by hillary_step 208 Replies latest jw friends
BurnTheShips,
You are too easily offended HS. Instead of looking down on me so much try looking up for a change. Maybe you'll see God.
Another dolt who thinks he can read personalities from discussion Boards, Lord save us. For your information, I am not offended at all. I am merely suggesting that you dishonest and hoping that you might prove me wrong. ;)
HS
2) Is a person who has faith in a God that you do not believe in, say for example Siva, practicing a form of self-deception?
Yes--up to a point.
So am I.
So are you.
Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.
Burn
I think the diffence between you and I is that I know what words mean and you do not.
I am calling you a liar
and ask for you to present what evidence you have for your bolded statement. I know that evidence is a word that means many things to religionists like yourself, apart or course from its true meaning, but I am calling you on this now.HS
Lol!
As usual, Hillary is the first to attempt escalation by claiming unique or special knowledge regarding the "meaning" of a word, lol!
As if such argument amounts to anything other than a semantic argument.
Again, I repeat myself- very little is indisputable fact, almost all we "know" or "believe to be true" is opinion.
Hillary's opinion's are the "right" one's, lol.
Such egotism is rare, indeed.
It reminds me of this vid:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5OY3aRqqqts
BA
Another dolt who thinks he can read personalities from discussion Boards, Lord save us. For your information, I am not offended at all. I am merely suggesting that you dishonest and hoping that you might prove me wrong. ;)
If you were in front of me I don't know if I would want to punch you in the face or pat you on the back. You CAN read personality to a point on a discussion board. You demonstrated as much when you posted recently on the RR "tattoo boy" debacle. You showed more sense there than I would have. You must be able to tell by now that I truly relish debating you. I hope you take that as a compliment. ;-)
Burn
I also see the extraordinary complexity and purposefulness of living things from the cell up as proof of a creator, the evolutionist will argue that evolution does explain this but it never convinces me it's just too good to be the result of evolution which is really based on blind chance.
I recall Serotonin strongly objected in one of his PMs, to me calling evolution a process based on blind chance but that's what it is in the end natural selection may not be blind chance but the creation of new genes through mutation which is what really creates new traits and cumulatively over time new species according to evolutionary theory, sorry Serotonin but, it is most certainly a random process.
An intelligent designer looks much more reasonable in explaining the nature of this world, every minute detail appears to have constructed by a creator unimaginably more intelligent than any human.
Finally evolution is most certainly not a proven fact but a theory that is constantly eroded by new discoveries. True enough life forms do get more complex with time but that does not disprove a creator and ominously for evolution the supposed numerous small changes in species are not present in the fossil record. As Darwin aknowledged there are big gaps between species as we go up the complexity ladder; today as much as in his time.
So call it a perception of things through a feeling or intuition mode or more rationally through the logical analysis of scientific facts eg the fossil record, belief in a creator is the way to go despite what Mr Dawkins et al claim.
2) Is a person who has faith in a God that you do not believe in, say for example Siva, practicing a form of self-deception?
I already answered this truthfully in my first reply on this thread, but it went over your head.
The only truthful answer to the question is "time will tell" who has been decieved, by themselves or others, and who has been correct.
BA
No we are not agreeing. You claim in a number of posts that you can provide "evidence" of the existence of a God. Despite your much repeated claim you have never done so, despite dodging and weaving like a used car salesman.
Oh BTW, I have provided evidence. Philosophical evidence. You already know about science and the supernatural.
I dodge and weave like a well trained soldier. ;-)
Burn
What many Christians fail to acknowledge is that there is a complex accumulation of evidence from many fields of thought which all taken together point us to an objectively right conclusion. Brother Apostate likes the crime evidence analogy so I would apply it here as well. Most people don't think O.J. Simpson was guilty just because of single bloody pair of ill-fitting gloves. The reason people think he is guilty is because of the weighty accumulation of all the numerous pieces of evidence and the circumstances which point to him as the most logical suspect. O.J. knew the victim, had motive, had a violent history with the victim, left his blood at the scene, left rare shoe prints, discarding his clothes, had wounds on his hand, had victim's blood on his vehicle, snuck around the back of his own house that night, acted strange, tried to run away, and many other pieces that as a whole point to him being guilty. Even if some lines of evidence went nowhere, were faked, or pointed to his innocence the vast majority of it still clearly pointed to his guilt.
Belief in God or having faith is also subject to numerous evidence lines of which evolution is but a small part. I knew nothing about evolution as my faith in God began to unravel. Evolution is just a small part of the mountain of evidence which proves to us that God is not real.There are many lines of evidence which point to the objective facts in the matter of God's reality. If the Bible is God's word then it contains many falsifying facts. The God-tantrums of the Old Testiment provide ample evidence which points us away from concluding that God is omnipotent, omniscient, and most assuridly not merciful. If God presents Himself in His own inspired book as a petty genocidal maniac then it becomes difficult to believe He would possess the wisdom and higher intelligence required to create a Universe. It certainly makes one pause to think about His qualifications to be God in the first place.
The plain fact that we have waited 2000 years for Christ's promises and yet nothing happens belies the Bible's truthfulness. The plain fact that all humans begin development as females flies in the face of a male god who creates males first in His image. The plain fact that the Universe is full of chaos and bad design including a tilted Earth being bombarded by space debris irrugularly orbiting an inconsistant Sun should tell us something. Bad biological designs such as air breathing dolphins and land animals and plants which require water to live on a planet full of deserts is another proof.
This is just a short list. The facts point to a random, cruel, unconsciuos universe and not to there being an intelligent super being like God behind it all. Otherwise the facts all contradict what we would expect to find and if this were the case, and God exists anyway, He would be quite insane considering all the lines of evidence He has given us. Finally I would say that the plain fact that God is never seen, heard, felt, or in any way makes His presence known to us should be a huge clue in of itself that He is not real.
Weigh all the acculmulated evidence and come to a logical conclusion for yourself.
Yes, but perhaps we should widen this concept a little. For example, one might state the case as you have regarding the entity of a "God". One might then go on to assign other characteristics to this "God". This God, loves me. This God created me. This God provides me with my wants. This God answers my prayers. This God looked after a book called the Bible to make sure it spoke truth to me. This God looks after the orbit of the sun so that it brings me life.You see, the concept of a God may not require self-deception, but all appendages applied to this concept do. They require that a person go further than a provable/unprovable concept, as BA clearly intones in his posts. It is this element of the issue that I wish to address.
Help me out for a moment. My poor brain can conceive of a being that kick started the universe and let it grow (evolve). I don't know if this being is still out there or not, but if it exists then doesn't that very existence bring up a myriad of questions? Those questions, lacking any input directly from this being, would necessarily be of our own conjecture. Which I guess is why we created the concept of religion.
Perhaps this is one area you're touching on above, but I don't want to put words in your mouth.
Is death the end? I don't believe so - but I don't believe I need God, either. We work out our own salvation and every action causes a reaction. I believe in Karma. Is it because I'm afraid of being annihilated? Well, having been so close to death and actually asking for death to take me, I don't believe I am. One thing's for sure, I'll find out when I die................................................or will I?
Howdy Ian. Long time no see.
Frankly I find atheism more comforting than religion when it comes to death. I find oblivion more comforting than coming face to face with remote, uncaring CEO-style God, or a vindictive bean counter IRS-style God. I'm not afraid of death, frankly I wouldn't be too worked up if it happened at the moment. But it will one day, and I would like very much to get to the place you are. I wish I could believe in the concept of karma, but I can't at the moment.
I'm more inclined to conclude that musings on the nature of God are often a reflection of our own self rather than the reality of what may or may not exist. I think we cannot help but bring our own strengths, weaknesses, faults and beliefs of ourselves to the discussion and so as the man said we "see through the mirror darkly."
I would question on philosophical grounds whether one could assert objectively that (abstract) faith can be equated with self-deceit or irrationality when the latter involves other people's subjectivities which generally lie outside objective inquiry. Self-deceit may be inferred from objective evidence generated by a person's subjectivity (i.e. "etic" evidence of another's experience), and indeed self-deceit is inimical to its own recognition in the mind of someone who experiences it, but neither is it possible to know whether a person has access to "emic" knowledge (such as what a person knows from his/her own experience) that is not available to the observer for evaluation. I do not mean to imply that emic evidence that is phenomenologically present is necessarily "real" (cf. Searle's phenomenological illusion), nor is it valid as evidence used to empirically establish objective factual knowledge, but I feel that it should be openly recognized that the premise of the OP (i.e. that faith is necessarily a result of self-deceit) attempts to designate a group of people as subjects -- not from any objective position but from another subjective point of view.
