What? There is a post of you explaining how you thought up the analogy of natives not knowing what airplanes are.
Fair enough.
All I did was explain how your analogy wasn't accurate, as your intent was that atheists are like the natives who are ignorant of some reality. Except planes are known to exist, gods are not, and that is how your analogy fails.
My intent was not that atheists are like the natives who are ignorant of some reality. That has nothing to do with my analogy.
My analogy was not intended to compare things that
can be known and proven to exist (airplanes) to things that
cannot be known or proven to exist (God). My analogy was using airplanes as something that the natives have never seen or heard of. The question is: How the natives know what evidence for an airplane looked like if they have no idea what an airplane is? Similarly, how would an atheist know what evidence for God looked like if they have no idea what God is? That was my analogy.
Atheists cannot go by what theists claim that God is and say there is no evidence for such a God, since theists have a God that reveals Himself through the messengers. When I say the messengers are the evidence for God, atheists say "that's not evidence " so I want to know what atheists think the evidence
would be if God existed.
It's 100% relevant that in a thread about evidence for God that there is a disagreement about what God is.
This thread was intended to be about what God is according to theists. This thread was about what atheists would accept as evidence for God, not about what theists believe God is or what theists believe the evidence for God is.
I said: Atheists say I have no evidence but how would they know that what I have is ‘not evidence’ if they don’t even know what evidence for God would look like if it existed?
Again, you have your own rules that deviate from the norm, and you can't dictate how others think and contribute. You know full well that your belief about "evidence for God" is contentious, and you should have thought ahead about the responses this thread would invite.
As always threads do get off track, I was only attempting to reel it in.
People are free to think and contribute however they want to, but I am also free not to discuss what I don't want to discuss.
Of course I know full well that my belief about "evidence for God" is contentious and I don't care what responses are posted. However, I am free not to engage in a discussion about my evidence for God since that has been amply covered in the past
More of your switch-a-roo. Atheists are often the target for questions by believers, and we are named.
Atheists might be a target of some believers but they are not in my crosshairs. I am the one who is always defending atheists when other believers attack them.
It is a natural reflex since atheists are considered a sort of threat. I remember talking to one of my Catholic cousins some years ago and she asked me what religion I was. Being Christmas I didn't want to create controvercy and admit to being an atheist I said I was Buddhist. And she said "Well, at least you believe in something." The meaning I took from this was that not having some sort of ideological belief means a sort of meaninglessness and emptiness, which is far from true. There is a habit of belief that many theists don't realize they use and rely on, and anything that threatens their "operating software" is frightening.
Atheists are not a threat to me and I don't think they are a threat to believers in general. Why would atheists be a threat? What can atheists do to believers to harm them? Only if a believer was not firm in their faith would an atheist pose a threat.
So you are a Buddhist who does not believe in God. I had a good friend who was a Buddhist and he believed in God.
Sorry, "evidence for God" opens the door to the many versions of God, and the lack of evidence for any of the many different gods. If you actually had evidence you could rebut these problems, but instead you complain that it is brought up.
If you actually had evidence you could rebut the evidence believers say they have. That was the point of this thread.
Believers don't know and can't answer these either. But they do have their adopted dogmas, just like you do, and they don't align. You think God doesn't interact with ordinary people, but other religious views claim God does. That's a pretty big disagreement, and it affects your beliefs/claims.
It is only a difference in belief, and it does not affect my belief system. People are free to 'believe' whatever they want to, but I go by the evidence.
This is persecution complex, claiming that your debate opponents are lashing out.
It was not me who complained about lashing out, it was you.
You said:
You are frustrated that you aren't trusted, and you lash out against those who show the best skill at thinking.
Yet you have no evidence of me lashing out. I am as cool as a cucumber.
They didn't have absolutist rules like Baha'i, so I wouldn't consider them a cult.
Cults might have rules, but true religions have Laws and these Laws come from God.
As we know religion is a wide open landscape and a believer can find whatever they are looking for. You found Baha'i, but is it truth? Is your version of God accurate? The evidence is not convincing. The advantage of faith is that the believer can fill in the gaps where evidence is missing.
Whether my evidence convinces you or anyone else is not what would make the Baha'i Faith a true religion. It is either true or not, regardless of what anyone believes, since how many people believe in a religion does not make any religion true.
I don't have any gaps to fill in since there is no evidence missing. I certainly don't know everything about God but I know enough to know that God exists and I know what I need to know to fulfill the purpose of my existence.
I have read a lot of what you all have posted and it actually had the opposite effect. The writing are not well written, offer little guidance, and could have been created by any clever conman. And look at other people on RF, anyone else blown away by the texts? No.
How many people are blown away by the texts has no bearing whatsoever on whether the Baha'i Faith is true or not. You still don't get it so you keep repeating the same mantra which equates to the fallacy of ad populum.
In
argumentation theory, an
argumentum ad populum (
Latin for "
appeal to the people") is a
fallacious argument that concludes that a
proposition is true because many or most people believe it: "If many believe so, it is so."
Argumentum ad populum - Wikipedia
The converse of this is that
if many or most people do not believe it, it cannot be so, and that is fallacious.
If you see a Ford pinto in a parking lot most everyone is going to see a piece of junk. Do you know who won't? It would be any member of the Ford pinto fan club. Meaning is in the eye of beholder.
I know, because I have 1986 Honda Prelude and most people would think it is a piece of junk, but I love it.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder when it come to 'what people like', but what people like has nothing to do with what is actually true or false.
Odd that the same God has different revelations that are inconsistent. This sounds like an excuse, not an explanation.
The revelations are not inconsistent although they are different. Why would a new messenger come just to reveal exactly the same thing that the previous messengers revealed? What is inconsistent is what people believe but that is because they don't understand the real meaning of the scriptures.
Why? Why would a God reveal conflicting things? Unless the God was evolving to, it makes no sense. And if God does evolvee, then there's no truth, as all that is subject to change.
God does not reveal any conflicting things, God only reveals different things in every age, because humanity needs different things in every age.
There is a reason why there are basic moral impulses in human development. These morals formed many hundreds of thousands of years ago, well before Gods came along. These moral evolved with the impulse to survive, and this was the basis for tribalism as language and meaning evolved.
According to my beliefs, there was no time when man was without religion or God, since God has sent messengers ever since man evolved to be man. The reason there is no record of these messengers or the religions in prehistoric times is because the art of writing did not exist that long ago.