Not everyone shares this point of view. Look at all the wars fought in the name of religious differences, for example.
That’s true. That happened because people were following the teachings of the leaders of the older religions.
Can you give me any reason at all why anyone should accept a claim as accurate if the accuracy of said claim can not be shown?
I guess you are asking why anyone should believe the Baha’i Faith is true if the claim of Baha’u’llah to have received a message from God cannot be
proven to be true.
Except you can't say it is true, at best, all you can say is that you believe it is true.
What you are really saying is that I cannot
prove that it is true, I can only believe it is true. That is correct because nobody can prove that a religion is true as a fact, they can only prove it is true to themselves.
You can't say it is true unless you have evidence that shows that it is true, and you've said many times that religion doesn't work that way.
I would not say it is true unless I could prove it is true. All I can say is that I believe it is true.
I think that the evidence proves that it is true but that is just my personal opinion.
I was not searching for a SUITABLE car, I was searching for the BEST car. That's why I chose a car that I found at the first dealership I looked at. Because there was no way that a car at another dealership could be any better than that one, right?
Car analogies do not work for religions because religions are not equivalent to cars. You can find cars with the same features at all the dealerships, so it makes sense to compare cars at other dealerships. The same does not apply to religions. There are no other religions that all the features that the Baha’i Faith has so it would not have helped me to look at other religions, since I needed to have the features that only the Baha’i Faith has..
People all choose their cars and religions very differently because humans are all different. Other Baha’is probably looked at other religions before they chose the Baha’i Faith because they were searching for a religion, but I was not searching for a religion so I did not look at other religions. I was attracted to the Baha’i message of the oneness of mankind and world unity, not to the Baha’i religion. I did not even think in terms of religion back then because I was not raised in a religion and I knew nothing about religion.
Well yeah, but you've got idiots believing all sorts of nonsense these days. Some idea being believed to be factual doesn't really prove anything. I could say that I can poop gold and there'll be someone gullible enough to believe it, I'm sure.
That’s true, but I do not think that matters as long as you are not one of those gullible people, and I don’t think you are.
However, without tests, there's no way to show that any particular religion is NOT bunk.
The only tests I know about are the tests of a Prophet I told you about before, but maybe you can devise a test of your own.
So, with no way to remove a religion from the "bunk" pile, why shouldn't we just keep them there?
I think there is a way but you will have to decide for yourself if it is worthwhile to try to remove it from the bunk pile. We all have to decide what is worth our time.
I have lots of piles of bunk in my house but I have better things to do than remove them. I have been under a pile of atheists since I started a new thread three weeks ago, so that has taken all my time. But you know what they say, for everything there is a season. I prayed to God last night to relieve me of all these posts and apparently God heard me because the storm suddenly died down.
Ah, so you didn't stick with the first option. So how is this relevant at all to your search for religion?
I went as far as I could in the community college, which was only two years, so I had to go to other colleges and universities in order to get my bachelor’s degree and later two different master’s degrees.
My college attendance is not really relevant to my search for a religion.
Ah, but here's the thing...
If, during the course of your investigation, you started wanting to believe it - just a little bit, maybe even so little that you didn't even notice - then that could have influenced you to be more willing to accept it as true. And the more willing you were to accept it as true, the more you wanted it. So it's a feedback loop that continually reinforces itself until you conclude that it must be true. That is not a logically valid way of arriving at a conclusion, and without peer review, you have no way to prevent such things happening.
It only matters what actually happened, not what could have happened, and I am the only one who knows what actually happened. Of course if I wanted it to be true that could have influenced me to believe it was true, but I cannot recall wanting it to be true. I simply believed it was true.
Later, much later, I did not want it too be true and I wished it was not true, just ask my husband. For many years I hated the Baha’i Faith and God. I wished that God did not exist many times but the only way out of that is if I could believe that Baha’u’llah was not who He claimed to be. But I could not do that because of what I knew about Him. So what I wanted to be true did not influence me because I do not operate on my wants, I operate on reason. There was no way out of this bind except to try to make peace with God and the Baha’i Faith, so that is what I set out to accomplish. I am not all the way there but at least I am on the road.
All peer review would accomplish is listening to someone else’s opinion which would not be any more valid than my own. I would just end up believing based upon what other people believed, their opinions, biases included.
At the end of the day it has to be our own choice what to believe because we alone are responsible for our own faith. We cannot offer as an excuse to God that Tom, Dick or Harry did not believe so we too chose not to believe, that won’t fly with God.
Okay then, how many cars are there? I mean, there's only a handful of manufacturers that are manufacturing cars today in a number that makes it likely that the average joe looking to buy a car is going to come across them. And those manufacturers are going to have a limited number of lines. They might have an economy hatchback model, a higher end sedan model, a luxury model, a performance model, a few different types of van, a ute (perhaps with 2 and 4 door variants), an SUV (perhaps one designed for city use but to look cool, and another meant for serious off-roading), and a few different sizes of trucks. And of course, not every manufacturer is going to produce vehicles in every category. Ferrari pretty much deals with the performance model area. Range Rover doesn't really do the small economy hatchbacks. And Isuzu isn't going to be putting out any luxury models any time soon.
Or perhaps you are speaking of the number of individual vehicles that are available to buy. In that case, I think you should count the number of individual believers as well. In any case, the number of religions isn't really going to be overshadowed by the number of cars in the marketplace.
That’s all true, there are many kinds of cats and may kinds of religions, but do you have a point to make?
BTW, I never wanted a SUV, I never even thought of buying one, but I ended up with one because I could not find what the other kind of vehicle that I was looking for at the time. Now I will have nothing else because it is much more practical and easier to drive than the vehicle I had before. That is kind of analogous to my religion. I never wanted one but I ended up with one and now I cannot go back to the way I was before.
That made me think back, and I think that what happens to us in life is a combination of fate and free will choices we make. Nothing happens by chance alone. It was fate, because of an accident that was not my fault that totaled my vehicle, that I had to replace it with another vehicle, and that is the only reason I got a SUV. Likewise, it could have been your fate that you happened to run into a Baha’i like me who talks her ear off and has a predilection for atheists, because most Baha’is are not like me. I might actually be one of a kind.
Of course we are all one of a kind because we are all unique, and no two people are alike.
