Welcome to Religious Forums, a friendly forum to discuss all religions in a friendly surrounding.
Your voice is missing! You will need to register to get access to the following site features:We hope to see you as a part of our community soon!
You brought up leprechauns in the OP. My post was directly on point as to reasonability of the analogy. You would find it unreasonable to believe in leprechauns just as I find it unreasonable to believe in God. And our respective conclusions are largely based on the same underlying reasons. Thus, the analogy of the OP suggests it IS reasonable— there’s not much difference between gods, leprechauns, Bigfoot, fairies, unicorns, etc.
You have yet to give any "underlying reasons" for finding it unreasonable to believe in God (which isn't exactly what the OP is asking to begin with).
Okay, so now we're getting somewhere. Perhaps you'll name some things that are different and some things that are similar.
Why, the group of atoms called Billie Eilish mean nothing at all to me. They house and generate the metaphysical being that has then generated the creative myth that does matter to me (but that's as much because of me, as it is because of her). But the atoms themselves mean nothing in and of themselves. So why should I care in the least about them?
I couldn't care less what they are. And on a quantum level none of us even knows what they are. I don't understand this weird obsession with a materiality that has no significant meaning and no one really knows, anyway.
To a biochemist, sure, but to the rest of us, no; it's not reasonable. Each of us is far, far more than the biochemistry that's involved in our happening. And in fact, without that "more" part, the biochemistry is of no consequence at all. Without the amazing thoughts produced, the human brain is just a pile of biological waste.
But that's just is. No one around here ever bothers to distinguish between "the manners of existing". Most won't even acknowledge that there is such a thing. It's why the discussions/debates never go anywhere but spiral into the abyss of 'tit-for-tat' personal attacks.
I'm the one trying to get people to make distinctions. But their bias is based on their ignorance of those distinctions, and so they don't want to make distinctions. I try to point out the difference between any one person's concept of God, and the idea of God as a collective universal concept. But nothing doing! They want to fight about THAT God. Or whine about too many different gods. Because that serves their bias.
I am not afraid and I do not oppose "demarcation".
At some point "self-deception" becomes an irrelevant factor. Everything going on inside our heads is a form of self-deception. Yet it's still going on, there, so it's still "real". Therefor, reality is a deception. And since it's all going on inside of 'us', it's all self-deception.
IT'S ALL FICTION to us. AND it's all real. What you want isn't there. The black-white, right-wrong, real-unreal, abstract-obective, dualist existence; isn't available. Existence is all one huge complex event, happening. Those dualities are only in our heads.
"Double-think" could be another word for taoism. "When you feel the early spring sunshine on your face, and you smell the wet earth bursting with new life beneath your feet, remember the fall, and that dry and crusty sound of death and decay. And then the winter, with it's biting cold and frozen ground. Because it's within and among all of these that the Tao sings it's eternal song."
All thought is an abstraction of experience. Perception is conception. Let's acknowledge that, first. Then we can try to understand the degrees or levels of abstraction, and the ways we can use these to better understand ourselves in our experience of the world. Let's stop pretending that the world is a "thing", and start recognizing that it's an event, happening. And for us, it's all cognitive. NOT MATERIAL.
There is the great mystery of being. That's what all those many god-concepts have been trying to represent. And anyone foolish enough to try to deny that and/or dismiss it is doomed to abject failure. Because the mystery is immutable.
How do you know that there are no gods to represent via religions?
Probably for the same reasons many really like to ignore the fact that gods represent (or literally are) various aspects of reality, nature, and the universe. In many, many cases (at least this is the norm in indigenous and polytheistic theologies) the gods are not pointing to "abstract concepts" or "fictions" they're pointing to actual indisputably real things like the sun and the earth or emotions like love or practices like smithcraft. Honestly, all god-concepts emerged out of humanity's experiences with the world. All of them. Without exception. Some might just be a few more degrees removed than others. Why this is so hard to understand is baffling. They're all representing something someone experienced.
I’m sorry…. but this really doesn’t sound like a discussion or a debate but rather just throwing out statements for argument sake.
I was not referring to religious myths, those are products of humans.
The equivalence being drawn is the lack of demonstrable ability for the claimant to distinguish the truth from the falsity of his proposition. There is nothing false about that equivalence.
Pure fiction doesn't (literally) represent anything at all. It's made up, that's what fiction is. To return to the point—the question of the existence of god(s)—the question is whether the god-concepts represent anything at all or are they just fiction. This is the distinction you seemed to want to ignore a few posts back (#190). The distinction maps directly to the concepts of leprechauns and fairies and whether they are concepts that represent something real or are they just fiction.
Reject it all you want. But the unknown source, sustenance and purpose of all that we don't know is what the gods are all about. Gods of fertility, gods of the hunt, gods of war, gods of justice and retribution, gods of the afterlife; all these and more intended to represent what we don't understand and therefor can't control in this life. And so are hoped to somehow be convinced or cajoled to act on our behalf. Even the atheists have just swapped the old gods out for the new gods of science and technology and a new pretense of power over life that we don't really have.
It's easy. What we don't know God does. What we can't control God can. The morality that we can't make others adhere to God will. If we could just acknowledge and accept our limitations in this world we'd have little need or use for the gods.
Not to eliminate it, but to gain some sort of control over it: illusory of otherwise. God/gods are a characterization of the unknown that we can interact with, and thereby perhaps gain some influence over.
Which means exactly nothing in relation to the validity of the claim being posed.
The ideal of equivalence itself, is false. It only functions when we ignore all the ways that the equated items are not equal. Actual equivalence can only exist within a single item, which renders the idea incoherent.
There is no such thing as "pure fiction". If there were, no one would understand it. Fiction is just reality re-arranged.
There is no "just fiction". This is a mythical state that you are using to maintain your bias.
Yes, because it's nonsense based on ignorance.
Both the representations and the content they represent are real. And there is a mountain of evidence it prove it. If you continue to refuse to see this I can't make you see it.
It also is about faith, and understanding that we need to be in the right place, at the right time, to make the proof, happen. One cannot just set up a lab experiment, and expect Bigfoot to show up; here I am! Then, when he does not show up in the lab, we declare he does not exist.