Atheists: If God existed would God……

[Trailblazer]

Due to God. You have yet to explain what problem your idea of God has with communicating with humans. Language is not that difficult to use. Children can use it. Your idea of God is incapable?

I do not have an idea of God, I know what God does and does not do and I know why.
God has no problem, it is humans who expect direct communication from God who have a problem.

Why can't you accept reality? God does not want to speak to humans directly.
What about that do you NOT understand?

Just one time with a coherent explanation that makes sense.

I already explained that to @Polymath257 in this post.
#428 Trailblazer
I am not responsible for whether it makes sense to you.

 

[Trailblazer]

God isn't talking to you either. And you could be wrong to trust Messengers. So neither of us have any real reason to think a God exists. It's not as if you know any messengers personally. All you have are texts. You must know that doubt is reasonable.

You cannot speak for me, you can only speak for yourself.
God is not going to speak to me directly and I would never expect Him to.
I have a reason to believe that God exists because I believe what Baha'u'llah wrote.
I do not need to know Baha'u'llah personally to know about Him.
Your needs are not my needs.

 

[Trailblazer]

The writer is irrelevant. I am not moved by cults of personality.

Fine then, saves me the trouble.

 

[Trailblazer]

Did you ever meet him, and ask questions? How do you know what he wrote is true, you're not a messenger? Aren't you just assuming it's true and you could be completely wrong?

I do not need to meet him or ask questions. Others met him and asked questions and I can read about that. After over 51 years I know that the Baha'i Faith is true. How many more years do you think would be necessary?

 

[ppp]

Fine then, saves me the trouble.

Let's be frank.You were never going to take the trouble to demonstrate your beliefs. No trouble saved.

 

[Trailblazer]

The idea of an afterlife is absurd. Not only does it have no evidence, it is inconsistent with what we know of how death and consciousness works. The claims by theists can be dismissed at face value, and that is why I say it's not true. It's a fun idea, but it's absurd.

How death and consciousness works is irrelevant because you do not know what is after death.
What is absurd is to think that this is the only life we have, that God would expect humans to suffer in this world for no reason. But unless you believe in God that is irrelevant.
You will just have to find out for yourself. That is what I say to all the atheists.

I have heard what believers say it is my whole life. It's never been a coherent and rational idea.

You have never heard what the Baha'i Faith says about eternal life, although I don't see how it would matter. It would only matter if you believed in God.

 

[Trailblazer]

Let's be frank.You were never going to take the trouble to demonstrate your beliefs. No trouble saved.

No, like a fool, I do whatever people ask me to do, unless I have done it 100 times already.

 

[Trailblazer]

So why should anyone believe them?

I never said anyone should.

 

[Trailblazer]

And a critical thinker would realize that this inability of humans would be a design flaw by the creator.

No, only an idiot would think that. God does not make any mistakes so there are no flaws in the design of humans.

God does not want to communicate directly to humans, how many times do I have to say it?
YOU want God to communicate to people directly but God does not want that.
God does not do anything that He does not want to do. Why should God do something just because you want Him to?

Well, then God isn't doing it right. But, since God isn't limited to human abilities, he would be able to do the communication so that everyone understands.

The all-knowing God is not doing it right, and you know more than an all-knowing God?
God did communicate so everyone can understand, but you reject what He communicated.

So you are saying that God *cannot* whisper in my ear in such a way that it is clearly NOT any of those?

I am saying that God chooses not to do that. Why should God do what you want instead or what He wants to do?

 

[Trailblazer]

I would say that a rational person would look at the evidence available. YOU are assuming there is *any* evidence provided by God. That is not in evidence.

Messengers of God are in evidence and they are the evidence provided by God

There is no evidence of messengers, other than some people *claiming* to be messengers. But there is no good reason to believe them.

Oh yes there is evidence, you just don't want to look at it. The claim is not the evidence.
Baha'u'llah provided evidence to back up His claims.

To believe the 'messengers' are 'from God', you have to *first* believe there is a God. Only after that can the belief that those people were messengers from God be supported.

You cannot believe in God *first* before you believe in Messengers because the Messengers are the only evidence that God exists.

 

[Trailblazer]

Funny, the evidence points to any existing deity acting as if it is non-existent.

Only to atheists.

 

[Trailblazer]

So it is a personal opinion. An assumption you make for your own personal reasons.

It is a belief, not an assumption.

As I said: maybe the message isn't that important. If it isn't relevant to our well-being, then even a good deity would be able to not communicate.

It is very relevant and the good deity communicated the message.

 

[Aupmanyav]

Why did God require 40 years to pass his communication. That is absolutely funny and irrational. He is all-mighty, he could zip the message and pass it along with the key to humans in a planck's moment.

And what was the message!
The message was that all people of the world should accept and gather under the banner of Bahaollah, who is his latest representative, not consider women as equal to men and the LGBTQ still to be considered abominations, at least till 2852 A.D., after which a new manifestation may be sent with different rules. The message of peace and brotherhood was sent earlier also with other manifestations, Jesus and Mohammad. Apart from this there is nothing new. And God / Allah took 40 years to impart this message to Bahaollah which I put in less than two lines? What kind of God / Allah is this?

 

[viole]

No critical thinker would expect God to communicate directly to everyone in the world, only a small child would expect that. Any critical thinker would think it through and realize how it would be impossible to convey everything that God conveys to Messengers to all of the 7.8 billion people in the world. Even if God could convey all of that, very few humans could ever understand it, let alone do anything with it.

So what is God supposed to do, whisper in everyone's ear and say "Hi I am God and I exist." What would that accomplish? NOTHING.

And if God whispered in your ear and claimed to be God, how would you know it was really God, and not just an auditory hallucination or an alien from another planet?

Clearly, atheists who believe that God should communicate directly to everyone have not thought it through. Like a small child all they can think of is that they want what they want. None of this is based upon reason, it is all based upon emotion.

Well, for sure, between the two scenarios:

1) An unknown comes about and claims to be a messenger of God. To have used burning bushes, or some other God's communication medium. Hidden from view, of course
2) The whole world has received a message, via telepathy, with the same exact text, at exactly the same time

I would be much more impressed by 2). Obviously. Who would even consider 1)?

And again, if your messenger conveys message X, and it is understood. Why doesn't God conveys the same exact message X, at once. To the world. Instantaneously. Instead of relying to Chinese whisper, communication noise, misunderstandings, local traditions, etc. over the millennia?

Is the understandability of X depending on the source of X?

Ciao

- viole

 

[Heyo]

To date no atheist has ever been able to address any of these issues.
They just want what they want, like small children want a lollipop.

Maybe I can address it from an Agnostic point of view.

'all powerful', 'all knowing' and 'all good'. does not mean that God would want to communicate directly to every human being on earth.

You cannot make that work no matter how hard you try....
It is nothing but an ego projection because it is what YOU BELIEVE such a God would do

I agree. But you don't agree with yourself here. If we don't know if a god would talk to everyone, we don't know if it'd talk to anyone.
That it did talk to "messengers" is your belief (which you have a right to hold) but you can't say that you did deduce that.
(And that is by assuming that there are gods, which isn't known.)

You stated that as an assertion -- "Since that has not happened, either God is no all good, is not all knowing, is not all powerful, of does not exist at all" -- but it is nothing more than a personal opinion.

You have NO IDEA what would happen if God communicated directly to everyone, and apparently you do not even bother to think about it....

• What if some people did not want to hear from God?
• How would anyone know it was God communicating?
• How could that ever bring world unity if everyone got their own personal message?
• If God communicated to everyone everything that He communicated to Baha'u'llah over the course of 40 years, when would they have any time to live their lives? The world would come to a complete standstill.

Replace some entities with others in the above:

- How would anyone know it was God communicating through messenger X?
We don't, as you admitted before (at least by not explaining why).

- How could that ever bring world unity if every messenger got their own personal message?
And the evidence is that every self-declared messenger has a different message, even those who claimed to have received their message at about the same time, so the "updated messages" shtick doesn't work-

- If messenger communicated to everyone everything that s/he received from god over the course of 40 years, when would they have any time to live their lives? The world would come to a complete standstill.
Yep, doesn't work.


Your faith rests on the belief that you picked the right messenger - just like every other believer.
You don't know, you can't know, that that assumption is right. And since all your other beliefs rest upon this first assumption, they are all preliminary. Even if they are logically consistent, someone else could come to another logical consistent system by picking a different messenger.

 

[Trailblazer]

Exactly the same way Christians do and the same way we do with any other proposed hypothesis. Any given god is defined with specific characteristics and so we can seek to determine whether those proposed characteristics are consistent with our observations.

The only characteristic of God I ever hear atheists mention is omnipotence and what they expect to see is God doing what they would expect an omnipotent God to do, which is everything they want God to do. However, omnipotence implies that God only does what He wants to do, not what humans want Him to do. The atheists I have posted to just do not seem to be able to grasp this concept.

I appreciate that, but I'm not convinced you've been able to entirely succeed.

Probably not entirely, because I cannot know what it is like to NOT believe in God, I can only imagine it.

If a definition of God is proposed that states (or we think implies) that God would seek to demonstrate it's existence to everyone, that would be inconsistent with our observations and so we would not believe that specifically defined God exists.

I believe that this definition of God is consistent with reality because there is no indication that God is seeking to demonstrate His existence to everyone. The God I believe in would never seek to demonstrate His existence to everyone since He wants us to choose to believe on faith and evidence.

Sorry, but your failure to get in to the atheist headspace is fudging subtle but key wording again. If someone doesn't believe in God, they literally can't think God hasn't lived up to their expectations. This would actually be, as I already said, that proposed definition of God not matching up with observed reality. It isn't about God failing at anything, just people failing to come up with a viable definition.

But they can think that if God exists God is not living up to their expectations and they can think that the God I describe is not living up to their expectations. For example, many atheists think that if God existed He would communicate directly to everyone rather than communicating to one Messenger. And God is failing because God is not living up to their expectations and doing what they would expect Him to do.

Really? I would suggest that you are proposing a God you would expect to send messengers, which is (arguably) consistent with the observation of people who say they are Messengers of God. You'll also believe and say lots of things about the nature and actions of God, and in this context, they're all expectations, things you would expect to see reflected in your observations.

The bottom line here is that it shouldn't matter whether we (currently) believe in any gods or not, the logical process we should apply to any proposed god should be exactly the same for all of us, exactly the same as it would be for any other proposed hypothesis.

The difference between me and atheists is that I am not proposing a hypothetical God, I believe in a real God who sends Messengers, and I believe what the Messenger Baha'u'llah says about that God and the purpose of life on this planet. It is true that I would expect to see reflected in my observations is consistent with what Baha'u'llah said about reality.

 

[Trailblazer]

And again, if your messenger conveys message X, and it is understood. Why doesn't God conveys the same exact message X, at once. To the world. Instantaneously.

Because God does not want to.

 

[viole]

Because God does not want to.

Of course. Very convincing. A God that wants to make Himself known, but He likes to do it in the most inefficient way. Great.

Unfortunately, with this sort of reasoning, you can rationalise basically everything.

Mi friend from Iceland believes in literal helves and trolls (like some do there). When I asked why doesn't he invite one at home, the reply was: they do not want to mix with humans. Of course.

Ciao

- viole

 

[Trailblazer]

Your faith rests on the belief that you picked the right messenger - just like every other believer.

That is true, I only have a belief, but the hundred-dollar difference between me and the other believers is that I believe that all the previous Messengers are also right and I believe that religion is essentially one.

 

[Trailblazer]

A God that wants to make Himself known

There is no reason to believe that God wants to be known to everyone.