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No .. they are NOT facts .. if they were, then believers in God would not have a leg to stand on.
We are not that stupid, you know.
I'm familiar with the analogy and I'll go ahead and give you a :WINNER: for that even before @muhammad_isa is going to do his best to derail and / or dodge it.Now, this may seem off-topic, but bear with me and it will provide you with an answer to your question and a useful analogy for understanding the logic behind that answer.
Here is a jar of jelly beans.
Now, can you tell me whether or not you believe* the number of jelly beans in the jar is even?
(*to be clear, to "believe" something in this context simply means "to hold that a given proposition as true")
If your bliefs are based on good evidence, and theists follow evidence, then why aren't other believers being convinced by what you offer? You accuse atheists of being blind, so what about other believers that reject Baha'i? Are they blind too? Shouldn't they be the easiest to covert?
You show us you aren't a critical thinker, mostly due to your bias. One element of being a critical thinker is the ability to self-monitor motives and confirmation bias, and you are not willing to examine it. You even use the application of fallacies wrong, usually when getting emotional and defensive over petty issues.Says who? One who does not even know a basic fallacy.
You are a time-waster..
Nonsense .. you cannot know for sure whether you were aware before or after your present awareness.
No, the statement "I do not believe there are gods" and the statement "I do not claim that there are no gods" are perfectly consistent.
I predict he will avoid doing so like the plague.
Mere word play..
In debate bad assumptions will be pointed out, and theists make numerous bad assumptions when they decide some sort of god exists. Believers are a product of their social experience and not an example of being an indepentent and critical thinker.
Kinda like living our adult lives assuming Santa Claus isn't real?
There is only one form of critical thinking - one set of rules of inference, any violation of which results in unsound conclusions, which are ideas tat shouldn't be believed. By those rules, a god belief is unjustified, since their application to the available evidence for gods never leads to "therefore God." That is a correct statement. If it weren't, you could successfully rebut it, and you cannot.
Those are your words. I say they hold unjustified beliefs.
Can we just assume that you will never understand what agnostic atheism is if you still don't? The agnostic atheist does not assume that fictitious characters don't exist, but does live as if they are nonexistent. The agnostic atheist is usually also an agnostic aleprechaunist and lives his life as if leprechauns don't exist, never chasing rainbows in search of pots of gold, for example. Being a critical thinker, he understands that he has no argument that concludes, "therefore, leprechauns don't exist."
This is you making the same error again - failing to distinguish between unbelief (agnosticism, not believing) and disbelief (gnosticism, believing not). There is no need to assume that there is no afterlife to ignore the idea while alive. Also, what interest ought one have in a conscious experience in the future not connected through memory to a conscious experience in the past? There is no difference to me between having existed before birth but with no memory of that and not having existed at all. Likewise, I would be uninterested in a conscious afterlife not connected through memory to my memories to date. That would be somebody else, not me. Think about that statement.
It wouldn't it matter to this "me" either way.
They don't, if "leg to stand on" refers to justified belief. But those are the standards of the critical thinker, who, unlike the faith-based thinker, is unwilling to believe based in gut feeling.
Your word. I have never called you stupid for holding an unjustified god belief. Stupid people are below average in intelligence. You are probably at least average.
The concept of agnostic atheism eludes you. But I still won't call you stupid for being unable to conceive of the idea or for hearing only "goo-goo gurgle-gurgle" when critical thinkers speak because there are so many more just like that that I have to call the lot of you average intelligence.
You don't know whether I claimed that or not? I've most recently answered that here.
What I mean is that your conclusions are unsound. The entire critical thinking community rejects such ideas.
You left out the most important one. Baha'u'llah's claim of being a messenger of a deity doesn't convince many. You write as if it is assumed that if people only saw the message and carefully considered it, that they would be convinced. You've posted uncounted thousands of words of that message. After looking at several of them, I stopped reading them, and I'm sure that I'm not alone. There's nothing there but vague, flowery language calling for piety.
No, you are not. You're a serious student of your religion, but you've never learned critical thinking and thus cannot distinguish a critical thinker from someone only claiming to be one.
A critical thinker would never write that.
It makes no difference whether you think it is a good or bad assumption..
Perhaps it would benefit you to reappraise the framework the discussion is being held in. If you cannot help but conclude that every discussion concerning God is about proving Gods existence and thereby base all your arguments upon that then you should refrain from debating every argument here with that as a basis with which to begin.
This seems to me to be a statement that is no better than simply saying the universe has a purpose if God exists. There is no reason to suppose that a creation must have the ready appearance of its creator to itself, that is to its conscience self - humankind for instance. That purpose may be discovered without providing a complete description of its designer if that designer so chooses to implement its possible discovery into its design. Christianity tells us this is the case-implied in scripture.
This seems to be a vapid statement. Why wouldn't it behoove us to know if the universe had a purpose, especially if knowing that purpose might give benefit some how? This isn't the same as claiming we cannot know such things for sure since no proof has been presented to date that we can't. Or has there been?
Why? Because its in our DNA to seek answers. Funnily enough in claiming "it's not our purpose" your suggesting that you've thought about it, even as an atheist. That indicates that it is important enough to you to draw your interest. Doesn't that bring us back to seeking purpose for the universe? Purpose draws us to action, that's why we seek it.
The point is Skeptics and many believers alike mistakenly apply human standards to God. What a human considers good is defined through expediency and what is deemed pragmatic but always born by ignorance. God is good because it is the only concept which allows for perfect justice in reality. Gods essence may necessitate the possibility of evil in creation - evil being defined as that which apposes Gods purpose for creation.
If reality hasn't shown you that that is exactly what some people need then you need to open your eyes. We have recorded "laws" for a reason. That is to initiate justice when those laws are broken. Justice cannot be initiated in accordance with unrecorded laws. One mans evil is another mans good but the law ideally clarifies the most just action a person should take. Scripture warns against such relative ideations.
Presuming gratuitousness and actually being gratuitous are two quite different things. Especially when it comes to the complexities of understanding reality with the limited tools accessible to us.
That rejection is based in ignorance perpetuated by well meaning believers and disbelievers who reject any and all answers based upon what they expect of such a God in relation to what they think they know about reality.
Who's character flaw? And how do you mean translate.
Atheophobia - vocabulary word of the day. Sadly your right. That just goes to show that religious people are normal human beings just like atheists when it comes to being subject to judging others.
Terms like mine? And what terms are those? Theological terms? Seems given the subject those terms are aptly applied.
Can she, or any other Baha'i, really say they took an unbiased look at the evidence? That they examined the claims from both sides of the argument? And then were satisfied that there was no question about it, that Baha'u'llah was the promised one from God for this day and age? Those of us that question it didn't have to dig too deep to find problems. Problems that can't easily be answered or that can't be answered at all.
The Baha'i claim is that each manifestation brought new social laws from God that were needed at the time. I have a strong feeling that the religious leaders of the people and culture made up those laws. That they were from a God. But how do the religious leaders get people to obey those laws? I think a very good way would have been to say that those laws came from God... That he wrote them on stone... and said that his laws are forever, that those that obey will be blessed and those who disobey will perish.
Amazing... It's still a Baha'i, a person in a religion that says to find the things people have in common, that says that religion without scientific evidence can become lost in superstitious beliefs, and she's arguing to people that are only asking for that kind of evidence... something real and objective. And asking, "If there is no objective evidence for God and other religious beliefs, why believe them.
