Yes, and it made my point better than I could. The gay is bad because the imaginary man in the sky says so, so here rape my daughter instead.
so wrong on so many levels. Savatar has explained it quite well for you.
This is a fallacy. Humans come in a variety of "flavors", that's why belief in God is as diverse as opinions on who makes the best car.
The belief in a greater good still remains, though, no matter who/what that is attributed too. That was my entire point.
Good, but we're not talking about UFO's, New Agers, etc...we're talking about why we seem to have an inherent capacity to believe in a greater good.
You're committing another fallacy here by saying that just because there are many versions of god, NONE of them are true, or likely not true.
How many ways can you think of to kill someone? Does that mean that because of the sheer diversity of opinions on that matter, all of them are potentially ineffective?
And I've questioned my faith, and answered them.
no because all you know is that one can select from any number (infinite) number of choices but you nor any man knows all of them. That does not make you or anyone else "all knowing".
Who are these people? Certainly, not myself.
Its about time you start being specific about "who" thinks its a good idea to allow their daughters to be raped.
Secondly, just because someone offers an explanation as to why it happened the way it did, isn't indicative of their moral feelings on the action.
That's like saying that just because I'm explaining to you why James Holmes shot up a movie theater, that means I condone mass murder.
Well, that analogy makes no sense whatsoever.
If god knows exactly what we're going to do, then we don't a have a choice but to do exactly that. If we choose to do something different, then god didn't know what we were going to do.
So you disagree with Lot's decision? Good.
There is no "complete" anything. It is unnecessary. How about just anything when it comes to gods?
I do things from a position of Knowledge, that being what is demonstrably true. I may not have "complete" understanding of what will happen when I get into a car(for eg), but it does not require Faith to get into that car and to use it as I have done repeatedly before. I have sufficient evidence to make that decision without fretting about it.
Again, you are equivocating something for which there is zero evidence for, with something for which there is daily evidence for. Do you not see the difference between these 2 things?
You have no more evidence for your god, than you do for Krishna, Zeus, or the FSM. The only difference is that you have Faith in your god and not those other gods.
Yea, if you, god, whomever, knows that someone is going to do 1 of an infinite number of things, that's pretty much worthless. That's like me telling you that I know the winning lottery numbers, then I proceed to give you a list of every possible combination of numbers that could make up the winning digits.
So god knows every possible combination of everything that could ever happen. He is all powerful so he can do anything that he wants. Yet because of "free will" he never intervenes. Sounds kind of worthless to me, he might as well not even exist. And then we get to god's plan. How can god have a plan if we have free will to do whatever we want and he's not going to do anything about it?
I'm not trying to prove God's existence BTW. I'm Taoist, I don't believe in "God" per-se. I'm simply pointing out the role a variety of faith has in daily life, whether one believes in a God or not.
Nor am I saying religion-based faith is equivalent to, call it evidence-based-faith.
I don't believe faith requires zero evidence to be faith. Believing an outcome will occur based on incomplete evidence is also a form of faith. Faith in the evidence at the very least, faith that your own judgement of the evidence is accurate, faith in human reasoning.
Hell in reality most people's religious faith is based on some perceived "evidence". You hear it all the time: "I prayed for X and it came true." Whether objectively true or not, to the religious person that's "evidence" that God exists.
Thanks for making the distinction, I have a better understanding of where you are coming from. However, whether these are "forms" of Faith is irrelevant. We are still discussing things for which some have plenty of Evidence and the other no Evidence. Equivocating the 2 forms as the same thing is the problem, they simply are not the same.
I know that Theists/Believers take "answered" Prayer(more accurately, they prayed for something and what they asked for occurred) as Evidence, but if one prays for enough things some of what is asked for will occur. That does not mean that the prayer had anything to do with it. It just means that they got what they wanted in the first place. That reminds me of what I heard/read recently from someone who claimed to be a Theist. They were looking for a Job, prayed about it, then shortly thereafter received a phone call from an Employer they had sent a resume to. The problem with it is pretty obvious as people have that happen whether they pray or not, but because that person prayed it was answered prayer to them. That is merely attributing everyday occurrence to the deity of their choice. Kinda like how some theists claim a hurricane or dead soldier is because of some perceived wrong against their deity. Good things happen, Bad things happen, that's just part of life. Neither is evidence of deities, spirits, conspiracies, etc.
For me, Nirvana as a state of no emotion and no feelings does not sound appealing, and so I cannot say that it would be my heaven. In the end, I could not reconcile that with my view that it is right, even important, to get sad at things that are sad, and angry at things that should make a person angry. I see this as fundamental and necessary to the nature of a human being. To end all emotion and feelings would be as becoming less than human. From a christian perspective, we find in scripture that both God and angels feel emotions - sorrow, anger, joy - just as people do... and so it would seem that heaven, or a state of perfection, would likely neither be a complete lack of emotion nor a state of unceasing bliss... at least based on my personal opinion and on Hebrew/Christian/Islamic sources.
Thanks for making the distinction, I have a better understanding of where you are coming from. However, whether these are "forms" of Faith is irrelevant. We are still discussing things for which some have plenty of Evidence and the other no Evidence. Equivocating the 2 forms as the same thing is the problem, they simply are not the same.
I know that Theists/Believers take "answered" Prayer(more accurately, they prayed for something and what they asked for occurred) as Evidence, but if one prays for enough things some of what is asked for will occur. That does not mean that the prayer had anything to do with it. It just means that they got what they wanted in the first place. That reminds me of what I heard/read recently from someone who claimed to be a Theist. They were looking for a Job, prayed about it, then shortly thereafter received a phone call from an Employer they had sent a resume to. The problem with it is pretty obvious as people have that happen whether they pray or not, but because that person prayed it was answered prayer to them. That is merely attributing everyday occurrence to the deity of their choice. Kinda like how some theists claim a hurricane or dead soldier is because of some perceived wrong against their deity. Good things happen, Bad things happen, that's just part of life. Neither is evidence of deities, spirits, conspiracies, etc.
What about the fact that the evidence of God and faith is not provided to a human until after the walk of Faith? God gives principles and promises in some of his commandments. For instance there is a promise in the commandment to honor and obey your parents. The promise is that your life will be long upon the earth. So many things you have to put to the test and takes God's word on it and see if it is true or not. He doesn't send miracles to non-believers. He does not cast pearls before swine (Its a biblical saying).
A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Don't expect the proof you have not earned. If you were an athletic person but did not exercise, you would not be expected to be able to win a marathon. It requires training and exercise on your part to be physically fit and win a marathon.
Take the story of David and Goliath. In the old testament it says David slew Goliath with a sling. However it does not explain very well that a sling can be a deadly weapon in the hands of a well trained person like a shepherd. David had earlier slain a Bear with a sling while guarding his sheep. God didn't miraculously teach him how to use a sling. He prepared himself to be able to use the sling. God just strengthened him enough to be the victor. Don't expect the protection of God until after you have done all that you can do for yourself.
Jews didn't believe in the unknown. God showed his powers to them in the past. People sometimes have to learn by "kicking at the pricks" (Biblical Saying). Some people will believe drinking is bad and they don't drink. Other people have to get drunk and crash their car and go to jail before they will accept it as a fact. That is learning the hard way.
No I'm not. Is it equivocating to say that pickup trucks and sedans are both cars?
Does this make it clear enough?
They both require belief in an unknown (the definition of faith), the only difference is the amount of unknown deemed tolerable.
And I don't necessarily need God's miracles to believe in him, I need proof of his existence. Being God, if he's up there he knows exactly what it would take for me to come to him of my own free will, and he could provide such if he wished. If he loves my swine ass so much I don't think that's too much to ask.
No. You are still equivocating between Evidence and No Evidence. You are not making an honest argument here. It does not matter if the term "Faith" can be wiggled to both or not, 1 has Evidence backing it up, the other does not. There is Reason to believe one and no Reason to believe the other.
equiv·o·cat·edequiv·o·cat·ing
Full Definition of EQUIVOCATE
1
: to use equivocal language especially with intent to deceive
2
: to avoid committing oneself in what one says
*sigh*
Note you use the same verb for both, proving my point.
As for equivocating:
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/equivocate
No, I'm not doing that^^^
I've been quite clear, and I've stated the differences as I see them. You may as well have said that because a pickup truck has a flatbed and a sedan does not, only the sedan is a car, and the pickup truck is not a car.
The mechanisms behind belief in evidence and belief in a deity are one and the same, as you just subconsciously admitted in your very post. The difference is how they're implemented, under what circumstances, and the how well attuned individual personality is to one implementation or the other.
Sorry if it's a blow to your ego Sandorksi, but no matter how much you like sedans, or define yourself by sedans, they aren't the only things that run on internal combustion engines.
Moot. One is justified and justifiable, the other is not. That is where equivocation comes in. Belief without Evidence is unjustifiable . To argue that "faith" is required everytime you drive you car has no bearing when the discussion is gods, faeries, or any other non-evidential thing. It is fallacious and deceptive, equivocation.
You must think I'm trying to prove something I'm not. Whether the faith is logically justified or not is irrelevant to my point. Logical justification often increases a person's faith, it does not change the nature of it.
My only point, back when all this started, is what you bolded. Atheists and Religious people run on the same fuel (faith), they just implement it differently and respond to different stimuli. It's relevant when the discussion is Gods and such because I've found it good to remind Atheists that they're not as dissimilar from their religious counterparts as they often think (in fact, as they often puff themselves up over) and vice-versa. Call it a philosophical theory of unification. A priest feels about their religion roughly the same way as a scientist feels about their science, because they're both based on implementations of the same thing.
There's an emotional resonance that few in such debates acknowledge. If you're debating with the intent of gaining a broader understanding of the opposite perspective, I've found it's a useful thing to understand. That's all.
You are equivocating again/still. That statement is complete nonsense in the context of what that means. The Atheist in no way is basing their lives on what the Theist is.
On the fundamental level yes they are. Just as AMD processors and Intel processors both implement x86, albeit in very different configurations with very different outcomes optimized for very different activities. And that's the last analogy I'm pulling out to explain a simple 3-point tree diagram.
If you were Theist, you could replace "Atheist" with "Theist" in all of our recent posts and you'd have fundamentally the exact same arguments, although instead of logical justification you'd be arguing holiness or eternity or something. I see it all the time in debates like these. I suppose one thing Atheists and Theists undeniably have in common it's a need to differentiate themselves. A Theist prides and identifies himself with his faith just as an Atheist prides and identifies himself with his logic.
But I guess this is where we differ. If you want and/or need to think that your sense of logic makes you fundamentally different from your Theist counterparts, I doubt anything I could say here is going to persuade you otherwise.
The difference is all about demonstrable Evidence. Sorry, the Theist and your argument has none.