Challenge for atheists/ atheist position

[Cap'n MacDougal]

What is the reader supposed to conclude from your statements.

I don't know that the reader is supposed to conclude anything. I'm simply sharing my thoughts on the subject. You're free to conclude whatever you like!

 

[Cap'n MacDougal]

Hahahahhaaaa. Good to know, perhaps you'll enjoy a deep fried pineapple.

 

[columbus]

Can you convince me that I'm incorrect in my theism?

My eyes started glazing over 180 posts ago so I am probably repeating some stuff. Pardon.
First off, nobody could convince you that the sky is blue if you refuse to come out from under the blankets.

Secondly, theism is not a belief system. A simple "God exists" belief is deism. Theism is a collective abstract word for beliefs that are at least a little more detailed about God or the supernatural. Usually a lot more detailed, from Buddhism to Catholicism, most people believe that they know quite a bit on the subject.

But it is all different. From the prophets they believe in to the number of "persons" of god to this God's opinion on who can marry and how old the earth is, the list of competing theisms and theistic pronouncements is nearly infinite.

The reason for this is unambiguous to us reality based people. There is no God who cares enough about what we humans do or believe to clearly tell us what it is. He expects us to blindly choose from the plethora of humans claiming to speak for Him. Given this unassailable fact of human existence there is no reason to believe that any particular theistic system is any more than humans kidding themselves about how smart and informed they are, including you.
Makes no difference what theism you picked.

Tom

 

[columbus]

Very well stated! But do you know where you goofed? On the ''reality based people'' part; /that is a false argument/; it calls into question your otherwise sound logic and conclusions. But, at least you gave it a try; and no, you didn't really repeat much, your argument is probably the best one presented on the thread, imo.

OK,
Replace "reality based" with non theistic. To me, the term non theist means "do not find humans claiming to understand and/or speak for God at all credible".
Does that make more sense?
Tom

 

[columbus]

I don't know; if you want to generalize, you can of course. Though, ''non-theistic'' to me, could mean many things, so it just doesn't seem like a good counterpoint, as a generality. *shrugs*

Ok, so what word would you use to mean "doesn't find human opinions on unknown, perhaps unknowable, subjects to have any authority"?
Tom

 

[columbus]

I wouldn't generalize, at all. If I wanted to 'describe' that idea, I might say agnostic.

Ok, use agonistic. Now does my first post make sense.

To be honest, I was looking for a term that went beyond religion. "Reality based" includes everything from the supernatural to "what caused the singularity" and "is there other sapient life in the universe" and such questions.
Tom

 

[columbus]

I understood what you meant, however the idea is not very useful as an argument. If you were arguing something much more specific, then I might use the same ''idea'', but it only works within parameters.

Which idea?
Where were you specific about "my theism"?
What "parameters"?

Can you be a little more clear? I feel like I am trying to convince someone that the sky is blue, but they won't come out from under the blankets.
Tom

 

[Monk Of Reason]

Your comment is unclear, so of course it isn't obvious what you mean. Are you saying that you don't believe any of your own experiences?

On a personal level I don't totally doubt myself. But its within reason. I'm talking about the context of a debate here. If I wanted to get you to believe in a concept I would never expect my personal subjective experience to mean jack ****. Even on this I don't believe anecdotal evidence is worth anything either.

Reasons? People are internally biased. Good example here in a non-god and non-controversial way. If I get up and sing Karaoke I think I might sound awesome. In my head I sound awesome. However when others hear me I sound like a dying whale. This is a well known phenomenon. We cannot accurately depict our situation or even our abilities most of the time because of our own internal bias.

 

[Monk Of Reason]

This doesn't seem to be the case upon observing public discourse and various conversations on various topics. We use personal anecdotes all the time in debates. Why do you say the don't mean anything in debates?

A good example was a guy saying that he only ever saw cases where pedophiles went after little boys. I showed him he was wrong at every single turn with the actual statistics. His entire anecdotal evidence based argument was ****. There is a possibility that the anecdotal evidence could match the truth but it isn't actually evidence of the truth. Now what you may be referring to would be the usage of anecdotal evidence that has to do with strengthen or giving examples. I started this paragraph with an anecdote specifically to highlight this point. The anecdote isn't the force in the argument. It was used as a tool to help get my original point across. But as far as evidence it isn't.

Are you perhaps saying that personal experiences doesn't mean anything in debate because you are assuming that the person means for their personal experience to somehow generalize across the entire world? That's an assumption that should not be made. Often, it seems that people simply want to be heard and understood and they're not making statements intended to be taken as some sort of universal truth. There are cases where what you are suggesting here is appropriate, but there are other times such data are unnecessary (or impossible to obtain) depending on what is really being said by the speaker. Religious experiences are more like arts. Quantifying the arts misses their intent. Each unique painting tells a beautiful story, and converting everything to numbers and data points eclipses that. In part because of this, I find challenges to "prove" religion to be absurd. Particularly for my own, which has never been about making matter-of-fact proclamations in the first place. Possibly neither here nor there, though.

Thats the big issue here. If you are on a debate forum debating me about your religious views be prepared to have to defend them. If you don't want to debate there are sections for that. If you say you have your personal beliefs of whatever thats fine. I won't interfere unless it begins to interfere with me. It is my personal opinion that people shouldn't believe in things they only ever experience subjectively but I won't force that view onto others.

 

[Monk Of Reason]

Except that, subjective experiences can mean something. You are talking about a situation where I am basically assuming that your subjective experiences, or what you make of them ,are pretty much worthless. OK, in some debate formats, this might apply, however,, unless the format is very strict, then they only apply at a certain level of believability. Although it becomes ''subjective'', it also becomes personal, hence our subjective experiences, vary. So, it ''goes both ways''. Someone stating that there is no deity because x, y, or z, is no more (inherently) credible than anything else.

//in other words, we create our own objective parameters. //this is why these words ''subjective, ''objective'', are a tad useless in many debates.

It is any debate of any kind for me. How do I know you aren't lying? How do I know you aren't crazy? How do I know you aren't mistaken? There is nothing rooted in fact to help us get to the point where we can get rid of these questions.

Would you accept a purely subjective argument from me that Satan was actually the good guy and that your god had been lying to you this whole time? That all of the war and poverty and death was God's doing? Satan is attempting to set you free. He teaches good will between mankind that can only be obtained through the light of wisdom. Lucifer himself means "Bringing light".

 

[Monk Of Reason]

I can, and do, consider those arguments.
You seem to be taking yourself back to a purely subjective way of determining anything...this seems like you are ''breaking your own rules'', here. Because, on the one hand, you say that the subjective argument is garbage, then, on the other, you cannot except other arguments /because they are necessarily subjective/. This essentially leaves you with no argument, a type of agnosticism, basically.

I am an agnostic atheist.

I accept the arguments of evolution, physics, chemistry, ect. I don't respect religious arguments because they fail to bring solid evidence .Its purely subjective and what's worse is that we have conflicting arguments of absolute truth with no way to verify which is correct. Islam has no more support than Christianity and neither of them really have more evidence than Scientology.

 

[NulliuSINverba]

Can you convince me that I'm incorrect in my theism?

Can you convince me that I'm incorrect for still believing in the Tooth Fairy?

 

[Demonslayer]

It is any debate of any kind for me. How do I know you aren't lying? How do I know you aren't crazy? How do I know you aren't mistaken? There is nothing rooted in fact to help us get to the point where we can get rid of these questions.

This.

Any personal story is just that...a story. If there is nothing verifyable you can't expect anyone else to take it seriously. Otherwise everyone who claims to have had anal probes during alien abductions should be believed and all visions driven by hallucinations should be accepted.

We can't. We can't just accept everything everyone says, we would all be vulnerable to deception and mental illness could go undetected because we assume the voices someone is hearing in their head are real. And the odd thing is, theists must know this on a certain level because the only personal stories anyone is asking us to accept without question are stories of contact by God. Most theists I know scoff at alien abduction stories, and rightly so.

 

[Demonslayer]

So everything just poofed into existence?

LOL. I like you q konn, you can have a little fun without getting too bent out of shape.

My answer about the beginning of the universe is simply "I don't know" because I don't know, and I don't believe any of the thousands of creation myths that people have made up to put a framework around an as yet unknown.

All I'm saying in this thread about people's unverifyable personal experiences is that they can't expect anyone else to believe them. For instance if I said I was there when the universe began, saw that hen a great cotton candy machine existed in the void and exploded, and since then I've been reincarnated over and over just so I could be here today to tell you the truth about the origin of the universe, you would rightly laugh me off. For the same reason I can't believe other people when they say an alien took them into a spaceship and stuffed things where the sun don't shine, or that and angel came floating through the living room window to tell them their deceased loved ones are having a ball in Heaven, attending the weekly penochle games with Jesus and whatnot.

 

[NulliuSINverba]

This is like me asking you to convince me that my belief in the invisible man with 4-arms is lunacy... You can't do it.

In this scenario, I have to provide no evidence whatsoever for my invisible man with 4 arms, yet you somehow have to disprove the existence of the the invisible man with 4 arms.

How exactly would you go about doing that?

Q. - Do we have any evidence whatsoever of invisible people?
Q. - Do we have any evidence whatsoever of people with more than two arms?

If the answer to either of the above questions is within screaming distance of "NO," it seems to me that we're already halfway to demonstrating that (at the very least) your belief in The Invisible Four-Armed Man is unfounded (if not sheer lunacy).

 

[TheGunShoj]

Can you convince me there isn't a notoriously evasive squirrel names Lars on the planet Mars? Here is the thing though, I'm not going to tell you anything about Lars at all. .

What i find amusing is that the folks who are responding to the OP like you did here are actually giving more criteria to refute than the OP did

 

[Desert Snake]

What i find amusing is that the folks who are responding to the OP like you did here are actually giving more criteria to refute than the OP did

true, but ''refutation'' is largely meaningless without credibility anyway.

 

[Iti oj]

What i find amusing is that the folks who are responding to the OP like you did here are actually giving more criteria to refute than the OP did

because the refutations are a direct response to the claims being made.

 

[Desert Snake]

because the refutations are a direct response to the claims being made.

But that can't be the methodology for refutation. It makes no sense. It really means, that people aren't ''atheists'', they are agnostic aspirants, at best, labeling themselves as ''atheists'' for whatever reason.

 

[TheGunShoj]

true, but ''refutation'' is largely meaningless without credibility anyway.

Then why are you asking people to convince you that your beliefs are wrong? What other means would they have other than to refute a model that you put forth? Which (and i could be mistaken because I just came into this thread and didn't read all the way through) you haven't provided yet. That's what I found humorous. People were responding saying "Can you prove that this thing with these characteristics doesnt exist?" So the people who were trying to show you how absurd your initial request was actually provided better models with actual characteristics to refute on accident. ha!