why are you arguing the actions of a God you don't believe in using historical accounts of his actions that you don't believe to have actually happened?
Have you ever seen discussions of Star Wars or Star Trek, or Lord of the Rings?
Those people don't believe that those things happened. It's really quite entirely possible to set up hypothetical discussions of fictitious things.
There is only one God, the God of Moses, YHWH.
And if you were God you would know what I am thinking at all times. Yes, God knows what is on our mind, our thoughts and intentions for the future.
So tell me, JohnOfSheffield, self proclaimed "god", what will I be thinking at 12:00AM on July 27, 2017?
You are not God.
You are a foolish atheist and confused human.
God has an eternal body waiting for you that will never get cancer. One that will never age, never suffer, and always looks good in those jeans you like. We all die eventually, somehow, some way. The point to this life is not how we die, but how we live. Miracles exist to show a glimpse of eternity, this life decays and ends no matter what. Everyone is cured... when they die. You must be born again before you enter eternity.
....
I guess I can't properly reply to this, other than to simply reiterate what I've already said.This is not comparable and you know it. You can make up justifications all you want, but don't justify it to yourself. Own up to what you really feel.
So he made us live in the shitty faulty body just for shit and giggles then?
Sounds like god is an arsehole then.
That's not what I said, it's what you interpreted due to presupposition. Start from scratch - You are alive, you have the power of influence on all of creation and there are many others in your environment with the same power. You are constantly in a state of decision making and there is no pause button. Every action has a consequence, good and bad, and the future is defined by collective decisions and consequences made by all living creatures. What do you do and why? The meaning of life is all about those decisions.
In this thread, MeowCat put forth that God knows what you're going to decide in the future.That's not what I said, it's what you interpreted due to presupposition. Start from scratch - You are alive, you have the power of influence on all of creation and there are many others in your environment with the same power. You are constantly in a state of decision making and there is no pause button. Every action has a consequence, good and bad, and the future is defined by collective decisions and consequences made by all living creatures. What do you do and why? The meaning of life is all about those decisions.
What's any of that got to do with the classical christian god and the way he's supposed to have set up the rules of the game?
There is only one God, the God of Moses, YHWH.
And if you were God you would know what I am thinking at all times. Yes, God knows what is on our mind, our thoughts and intentions for the future.
So tell me, JohnOfSheffield, self proclaimed "god", what will I be thinking at 12:00AM on July 27, 2017?
You are not God.
You are a foolish atheist and confused human.
What rules? What game? Get all that out of your head, just wake up and live already. Learn to love unconditionally, learn to live for others, learn to have peace and happiness in spite of those who don't want any of that. There are answers that you can't get until you are ready to accept them.