A Christian becomes a nonbeliever

[mikkel_the_dane]

Yet you believe anyway. Why would a person believe in an idea that not only has no evidence, but is also inconsistent with what is observed?

It's like a child being offered the option of broccoli or imaginary cookies, and they pick the imaginary cookies. You tell the kid that the cooking are imaginary and they respond with "But I like cookies".

I'm treating you as anyone else who states their beliefs.

Thus no truth, yet the believers don't seem to quite understand this.

The difference is why believe in some implausible idea that lacks evidence versus not believing. You make it seem as if we are debating coke versus pepsi as the better cola.

I do metaphysics, ontology, logic, epistemology and ethics differently than you.
I know it is not true, and so what. It is not true that the universe is physical. Big deal.
My God is the faith that universe is epistemologically fair and real, ontologically orderly and as such for epistemology knowable. If you know that is true, then give the evidence.

 

[Sgt. Pepper]

But you are convinced, but not @mikkel_the_dane or @Trailblazer . You're not convinced of Trailblazer's belief and evidence. So since this is all subjective due to weak evidence why bother trying to argue your beliefs?

Assuming a God exists the way you assume it does. You could be mistaken.

Yes, it's what you believe, and it differes from otehr believers. Lots of confused people that don't have a solid foundation of shared evidence.

Do believers really understand why they ended up believing in supernatural ideas? Do they understand the biology and the social influence at work in their brains? Not from they reveal.

In my opinion, as a former evangelical Christian, there isn't any kind of sufficient evidence for the existence of God or any other deity, for that matter. Any alleged evidence of God's existence, in my opinion, is purely subjective and certainly not objective, incontrovertible proof. That is evident to me because Christians believe certain things about God, whereas Muslims, Baha'is, and Jews believe completely different things about the same God. Not to mention the fact that there are hundreds of Christian churches teaching and preaching different dogmas about the same God and the same Bible. To be honest, I think it's absurd for Christians to assert that Christianity is the only true religion in the world when they can't even agree on what the Bible actually says.

I currently practice Wicca, but I am willing to acknowledge that I lack sufficient empirical evidence or alleged evidence that any deities exist. I choose to believe in the prospect of supernatural deities, but I am honest enough to acknowledge that I cannot prove or disprove their existence. I've always been drawn to spirituality and am fascinated by beliefs in the supernatural, but I'm not willing to say that I'm completely confident, beyond a reasonable doubt, that the God of the Bible or any other deities actually exist. I'm not all-knowing and all-powerful, and I can't be in all places at once or explore all of space and time. So, as far as I'm concerned, I can't honestly determine whether there is only one God, if there are other deities, or if there aren't any deities at all.

As far as any "messengers of God," humans are fallible and are prone to make mistakes and contradict each other. Personally, I believe that the messages or revelations that people claim to have received from God are as credible as Bigfoot and extraterrestrial stories in a tabloid. In my opinion, I believe that it is perfectly clear that these so-called divine messages and revelations from God are also implausible and obviously can't be demonstrated empirically.

 

[muhammad_isa]

But you are convinced, but not @mikkel_the_dane or @Trailblazer . You're not convinced of Trailblazer's belief and evidence. So since this is all subjective due to weak evidence why bother trying to argue your beliefs?

No .. our beliefs are not ONLY dependent on whether there is strong or weak evidence..
It is a lot more complicated than that. Intentions and knowledge vary between people.
A sense of belonging is also important, along with other factors.

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

That is because you dismiss the evidence .. and then call it a "claim".
A person who accepts the evidence does not dismiss it.

One doesn't dismiss evidence. He evaluates it. If he is a critical thinker, he does so using well-established rules of inference that connects evidence to the sound conclusions derived from it. If he is not skilled in critical analysis, he used his own custom rules, which he will say justify his conclusions drawn using them, but not in the academic community, which rejects his claim that his evidence supports his conclusion. It really doesn't matter to a critical thinker what a person concludes if he is not using fallacy-free reasoning, just as a skilled mathematician doesn't care what a person who doesn't know the rules of inference for addition suggests the sum is. If 2+2 doesn't equal four every time in a custom, private system for adding, it's output is useless.

Also, nobody is calling evidence a claim. A claim is a statement offered as fact. It might be bare - no supporting argument - or it may be preceded by an argument, which might be sound or unsound. These are all claims, whether unsupported, insufficiently supported, or sound, and none is the same as any evidence offered as sufficient support to justify that claim.

my sister says, "God is so good. He cares and loves us so much"... when something good happens. Or "Oh well God knows best. It was his will"... when something bad happens.

A great illustration of the confirmation bias that follows the faith-based assumption that God is good.

the Baha'is carefully avoid the issue of animal suffering. God is good no matter what.

And another. Yet they accept this god anyway. Why? They're free to assign any qualities to the god they choose to believe in, so why choose that one? If I were a theist, my god would simply be unaware of that suffering or unable to intervene, meaning that he would be like me, who only "tolerates" the animal cruelty that he is powerless to prevent.

I don't think God ever makes mistakes. Rather, I think that what we humans 'perceive' as mistakes are not really mistakes.

And more confirmation bias, which causes misperceiving mistakes as not being mistakes. What a terrible way to decide what is good and what is proper behavior. The decisions are all pre-made. It's all good and none is a mistake. A faith-based confirmation bias like that deforms both cognitive and affective ability, that is, the ability to make proper judgments about what is true and what is moral.

I fully agree, especially since suffering has nearly destroyed my life, but the other Baha'is will say "that's great, look how much you are growing spiritually!"

How does that make you feel when they not only marginalize your suffering, they also imply that you should be glad for it and are being impious not being grateful for it?

I used to blame God for my suffering so I hated God, but not anymore, since I consider it to be completely illogical to blame God.

I also consider it illogical to blame gods for nature's ways. But I've gone a bit further with it than you. This is an excerpt from I list I compiled of the benefits of atheism:

"[4] When a cute little doe-eyed girl dies of leukemia sometime later today (and one will somewhere), you'll have the comfort of knowing that it was just rotten luck, and not something caused by or allowed to happen by any ghost."

But you don't get that comfort, do you? The god others believe in is good. The one I believe in doesn't exist. Neither of us is tormented thinking he lives in a world run by a cruel or indifferent god. Yet you retain that version of a god.

It seems to me that God does not care about 'some animals' that suffer in the wild, if God was the one who was in charge of the process of evolution.
That is the only logical conclusion I can think of.

There's another logical possibility, and a more wholesome one.

Why are you defining 'good' as the will of God

Don't most Abrahamic theists do that? Their Bibles and clergy tell them that God is good, and they start with that faith-based premise and make moral judgments with that as a given.

It is morally right to punish people that mistreat animals because they are doing something wrong.

Agreed, but you seem to give gods a pass there, or do you consider a god that sits idly by watching gratuitous suffering immoral as you would a person actively inflicting that suffering?

 

[muhammad_isa]

One doesn't dismiss evidence. He evaluates it..

Errr .. you mean evaluates it, and dismisses it .. same thing.

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

One doesn't dismiss evidence. He evaluates it. If he is a critical thinker, he does so using well-established rules of inference that connects evidence to the sound conclusions derived from it. If he is not skilled in critical analysis, he used his own custom rules, which he will say justify his conclusions drawn using them, but not in the academic community, which rejects his claim that his evidence supports his conclusion.

Errr .. you mean evaluates it, and dismisses it .. same thing.

No, it's not what I mean and it's not the same thing. What I meant is what I wrote. A believer tells me to look around, that everything I see is evidence of a god. I am not dismissing nature, which isn't actually a meaningful sentence: "dismiss - order or allow to leave; send away." You can't send the evidence away, just the unsound conclusions it is claimed that it justifies. That's what's being dismissed.

It's a point of grammar or semantics - a so-called category error, like a fulfilled law. You can't dismiss evidence or fulfill laws. Evidence can be discovered, accumulated, interpreted, etc., but not dismissed, even if you send it out of the room, just as laws can be written, obeyed, flouted, amended, repealed, etc., but not fulfilled. That verb can apply to things such as dreams and promises. Likewise, a haiku can be original, clever, il-formed, or funny, for example, but not sweet. That's what category error means.

 

[muhammad_isa]

You can't send the evidence away, just the unsound conclusions it is claimed that it justifies. That's what's being dismissed..

You're just being pedantic now..
A person who claims that there is no evidence of God to be found,
and it is merely a claim, obviously sees differently to a person who claims
that there is evidence of God to be found.

What's the difference?
It's pretty obvious to me. The person who says it is merely a claim, considers that the evidence
is not reliable, or fabricated etc.

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

You're just being pedantic now.

I guess that means that you didn't learn anything. I thought that I was being instructive. Mistakes like category errors jump out at me and indicate a degree of lack of understanding of language. Yes, I knew what you meant by dismissed evidence, but I also knew that the phrase was grammatically incorrect (solecism, if you like expanding your vocabulary and don't already know this word).

A person who claims that there is no evidence of God to be found, and it is merely a claim, obviously sees differently to a person who claims that there is evidence of God to be found.

More properly and more fully, the critical thinker should say that there is insufficient evidence to justify belief in gods according to academic standards and the rules of critical thinking.

What's the difference? It's pretty obvious to me. The person who says it is merely a claim, considers that the evidence is not reliable, or fabricated etc.

But that's wrong. His only opinion about the evidence is (or should be) that it doesn't sufficiently support a god belief. The complaint isn't with the evidence, but with the conclusion about what it was evidence of.

 

[muhammad_isa]

The complaint isn't with the evidence, but with the conclusion about what it was evidence of.

Yeah .. it's not evidence, it's a claim .. whatever

 

[Trailblazer]

Which has no evidence. Resurrection in Christianity and Judaism also entail a new spiritual body, which Bahai is obviously familiar with and making up his scripture based on that.

Baha'u'llah did not make anything up. He did not need the Bible because He received a revelation from God.

“O KING! I was but a man like others, asleep upon My couch, when lo, the breezes of the All-Glorious were wafted over Me, and taught Me the knowledge of all that hath been. This thing is not from Me, but from One Who is Almighty and All-Knowing. And He bade Me lift up My voice between earth and heaven, and for this there befell Me what hath caused the tears of every man of understanding to flow.” Proclamation of Bahá’u’lláh, p. 57

 

[Trailblazer]

And there is no evidence, we just went over this.

There is evidence, you are just too blind to see it.

 

[Trailblazer]

Christians don't want a return to Eden.

No, not all Christians want that but the JWs want that. Check your sources.

 

[Trailblazer]

Do you mean a byproduct of life in our physical world? I am asking because the existence of life in a physical world doesn't entail the existence of suffering. It just happens to be case that life in our physical world gave rise to suffering.

Yes, I mean life in our physical world.
You do not know that there could be life in a physical world doesn't entail the existence of suffering, you only believe it is possible.
But it really does not matter if it is possible or not, since it is nonexistent.

 

[Trailblazer]

The fact is that if there actually were evidence, then after thousands of years of theists claiming there is evidence, that evidence would have been common knowledge by now.

The existence of God is common knowledge to everyone but atheists and agnostics, who comprise a very small percentage of the world population.

According to sociologists Ariela Keysar and Juhem Navarro-Rivera's review of numerous global studies on atheism, there are 450 to 500 million positive atheists and agnostics worldwide (7% of the world's population), with China having the most atheists in the world (200 million convinced atheists).​

Demographics of atheism - Wikipedia​

Thus it seems to me that the atheists and agnostics are just unable to understand what evidence for God looks like.

 

[Trailblazer]

So theists keep claiming, have been claiming for millenia.

Yet no theists seems able to present it.

Theists have presented the evidence over and over and over and over and over again...
The fact that atheists don't 'believe' it is evidence does not make it non-evidence.

 

[Trailblazer]

It's rather a matter of theists confusing claims with evidence.

It's rather a matter of atheists confusing claims with evidence.
A claim is not evidence of anything at all except that someone can make a claim...
Evidence is what supports the claim.

 

[Exaltist Ethan]

There is evidence, you are just too blind to see it.

If I can interject. @Trailblazer has a type of evidence that she believes. She believes in the claim of the evidence of the words of her prophet, Baha'u'llah. @joelr doesn't believe this evidence is evident enough for him, therefore, he does not believe it is evidence. The truth is, however, it is evidence, but Joelr doesn't believe it's valid evidence, whereas Trailblazer does believe the evidence is valid enough to believe. So, ultimately, I disagree with Joelr when he says that there is no evidence, but I do agree with him that Baha'u'llah's scriptures and written word isn't valid evidence enough to blindly believe all of it. I find Baha'u'llah's God too restrictive and limiting, making Baha'u'llah's evidence invalid to me.

I do believe that Baha'u'llah was special. He created a religion that more than five million people now believe, long after he died, but the evidence he provides isn't entirely valid to me. He, just like all people, understands God in certain ways, because something conditioned him to believe it in that way. He was highly influenced by Islam, and the Baha'i Faith is indeed very similar to that religion. But instead of believing it or not, I try to understand what is true about what he said, which is different, because while reality is of but one, the way to interpret that reality is shaded by a variety of colorful beliefs and opinions.

 

[Trailblazer]

Right, and critical thinkers will look at @Trailblazer's evidence, at @muhammad_isa 's evidence, and your evidence and realize these conflict and thus cancel out the overall claims of these three different versions of God existing.

Critical thinkers would be able to understand that the three different versions of God existing are not in conflict and do not cancel each other out, but are all from the same Source, but it requires a lot of critical thinking in order to understand that.

 

[Trailblazer]

No .. our beliefs are not ONLY dependent on whether there is strong or weak evidence..
It is a lot more complicated than that.

Anyone who had any logical abilities would understand that evidence is not what makes God exist.
God either exists or not.... Evidence is only what people want in order to believe in God.

God could exist absent any evidence at all, although that is not the case, since it would be unjust for God to expect people to believe absent evidence.

It is obvious to some people that God exists without looking at any evidence!

 

[Trailblazer]

Errr .. you mean evaluates it, and dismisses it .. same thing.

*WINNER*