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Faith is the power behind believing in God, The closer we get to the end more and more will fall away from God as you have. The world is controlled by satan who rules the world and the minds of the unbeliever. Those who keep their Faith in God and do not allow Satan to pull them away from God will be rewarded with the New Kingdom of God that he has waiting for only them that keep their Faith and love for him.
Faith is a very reasonable course of action that all humans engage in routinely because it works for us often. Belief is not, since it's both fundamentally dishonest and quite unnecessary, Theists run the whole gamut between the weakest faith and the most intense belief.
That's because you still don't understand it and you never will because you are an atheist true believer. For you, theism is wrong. Theism is false. Theism is bad. You truly believe this and you will not doubt it. Ever.
You have no idea what faith in a wisdom and power greater than ourselves does for those who choose it because you have none. You have no idea what you might have accomplished if you had. So you are in no position to pass judgment on anyone else's faith choices. Yet for some reason you are really keen to do so.
Of course they do. They know they can't back it up. But they nevertheless do truly believe in their atheist ideology, just as you do.
Few people do.
No one cares what you believe about God. So why should you? It's silly to believe things that we cannot possibly know to be true.
I am not a believer. You are. That's why. I have no interest in theism as a belief. Nor do I have any need for religion. In fact, I find it mostly annoying when I encounter it in others. But I can understand what faith is. And why people choose it, and I can respect it, and engage in it, myself. You cannot. Because you're true believer in your atheism. And that does not allow you to recognize anything reasonable or positive about faith in any sort of god.
This was in response to, "This is a believer's mentality.
Most of the atheists here are true believers in their atheism. Which is why they have to elevate science far above it's rightful place, and then defend it by any means they can muster. And of course these true believers can't see any of this, because they truly believe their absurdly elevated idea of science IS science. They have to. Science is the only pathway to salvation for the atheist.
I don't know what that means.
Don't see how that follows.
Oh I see, you're projecting the same mentality onto me as the other poster was trying to do.
That is why God had the Bible written so we have evidence of him. God tells us how to believe in him until he comes and that is through faith. Faith means believing in what you cannot see right now but hope for in the future of things. 1 Timothy 6:12 Fight the good fight of Faith lay hold for eternal life. Everything that is happening now, Wars, children out of control and the world getting worse is in the bible. The bible was written before all this started happening.
No. I define knowledge as the collection of demonstrably correct ideas, which only comes from experience (empiricism) or pure reason (mathematical knowledge, where demonstration is in the form of proof, not sensory experience).
I'm not granting libertarian free will at all. The belief that one has it may be an illusion, but so powerful and compelling an illusion to most that they accept it as knowledge. But that is just intuition.
Neither. The question of free will is unanswerable unless it is actually not free and that that is eventually demonstrated. There's some evidence to support that (Libet experiment), but it is not considered enough to draw that conclusion.
No problem.
All of the problem is you, and you have all the evidence you need to conclude that. There are over a half dozen articulate posters participating in this thread. I can understand them all, and they seem to understand me despite my lazy editing. All of them have expressed difficulty understanding you. If you don't see the implications of that, you're fated to forever not recognize what the problem is - the first step in correcting it.
There is no evidence that anybody has been able to teach you anything. Nobody can show you that you are wrong without your cooperation. There is no burden of "proof" with somebody who can't or won't examine an argument dispassionately, have the critical thinking skills to determine if it's sound, and be ready to change his mind if shown he is wrong by that method. Whenever I write to you, nothing changes for you.
Faith is an alternative to reason. If your reasoning is valid, you don't need faith to believe and neither does any other critical thinker. If you need faith to believe, then you have no reasoned argument to present.
I understand faith perfectly. I used to indulge in it myself. That worked out badly, and I learned a better way to make decisions about what is true. There's nothing to understand about faith apart from it being a path to unjustified belief.
For me, faith is a mistake and theism is unnecessary. I don't call it false, just unjustified and for me, unnecessary.
Sure, I do. Why would you think I don't? I saw what it did to me. I see what it's done to you. And I see what it's done to another theist currently active on this thread. None of it is something I want for myself again.
That was an answer to, "Most atheists deny you[r] claim that they claim no gods exist."
Been there, done that.
Sure I am. Those choices are irrational (not arrived at by applying valid reason to true premises or knowledge gained through prior experience) and generate unfalsifiable beliefs. If that were incorrect, you could successfully rebut it. But you can't and won't try. You might dismiss it or repeat yourself, but you won't falsify it with counterargument.
The word is preferred, or likeliest to be correct. The most parsimonious hypothesis is not necessarily correct, but if a simpler one accounts for all known evidence, it's the preferred one. If, however, some new discovery falsifies that simpler narrative, we modify it to something that accounts for the new evidence.
That's a good question that I can't answer other than to say that it's an assumption that has never failed. Here's a discussion of that if you're interested. The laws of physics WERE different in the earliest universe before symmetry breaking occurred and the particles and forces we know today first appeared, but not since to our knowledge.
If the science works, that's demonstration enough that the assumptions and conclusions underlying it are valid for now. Like I said, new discoveries may require some modification to old answers. Newton's treatment of gravity, though incomplete, was adequate to send man to the moon and back. The Einstein predicted that gravity could bend the path of a massless light beam - something that Newton could not account for. The update to Newton's theory of gravitation was not accepted until this was demonstrated.
Yes. I said as much: "I define knowledge as the collection of demonstrably correct ideas, which only comes from experience (empiricism) or pure reason (mathematical knowledge, where demonstration is in the form of proof, not sensory experience)." We can know that the sum of the squares of the sides of a right triangle equal the square of the hypotenuse through pure reason. We can also determine that empirically by making such triangles, measuring their sides, and confirming the Pythagorean formula.
God only gives the world 10 easy commandments to follow to live happy lives. Only a few in the Entire world that actually follow them and live to God's standards. Majority of the world lives however they feel, Killing, stealing, lying, hurting others. Then they raise their hands to God and want God's help when God already told them how to live a life that will give them total happiness.
But faith is belief, it's just one of several kinds of belief.
What "true beliefs" do atheists have, save a belief that God claimants haven't met their burden?
What does that have to do with Theism vs atheism? We're talking about ontology, not utility.
So you're a mind reader....
It seems to me that an awful lot do.
Again, you're defending faith as a utilitarian, psychotherapeutic modality, not as an ontological belief. I'm OK with that, as long as you don't also claim it's ontologically true. That claim would be unwarranted, given the lack of objective, supporting evidence.
Exactly!
"Faith" is unwarranted belief -- poorly evidenced or illogical. It's you who are the true believer. Most atheists doubt for the same reason you doubt the Flying Spaghetti Monster -- lack of evidence.
A "true believer " believes something. He makes a truth-claim. What claim does Ain't Necessarily make, other than you've presented insufficient evidence to logically justify an ontological belief?
Why do you believe Satan even exists, much less that he controlled the world? Do you have any actual, objective evidence to back this up?
Again, why do you believe this? Isn't it just one of innumerable, unevidenced myths?
I'm not a true believer. I'm making no claims to believe in. How is lack of belief a "true belief?"
Please stop preaching Y.F. You're expounding the myth you believe in, but you're providing no evidence for it.
Believing in observable, tested things is science -- and is reasonable. Believing in God is believing in the unobservable, untestable things -- not so reasonable.
And now we fall back on a conspiracy theory to explain why what we want to happen doesn't happen. LOL
What about theists that accept science? There are at least 3 of us on here and all three of us practice or practiced science professionally too. Just because the atheists, that you don't seem to like, accept and defend science doesn't make that science null and void by default of your bias.