You are even using another cultures prophecy as the foundation of christianityWhat?
No, I did not suggest any such thing. I was pointing out the irony of you rendition about historical documentation.
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Is It Reasonable to Believe Gods Don't Exist?
- Thread starter Nakosis
- Start date
Brian2
Veteran Member
No, the Jews of the time of Jesus used their own cultural prophecies to show that Jesus is the Christ and did what was prophesied and that He would return to judge the earth and end evil and bring in the fullness of the Kingdom of God.
Do you think the Gajendra stories are historical narrative and on the same level as the Bible historical narratives and especially the gospel documentation?
Maybe you don't, that is OK, but I don't think that actual historians have a right to teach their opinions on historical narrative as if their opinions are the facts.
But that never happened. Fail!
Yes both are stories written by human beings, not any god. The comparative is to show that many cultures have written stories about past, present and future events
Just as religious zealots have no right to mislead people.
Find the wisdom and share the good but please keep the rules of civility over any religion.
Twilight Hue
Twilight, not bright nor dark, good nor bad.
Nope. It's strictly in people's minds and imagination.
I would love to see anything related with theism occuring out in the universe that can be pointed out as such if you can and able to.
I'll put the kettle on in the meantime.
That's simple.
It's as reasonable to believe gods don't exist as it is to believe that any storybook character doesn't exist. They have the same truth value.
Brian2
Veteran Member
Jesus disciples were initially Jewish.
Brian2
Veteran Member
It's not really about the flood, it is about verses in the Bible and how they agree with recently discovered science.
The whole thing is interesting imo Something to watch with your cup cup of tea.
Twilight Hue
Twilight, not bright nor dark, good nor bad.
I found the video to be nothing but Christian apologetics that have been argued and debunked before.
For a couple of examples at the early portion of this monetized 30 minute long video ,
The four corners of the Earth have now become North South West and East on the compass?
Someone should tell her our poor friend about magnetic north and true north which of course, he conveniently evades in order to fit this into a Bible verse and still calls it hidden science.
Stretching of the heavens has now become the Big Bang and the expansion of the universe? That's the hidden science here?
Someone should tell that poor fellow there's a big difference between stretching and expansion of which one has to do with acceleration and not pulling, which is kind of ridiculous as well as God did not pull or cover the stars and planets and galaxies over the Earth itself, as the Bible verses suggests.
The whole video is just trying to take the proverbial square pieces and cramming them into a round hole and calling it a day.
Likely this video would impress a gullible theist with a low standard of believability , but certainly not a well-informed atheist.
The comment section in the video is only positive commentary supporting the content of the video and no opposition or criticism allowed as far as I can see, which tells me it's been heavily screened where negative commentary challenging the video is not allowed not to mention the video owner did not want people seeing this outside of YouTube, so he of course, disabled the video
And for a long time it never occurred to Christians that they weren't a sect of Judaism.
Brian2
Veteran Member
Leaving out part of the information does not mean that the information that was given is incorrect.
The science is that the heavens are expanding, the space/time continuum is still being stretched out.
What?
Stretching out the heavens does not necessarily mean that God pulled or covered the stars and planets and galaxies over the earth.
Science of course has it's current paradigm and we seem to accept it as if it is true and we know what happened and that it had nothing to do with a God.
It takes the unscientific language and shows that it does not conflict with science and if anything agrees with it and has been scientifically accurate for a few millenium and moreso than other religious texts if we are to believe the speaker.
What is this hypothetical well informed atheist, informed about? that the Bible has been shown to be scientifically wrong?
But yes, he is speaking to people who are probably believers and not to the well informed atheist who I guess must know better than to take what he says seriously.
Well this is the chance you have to make negative comments.
Brian2
Veteran Member
I think that realisation happened pretty fast when the Jews began persecuting the Christians and making them and Jesus anathema to Judaism. This happened before the Gentiles were targetted. Jesus came with the truth for all people after all and that persecution was part of the fulfilment of prophecy when God's Word would go out from Jerusalem to the nations.
Isa 2:2 In the last days the mountain of the house of the LORD will be established as the chief of the mountains; it will be raised above the hills, and all nations will stream to it. 3 And many peoples will come and say: “Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD, to the house of the God of Jacob. He will teach us His ways so that we may walk in His paths.” For the law will go forth from Zion, and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem. 4 Then He will judge between the nations and arbitrate for many peoples. They will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will no longer take up the sword against nation, nor train anymore for war.…
Notice that the stopping of war and the judging of the nations is to happen after the Word is preached to the nations. The Jews don't seem to see stuff like that interestingly.
What's a "god" exactly?
Does existence include existing solely as a notion or thing imagined in an individual brain?
Yo, old friend
I notice you quote Wittgenstein in your footer. Somehow I never pictured you as a logical positivist!
I sort of lost interest in him after reading his Proposition 1, "The world is everything that is the case." That's far too fuzzy to be meaningful.
Anyway, go well!
Hey, how are you doing?
Oh, definitely not a logical positivist. The quotes I encountered which I snagged speak to a bigger picture about the nature of reality, which itself shows how LP doesn't really work.
All of these claims of using logic and reason to understand the nature of reality, is inherently flawed, not the least of which is because of the nature of language itself. One's point of view may be perfectly reasonable, given the inherent limitations of the pair of glasses we are wearing. Change those glasses, and then "reality" is seen differently because our perceptions changed.
I found this discussion about this here which I found helpful in this context: Did Logical Positivism fail because it simply denied human emotion?).
Logical Positivism did not fail because it denied human emotion. LP failed because it tried to reduce the concept of meaning to the process of verification, and it became increasingly clear that this was an impossible task (as the later Wittgenstein, among others, pointed out quite clearly). Logical Positivists would look at a scientific proposition — such as the laws of gravity — and note that such theories are meaningful precisely because they can be used functionally in ways that verify them. They wanted to extend that kind of apparent rigor to philosophy more broadly put, and at the same time restrict philosophy more broadly put to questions that could respond fruitfully to that kind of verification. But they could never solve what later came to be known as the demarcation problem: how to simultaneously retain those things they thought should be part of philosophy and exclude those things they thought should not be part of philosophy. The result was an assortment of conflicts and paradoxes that fragmented the movement.
99% of the debates here with the new atheists echos this same LP notion that subjectivity is nothing valid in verifications of truth. It's a failed philosophy, and the limits of language in fact go to that very point. It too is subjectivity.
While science may be a fantastic tool, we have to bear in mind that it is a verification of a world seen through the lens of a particular framework of an assumed reality shaped and limited by our language about it. "Our intelligence has fallen under the bewitchment of language and we have deceived ourselves into thinking we know what we are talking about."
I think what he is saying here is reflected in what we are seeing in most of these neo-atheist arguments, which is that the world is just laying around out there waiting for us to understanding it "as it is", or in his language, "is the case". It's basically the myth of the pregiven world.
The problem with this, which I always strive to point out, is that it completely ignores our own filters in determining what that is. It naively assumes that we actually can bypass our own subjectivities in determining that. But we can't. All of reality is a mediated affair. But we assume that something like the scientfic method gets us past our biases. And in a very narrow sense it does accomplish that to some degree, but not in the larger sense.
We cannot have a direct pipeline to the world "as it is", or "is the case", as long as we are looking at it as something that exists outside of our own subjectivities, just laying around waiting for us to know it as it is. We can never know it "as it is", only through the "limits of our language", which then translates into "the limits of my world".
Now from this point on, then it starts to be 'fuzzy' and more interesting. But I'd love to go there if you care to unravel reality.
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Audie
Veteran Member
In the West, "God" can be assumed to mean the god of Abrahamic monotheism unless another definition is provided to indicate otherwise, which god is the angry, judgmental deity that disesteems man and nature and issues threats and commands from outside of and above nature (not just extra-natural, but super-natural) while explaining which of us are abominations that offend it and need punishing.
In my experience, polytheists tend not to use the word except in the plural and uncapitalized, as in "the gods" or "the god of fire." These are not universe creators nor are they considered sacred in place of nature.
In the end, I let the theist define what it is he says he says that he believes exists, and then tell him why I don't believe what he believes however vague his description. Maybe he says God is love or the laws of nature. I tell him that I already have names for those, and God isn't one of them, which invariably becomes transformed into a claim that no gods exist because I reject his version of a god.
I have no problem with the deist god, and do not claim that it doesn't exist (which is why I call myself an agnostic atheist), merely that I don't believe that such a god existed and that the question is neither decidable nor relevant (apatheism) even if we could get an answer. Nothing changes either way if we discover that our universe was intelligently designed to work on autopilot with no day-to-day divine supervision present or needed.
Not at all, however you define superior, which presumably means more intelligent in this context.
To my knowledge, only some Abrahamic theists make that claim - the ones who are anthropocentric and see the universe as having been created for man - God's unique and special creation who sits in the center of reality for whom it was all created and about whom it all revolves. The atheistic humanist makes no such claim, and expects that there are or were greater civilizations than man's out there in the cosmos. But these are not the supernatural universe creators that theist claim exist and which claims atheists reject.
I define theology as the thinking that emanates from the assumption that a god exists (and in the West, usually that it has left a written testament). Those ideas come from human beings, and it's all useless if the god premise is false, and even useless if it isn't.
If Judaism is Happy Days, Christianity is Laverne and Shirley, Islam is Mork and Mindy, and Baha'ism is Joanie Loves Chachi - spinoffs.
That is incorrect.
We don't need to assume that no miracles happened to dismiss the claim that they do.
Nor need it. Naturalism is sufficient. No observation requires the existence of a deity to account for it, and none is better explained invoking a deity over naturalistic alternatives. If you're looking for a reason to believe in your god, you won't find it examining nature, which I think you understand. That explains all the claims that this god lives outside of time and space and can't be detected, because nothing that happens can be said to need a deity to have occurred.
Irrational means not arrived at using reason. That's not an insult. Perhaps you would prefer the word nonrational. Intuitions, like the experience of beauty during a sunset finding a joke funny are irrational, because we didn't come to those conclusions using reason. That's why we can't explain why we come to these conclusions. Unseen neural circuits employing unknown algorithms just inform us how we feel without showing their work to consciousness, just the conclusions. They tell me that strawberries taste good to me and liver bad. Neither of those ideas is derived from reasoning. Where reasoning comes in is knowing how to repeat those experiences.
No, he wasn't. The Hebrew messiah was prophesied, a mortal man and not an alleged demigod who would leave the world as he found it largely unknown and unremembered without the help of people like Paul and Constantine.
He probably thinks you shouldn't believe any of them, and that if you believe any of them, you should have a rational criterion for accepting this claim while rejecting that one.
Disagree. The tried to graft the history of Jesus onto messianic prophecy, and in so doing have generated specious arguments that convince nobody. Nobody at all looks at that scripture and the description of Jesus and says one describes or predicts the other. Only people that already accept that by faith a priori agree that it does.
I don't possess a single belief that I would call truth that came from Jesus. There is some overlap in our values such as support for the Golden Rule, but I don't call such things truths, and they didn't come from scripture. They're moral intuitions of the circuits we call the conscience, which also deliver intuitions to consciousness without showing their work. They tell me what matters to me, and I defy those intuitions at my own peril, as those same circuits reward and punish the self just like a god according one's compliance with its moral imperatives.
I never denied or suggested otherwise. I wrote "No, the Jews of the time of Jesus used their own cultural prophecies to show that Jesus is the Christ and did what was prophesied and that He would return to judge the earth and end evil and bring in the fullness of the Kingdom of God."
Evil did not end, there is no kingdom central for mankind and there has been no judgment day (end times). That is why revelations (book of) was written and still outstanding to occur.
Or did you stop reading bible because you have what you need and done with the bible?
I think we can agree that a world exists external to the self, and we know what we know about it through our senses. For me, it's objective reality, as distinct from the subjective view; and unless and until something can be shown to exist out there, it can only be said to exist as a notion, a concept, a thing imagined. And we've unraveled it to the point where we're now no longer approaching the age of AI, we're in it. So the future will become more and more unlike the past in the extreme, and we're into interesting times.Hey, how are you doing?
Oh, definitely not a logical positivist. The quotes I encountered which I snagged speak to a bigger picture about the nature of reality, which itself shows how LP doesn't really work.
All of these claims of using logic and reason to understand the nature of reality, is inherently flawed, not the least of which is because of the nature of language itself. One's point of view may be perfectly reasonable, given the inherent limitations of the pair of glasses we are wearing. Change those glasses, and then "reality" is seen differently because our perceptions changed.
I found this discussion about this here which I found helpful in this context: Did Logical Positivism fail because it simply denied human emotion?).
Logical Positivism did not fail because it denied human emotion. LP failed because it tried to reduce the concept of meaning to the process of verification, and it became increasingly clear that this was an impossible task (as the later Wittgenstein, among others, pointed out quite clearly). Logical Positivists would look at a scientific proposition — such as the laws of gravity — and note that such theories are meaningful precisely because they can be used functionally in ways that verify them. They wanted to extend that kind of apparent rigor to philosophy more broadly put, and at the same time restrict philosophy more broadly put to questions that could respond fruitfully to that kind of verification. But they could never solve what later came to be known as the demarcation problem: how to simultaneously retain those things they thought should be part of philosophy and exclude those things they thought should not be part of philosophy. The result was an assortment of conflicts and paradoxes that fragmented the movement.
99% of the debates here with the new atheists echos this same LP notion that subjectivity is nothing valid in verifications of truth. It's a failed philosophy, and the limits of language in fact go to that very point. It too is subjectivity.
While science may be a fantastic tool, we have to bear in mind that it is a verification of a world seen through the lens of a particular framework of an assumed reality shaped and limited by our language about it. "Our intelligence has fallen under the bewitchment of language and we have deceived ourselves into thinking we know what we are talking about."
I think what he is saying here is reflected in what we are seeing in most of these neo-atheist arguments, which is that the world is just laying around out there waiting for us to understanding it "as it is", or in his language, "is the case". It's basically the myth of the pregiven world.
The problem with this, which I always strive to point out, is that it completely ignores our own filters in determining what that is. It naively assumes that we actually can bypass our own subjectivities in determining that. But we can't. All of reality is a mediated affair. But we assume that something like the scientfic method gets us past our biases. And in a very narrow sense it does accomplish that to some degree, but not in the larger sense.
We cannot have a direct pipeline to the world "as it is", or "is the case", as long as we are looking at it as something that exists outside of our own subjectivities, just laying around waiting for us to know it as it is. We can never know it "as it is", only through the "limits of our language", which then translates into "the limits of my world".
Now from this point on, then it starts to be 'fuzzy' and more interesting. But I'd love to go there if you care to unravel reality.
I agree there is a world that exists external to our bodies. It exists as other to the "self" only because of how we see ourselves as separate from the world, which is actually an unreality. We are very much part of the world and the world as us. But it is precisely this differentiation of reality from the self, that is created by and reinforced by language.
Language created boundaries in order to distinguish this from that, but it is ultimately artificial. But in reality, everything is interrelated, interconnecting, and interpenetrated. Ultimately, there is no 'this vs. that'. It is illusory to think that our subjectivity is other to the world. It is part of it, and it part of our subjectivity. I and the world are ultimately not divided into two.
So when you say "known by the senses", what are senses except subjective in nature? And then when we form a thought about what it is we perceived, that too is applying subjectivity to objectivity. It is not actually objective at all in the pure sense of the word, but rather it is considered to be objectively true, has the subjective mind completely infused within it. There is no 'pure knowledge'. That would be what I call omniscience. And that view doesn't say anything at all, but simply see what "is" without dividing it.
I had saved a link to this other member's post from ages ago I recently came across and it fits perfectly here with what we are talking about. Perhaps he says it better than I am in my many words. New Atheists?
Isn't it rather how animals evolved? The ones that tended to survive and breed best were the ones best able to cope with their environment and where possible take advantage of it; and this involved responses from the individual critter "personal" to that critter. If there had been a better way towards surviving and breeding, it would have asserted itself automatically, no?
Hmm. I think language exists in many forms, from meerkat eagle and snake alarms to the body language of mating throughout the animal kingdom to birdsongs that identify birds' different groups even though they're the same species and so on. Humans have complex language and powers of abstraction and conceptualization not apparently found elsewhere, and this has greatly aided human tribal living with the advantages of planning and cooperation,
In a sense. But in another sense, we're born alone and we live and die alone. Each of us is a 'me' before we're an 'us'.
I'd say we're stuck with our subjectivity, whoever we happen to be. We evolved that way, because it works in all the circumstances it's faced so far.
Nor do I see HOW one can get rid of it. It's still one's brain monitoring its sensory input so that the reacting and planning parts of the same brain can do their thing.
They're subjective, but I like the approach of reasoned enquiry, that we consciously maximize objectivity ─ with observations recorded, conclusions reasoned from them reported, publications peer reviewed where possible, consensus-seeking or clear-cut issues of debate amongst the best qualified, and so on.
There are truths, just no absolute truths. Truth can vary as we continue to learn, and when it changes, it's retrospective eg until 2012 the Higgs boson was a theoretical particle but now there's always been such a beast. And if in future we find we've misunderstood the Higgs boson, that too will be retrospective and only relevant after it happens.