Too Many Extremes in Disbelief

[Audie]

Rather than a filter for truth, a concept of divinity which makes sense to the individual, may be a gateway to deeper understanding.

That much about our world appears, upon examination, to make little sense, is reason to be imaginative when trying to make sense of it.

Might be. Might.
Some sign that's ever true would be terrif.

 

[mikkel_the_dane]

That does not sound much like learning about
anything outside your own head.

Yeah, but there are absolute nothing in any heads but objective external sensory experince.

 

[F1fan]

Why don’t humans in general have a better track record of moral behaviour?

Because we are evolved animals that don't have supervision, and we make our own rules. We actually have learned to set ruls for ourselves to help function in various types of social organizations. It's that despite our ability to reason we still have a primitive emotional center and it drives us to make very bad decisions at times. The book Emotional Intelligence explains this, and offers methods to manage our emotions so they don't become hindrances and destructive.

I would suggest it’s because it’s part of our nature to be selfish, egotistical and afraid; religious people certainly aren’t immune from these traits.

Evolution explains this. Oddly from an Abrahamic assumption this is how God made humans. This only begs more questions as to why a God would deliberately create humans with such conflicted brains. Some believers claim it is to challenge us. Really? When so many fail, and so much death and destruction comes from it? Either the God was playing dice with the universe and didn't know the result, or it knew what would happen and did it anyway. Either way, and ignorant God or all-knowing God is on the hook morally. I haven't even mentioned mental illness and birth defects. Theists trying to claim a Diest God can get away with this. Trying to claim an interventionist God? No, there is too much to justify and explain away, and the God can't escape being a monster.

We can also, of course, be selfless, loving and kind; atheists aren’t devoid of these qualities.

Right. Good people will be good theists. Bad people will be bad theists. Religion doesn't make bad people good. Atheists know their morals can't be hidden behind belief in a God so have to be more introspect and responsible.

However, it’s the purpose of religion to help us, personally and collectively, to develop the best in ourselves, and overcome the worst.

Yet it has mixed results. For all the promise religion offers it all comes down to how decent the believer is, and there is a history of abuse. Again, no supervision. It's clear many believers don't really think a God is watching and they can do anything they damn well please. They might as well be atheists, but they can excuse their immoral acts as doing God's will. And others buy it.

I would be impressed if the vast majority of theists acted with wisdom and high moral principles in a way that can only be explained that they have tapped into some wavelength, or essence, or power, or influence, etc. But we don't. The good people who are believers is better explained as just good people, just as atheists who are decent, loving, moral people are good.

Historically religions were the first type of social contract, where the authorities had to organize and manage permantent settlements, and they used gods as the ultimate authority. This is explained by sociologists, and they can see how early humans created gods for the sake of authority over the people. As we know this has had mixed results, and the eventual response by civilized people was to eliminate religious authority and create secular governments. They couldn't trust religious authority due to the competition between religions and the abuse.

 

[F1fan]

Whichever concept of God makes most sense to you.

So humans have the ultimate authority to decide what God is? See how you just backed up my previous post?

 

[F1fan]

Very few religions have historically had books and even if some have (Egyptians, for instance) I would wager only 1% of people or even fewer had access to or could read them. The Hebrew Bible was, as you likely know, written centuries after the development of Judaism. The only religions I can really think which are truly based on books from the start seem to be Islam, to a degree (it's real history is fuzzy) and Baha'ism. Pagans don't generally have books save for epic poems and it's strongly debateable whether these are scripture in the strict sense and it doesn't matter anyway as almost all of them are post-Christian conversion of Europe in the case of that continent, and again in the Middle East we have mainly epic poetry. Other religions which are more philosophically inclined tend to have texts but, again, historically few folks have cared to or couldn't read them. Knowledge of God thus comes from other sources which are then transmitted to writing.

"Other sources" seems to be word of mouth. There is always word of some other god somewhere that wants attention from the limited pool of humans. Lots of competition.

I would suggest that diversity of religious options these days is likely in written form, books, internet, etc. We can add videos now that YouTube is a huge promotional platform for fringe ideas.

 

[Zwing]

Why would that matter? If there is a real deity, what makes sense to me is irrelevant.

Exactly. If the object of the statement is a real, existing being, then the statement itself is wrong, If there is a real God within reality, then “whatever God makes most sense to you” is only a valid reply in only one out of countless cases, particularly in the case where the God which makes most sense to you is identical with the God of reality. Regardless of that, however,

Whichever concept of God makes most sense to you.

despite @RestlessSoul’s quite good and explained meaning, obviously does not answer @Audie’s question, which (as we know her a bit by now) we should discern to refer to Gods as possibly real entities, rather than as hypothetical therapeutic devices of any level of actuality.

 

[mikkel_the_dane]

Because we are evolved animals that don't have supervision, and we make our own rules. We actually have learned to set ruls for ourselves to help function in various types of social organizations. It's that despite our ability to reason we still have a primitive emotional center and it drives us to make very bad decisions at times. The book Emotional Intelligence explains this, and offers methods to manage our emotions so they don't become hindrances and destructive.

Evolution explains this. Oddly from an Abrahamic assumption this is how God made humans. This only begs more questions as to why a God would deliberately create humans with such conflicted brains. Some believers claim it is to challenge us. Really? When so many fail, and so much death and destruction comes from it? Either the God was playing dice with the universe and didn't know the result, or it knew what would happen and did it anyway. Either way, and ignorant God or all-knowing God is on the hook morally. I haven't even mentioned mental illness and birth defects. Theists trying to claim a Diest God can get away with this. Trying to claim an interventionist God? No, there is too much to justify and explain away, and the God can't escape being a monster.

Right. Good people will be good theists. Bad people will be bad theists. Religion doesn't make bad people good. Atheists know their morals can't be hidden behind belief in a God so have to be more introspect and responsible.

Yet it has mixed results. For all the promise religion offers it all comes down to how decent the believer is, and there is a history of abuse. Again, no supervision. It's clear many believers don't really think a God is watching and they can do anything they damn well please. They might as well be atheists, but they can excuse their immoral acts as doing God's will. And others buy it.

I would be impressed if the vast majority of theists acted with wisdom and high moral principles in a way that can only be explained that they have tapped into some wavelength, or essence, or power, or influence, etc. But we don't. The good people who are believers is better explained as just good people, just as atheists who are decent, loving, moral people are good.

Historically religions were the first type of social contract, where the authorities had to organize and manage permantent settlements, and they used gods as the ultimate authority. This is explained by sociologists, and they can see how early humans created gods for the sake of authority over the people. As we know this has had mixed results, and the eventual response by civilized people was to eliminate religious authority and create secular governments. They couldn't trust religious authority due to the competition between religions and the abuse.

The problem is that not all atheists are like you. You conflate atheism with other human behavior.
In effect you are not describing atheism as such. You are describing a certain limited group of people for which atheism is a secondary aspect of them.

Now if you can show me how I have to in the strong sense be an athiest to have a good life, I will listen to you. But don't give me how I handle death, because I don't believe in souls and Heaven. Or that I must in fact believe in objective morality, because I am not an atheist.

 

[Audie]

I think my problem is trying to get online people to take a more scholarly approach when really all they want to do is take an argumentative, emotional one People will throw Jesus out the window simply because they don't like Jesus and find evidence to back up their dislike of Jesus. I study Theology at uni as a non-Christian so I'm inundated with the back and forth of historical analysis on the Bible, Jesus, etc. Perhaps I'm holding people to an unreasonable requirement.

The unreasonable is your assertion, sans names or example, that anyone throws out simply
because.

Hardly a trace of scholarly approach there.

 

[mikkel_the_dane]

Exactly. If the object of the statement is a real, existing being, then the statement itself is wrong, If there is a real God within reality, then “whatever God makes most sense to you” is only a valid reply in only one out of countless cases, particularly in the case where the God which makes most sense to you is identical with the God of reality. Regardless of that, however,

despite @RestlessSoul’s quite good and explained meaning, obviously does not answer @Audie’s question, which (as we know her a bit by now) we should discern to refer to Gods as possibly real entities, rather than as hypothetical therapeutic devices of any level of actuality.

The problem with these debates are that the word real have no objective evidence.
I mean I have no evidence for a real God, but is also so for a real world.

 

[F1fan]

Joseph Smith got the information about
where to find the gold Books of Mormon
from the vision of an angel.
That there were no gold books is irrelevant.
He went on to invent Jatter Day Saints theology.

It does not pay to question such things in the nth
degree.
Depending, of course, on how one thinks about intellectual
about intellectual integrity.

There's also the Urantia Book, which is over 2000 pages of small text and not very many illustrations. It has a similar "divine source" claims as Mormons. It is a fringe group of believers and the organization has kept it deliberately out of the spotlight for some reason, unlike Baha'i who are into direct promotion. The UB talks a lot about Jesus, and goes into a lot of detail about who he is and his purpose. It also explains life on other planets and describes that many forms of extrarestrial life out there. The Urantia folks think it is all true and they eat it up. To me as I read certain bits it reads as bad religious fiction and bad science fiction. My sister and her friends were into this, and I would ask questions, mostly about how it can be trusted, and the answers were no different than any other religious group assigning meaning, significance, and authority to their sources. That is where faith kicks in, and reason is suspended, as I find no reason to accept any of these books and texts at face value. To assign authority to these texts is in essence me assuming the knowledge of God, and being above error. How can any theist treat these texts as valid, but also be skeptical? They seem to choose one and not the other.

 

[F1fan]

The problem with these debates are that the word real have no objective evidence.
I mean I have no evidence for a real God, but is also so for a real world.

Is this post of yours not real? Should we doubt its existence given what you wrote here (assuming you wrote it, and assuming it really exists, and that I'm not just imagining it existing, right? Maybe a Russian troll hijacked your account.)

If you really believed what you wrote here how can you bother posting anything? That you post anything, and as true statements via your thinking, you must admit and concede that some things are real. I wonder if you are trying to drag us into your confusion.

 

[Zwing]

I mean I have no evidence for a real God, but is also so for a real world.

We accept the subjective world for how we perceive it because we perceive it; our sensations tell us there is a reality there. The precise nature of that reality we do not and possibly cannot know…I await Max Tegmark’s next book to see if he can tell me that the world is composed of the partial derivatives of functions, or some such theory. The difference with God is that no one in the history of mankind has ever had any perceptive evidence that it exists. Rather, the existence thereof is supposed based wholly upon conjecture.

 

[mikkel_the_dane]

Is this post of yours not real? Should we doubt its existence given what you wrote here (assuming you wrote it, and assuming it really exists, and that I'm not just imagining it existing, right? Maybe a Russian troll hijacked your account.)

If you really believed what you wrote here how can you bother posting anything? That you post anything, and as true statements via your thinking, you must admit and concede that some things are real. I wonder if you are trying to drag us into your confusion.

No, I do believe in real. I just don't believe that only the objective is real.

 

[Zwing]

I mean I have no evidence for a real God, but is also so for a real world.

We accept the subjective world for how we perceive it because we perceive it; our sensations tell us there is a reality there. The precise nature of that reality we do not and possibly cannot know…I await Max Tegmark’s next book to see if he can tell me that the world is composed of the partial derivatives of functions, or some such theory. The difference with God is that no one in the history of mankind has ever had any perceptive evidence that it exists. Rather, the existence thereof is supposed based wholly upon conjecture.

 

[mikkel_the_dane]

We accept the subjective world for how we perceive it because we perceive it; our sensations tell us there is a reality there. The precise nature of that reality we do not and possibly cannot know…I await Max Tegmark’s next book to see if he can tell me that the world is composed of the partial derivatives of functions, or some such theory. The difference with God is that no one in the history of mankind has ever had any perceptive evidence that it exists. Rather, the existence thereof is supposed based wholly upon conjecture.

Well, I do get the core beliefs that the universe is real, orderly and knowable, but that is without evidence or proof and as such as much conjecture as God.

 

[RestlessSoul]

So humans have the ultimate authority to decide what God is? See how you just backed up my previous post?

No, we don’t decide what anything is. We decide - to some extent - how we relate to God, each other, and the world.

 

[Nimos]

The Greeks and Romans had a specific way of writing biographies that we can tell fits into a specific genre (Greco-Roman biography), which has notable signs, such as missing out childhood narratives, not recording events in chronological order, making up great speeches etc. and scholars are now pretty unanimous that the Gospels are written in this genre. This puts the genre of the Gospels in the same historical category as, say, Suetonius' biographical works.

I see And what would that mean that it is in the same historical category as Suetonius?

 

[PureX]

Why would that matter? If there is a real deity, what makes sense to me is irrelevant.

It's not irrelevant to you. What makes sense to you is all you're EVER going have to go on.

Conversely, if 'whatever makes sense to you' is the standard, it is *all* personal opinion and not an overarching truth.

The truth is what is. What we think we know of the truth is PART OF WHAT IS, but is not the whole of it. Thus, the truth to you and I is relative, and limited, and therefor will ALWAYS be subject to being inaccurate and misleading.

... So, 'making sense to you' is a very poor filter for truth.

Nevertheless, because we are not omniscient, it's the best we can do with what little information we have, and with whatever capacity for logical reasoning we possess. Science can help us in certain areas. Religion can help us in certain areas. Philosophy can help us in certain areas, and art can help us in certain areas. But none of these are our golden ticket to the truth of what is. None of them.

 

[Rival]

I see And what would that mean that it is in the same historical category as Suetonius?

That we hold all such works to the same standard of criticism.

 

[Polymath257]

So why would some people dismiss the whole of the Gospels as unreliable? If we can (and do) agree that supernatural and other fantastical elements can be interrogated in ancient texts and the rest broadly assumed to have some truth, why is it some dismiss even Jesus' existence, crucifixion etc. even though these elements are neither fantastic nor supernatural? This is my contention.

I see the gospels as similar in many ways to the Iliad. There is some history, some literature, some moralizing, etc.

Reliable? In what aspects? How do we deal with different narratives in different gospels? Claims that are clearly wrong historically? The uncertain provinence of the writings themselves?

Do I think Jesus existed? Probably. Do I think he performed miracles? No. Do I think he was crucified? Probably. Do I think he claimed to be divine? Unlikely. Do I think he was concerned about religious revival? Yes.