Heyo
Veteran Member
I think the reason was to span a wider umbrella to boost their numbers. But the effect is the same: no burden of proof.
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Is Atheism the Easier Position?
- Thread starter Nakosis
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ecco
Veteran Member
Yeah, an omniscient, omnipotent, entity that has existed forever (before time according to some) and will exist forever, is natural. So are psychic snowflakes.
MonkeyFire
Well-Known Member
then don’t say anything when I go to Heaven and you have to stay in purgatory. You made your own bed now lay in it. If you were so rational then why do you offend the first amendment.
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ecco
Veteran Member
Ah, yes purgatory. Heaven and Hell weren't good enough. You guys had to invent an in-between also. Well, when you are dead, you are dead. When I am dead, I am dead. I gave up silly childhood superstitions when I was ten.
I do that every night and sleep in it quite well.
How, in your considered opinion, did I "offend the first amendment"?
osgart
Nothing my eye, Something for sure
Once you have eliminated the supernatural, then you have benevolence and all knowing. Eliminate those and you have naturalistic power with great limitations. Eliminate that and there isn't any God.
If you think that for yourself, fine, but it seems absurd to expect that every single other atheist must adhere to this narrow notion of what constitutes a god.
And again: a person doesn't need to disbelieve in the supernatural to be an atheist.
At this point, it seems that the assertion you said was "coherent to the point of being simple" is neither simple nor coherent.
Trailblazer
Veteran Member
What people "believe" has no bearing in what is actually true. That is the fallacy of argumentum 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."
This type of argument is known by several names,[1] including appeal to the masses, appeal to belief, appeal to the majority, appeal to democracy, appeal to popularity, argument by consensus, consensus fallacy, authority of the many, bandwagon fallacy, voxpopuli,[2] and in Latin as argumentum ad numerum ("appeal to the number"), fickle crowd syndrome, and consensus gentium ("agreement of the clans"). It is also the basis of a number of social phenomena, including communal reinforcement and the bandwagon effect. The Chinese proverb "three men make a tiger" concerns the same idea. 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.
So just because the Baha'i Faith is smaller than other religions, that does not mean it not is not true.
Matthew 7:13-14 Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.
When Jesus said that, Christianity was the narrow gate that led to life. It was narrow because there were very few Christians in the first centuries, but Christianity is no longer the narrow road. It is now a wide road because many people have entered through it. Given that Christianity is now the largest religion in the world, Christianity is no longer the narrow road that leads to life.
When God reveals a new religion in every new age, the religion at the narrow gate is the new religion God wants us to find and follow, and it is the gate that leads to eternal life. But it is not that easy for most people to find this gate because most people are steeped in religious tradition or attached to what they already believe. If they do not have a religion, most people are suspicious of the new religion and the new messenger. If they are atheists they do not like the idea of messengers of God or they think they are all phonies.
Jesus told us to enter through the narrow gate, the gate that leads to eternal life, and Jesus said few people would find that gate... It is narrow, so it is difficult to get through... It is difficult to get through because one has to be willing to give up all their preconceived ideas, have an open mind, and think for themselves. Most people do not normally embark upon such a journey. They go through the wide gate, the easy one to get through – their own religious tradition or their own preconceived ideas about God or no god. They follow that broad road that is easiest for them to travel.
The Baha'i Faith is now the narrow gate and the narrow road that leads to eternal life in this age. The Baha’i Faith and is the narrow gate because only a few people recognize God’s new religion in the beginning and enter through that gate.
“The Book of God is wide open, and His Word is summoning mankind unto Him. No more than a mere handful, however, hath been found willing to cleave to His Cause, or to become the instruments for its promotion. These few have been endued with the Divine Elixir that can, alone, transmute into purest gold the dross of the world, and have been empowered to administer the infallible remedy for all the ills that afflict the children of men. No man can obtain everlasting life, unless he embraceth the truth of this inestimable, this wondrous, and sublime Revelation.” Gleanings From the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh, p. 183
Trailblazer
Veteran Member
Thousands of personages have not had revelations from God just because thousands if personages "believe" that they had revelations. Only a numbered few men have really had revelations from God. The diagram below shows the primary Messengers if God although there may be others:
Trailblazer
Veteran Member
I don't have anything and I am no expert in Baha'i history so i don't know is anything was written contemporaneously
Do you know is any other religion that has anything chronicled at all? I am talking about widely recognized world religions such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. At least the Baha'i Faith was chronicled in the same century as it was revealed by men who knew Baha'u'llah personally, no other religion had that.
osgart
Nothing my eye, Something for sure
Mostly!
Trailblazer
Veteran Member
Who Wrote the Bible?
By Sarah Pruitt
Scholars have investigated the issue for centuries, but many questions persist.
Old Testament: The Single Author Theory
The Old Testament, or Hebrew Bible, narrates the history of the people of Israel over about a millennium, beginning with God’s creation of the world and humankind, and contains the stories, laws and moral lessons that form the basis of religious life for both Jews and Christians. For at least 1,000 years, both Jewish and Christian tradition held that a single author wrote the first five books of the Bible—Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy—which together are known as the Torah (Hebrew for “instruction”) and the Pentateuch (Greek for “five scrolls”). That single author was believed to be Moses, the Hebrew prophet who led the Israelites out of captivity in Egypt and guided them across the Red Sea toward the Promised Land.
Yet nearly from the beginning, readers of the Bible observed that there were things in the so-called Five Books of Moses that Moses himself could not possibly have witnessed: His own death, for example, occurs near the end of Deuteronomy. A volume of the Talmud, the collection of Jewish laws recorded between the 3rd and 5th centuries A.D., dealt with this inconsistency by explaining that Joshua (Moses’ successor as leader of the Israelites) likely wrote the verses about Moses’ death.
“That's one opinion among many,” says Joel Baden, a professor at Yale Divinity School and author of The Composition of the Pentateuch: Renewing the Documentary Hypothesis. “But they're already asking the question—was it possible or not possible for [Moses] to have written them?”
By the time the Enlightenment began in the 17th century, most religious scholars were more seriously questioning the idea of Moses’ authorship, as well as the idea that the Bible could possibly have been the work of any single author. Those first five books were filled with contradictory, repetitive material, and often seemed to tell different versions of the Israelites’ story even within a single section of text.
As Baden explains, the “classic example” of this confusion is the story of Noah and the flood (Genesis 6:9). “You read along and you say, I don’t know how many animals Noah took on the ark with him,” he says. “In this sentence it says two of every animal. In this sentence, he takes two of some animals and 14 of any animals.” Similarly, the text records the length of the flood as 40 days in one place, and 150 days in another.
The Old Testament: Various Schools of Authors
To explain the Bible’s contradictions, repetitions and general idiosyncrasies, most scholars today agree that the stories and laws it contains were communicated orally, through prose and poetry, over centuries. Starting around the 7th century B.C., different groups, or schools, of authors wrote them down at different times, before they were at some point (probably during the first century B.C.) combined into the single, multi-layered work we know today.
Of the three major blocks of source material that scholars agree comprise the Bible’s first five books, the first was believed to have been written by a group of priests, or priestly authors, whose work scholars designate as “P.” A second block of source material is known as “D”—for Deuteronomist, meaning the author(s) of the vast majority of the book of Deuteronomy. “The two of them are not really related to each other in any significant way,” Baden explains, “except that they're both giving laws and telling a story of Israel's early history.”
According to some scholars, including Baden, the third major block of source material in the Torah can be divided into two different, equally coherent schools, named for the word that each uses for God: Yahweh and Elohim. The stories using the name Elohim are classified as “E,” while the others are called “J” (for Jawhe, the German translation of Yahweh). Other scholars don't agree on two complete sources for the non-priestly material. Instead, says Baden, they see a much more gradual process, in which material from numerous smaller sources was layered together over a longer period of time.
New Testament: Who Wrote the Gospels?
Just as the Old Testament chronicles the story of the Israelites in the millennium or so leading up to the birth of Jesus Christ, the New Testament records Jesus’s life, from his birth and teachings to his death and later resurrection, a narrative that forms the fundamental basis of Christianity. Beginning around 70 A.D., about four decades after Jesus’s crucifixion (according to the Bible), four anonymously written chronicles of his life emerged that would become central documents in the Christian faith. Named for Jesus’s most devoted earthly disciples, or apostles—Matthew, Mark, Luke and John—the four canonical Gospels were traditionally thought to be eyewitness accounts of Jesus’s life, death and resurrection.
But for more than a century, scholars have generally agreed that the Gospels, like many of the books of the New Testament, were not actually written by the people to whom they are attributed. In fact, it seems clear that the stories that form the basis of Christianity were first communicated orally, and passed down from generation to generation, before they were collected and written down.
“Names are attached to the titles of the Gospels (‘the Gospel according to Matthew’),” writes Bible scholar Bart Ehrman in his book Jesus, Interrupted. “But these titles are later additions to the Gospels, provided by editors and scribes to inform readers who the editors thought were the authorities behind the different versions.”
Traditionally, 13 of the 27 books of the New Testament were attributed to Paul the Apostle, who famously converted to Christianity after meeting Jesus on the road to Damascus and wrote a series of letters that helped spread the faith throughout the Mediterranean world. But scholars now agree on the authenticity of only seven of Paul’s epistles: Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, Philemon. These are believed to have been written between A.D. 50-60, making them the earliest known evidence for Christianity. Authors of the later epistles may have been followers of Paul, who used his name to lend authenticity to the works.
By the 4th century A.D., Christianity had been established as the dominant religion in the Western world, and the New and Old Testaments as its most sacred texts. In the centuries to come, the Bible would only become more central to the lives and faiths of millions of people around the world, despite the mystery surrounding its origins and the ongoing, complex debate over its authorship.
Who Wrote the Bible?
Trailblazer
Veteran Member
There is no inner circle. Only God knows who has been initiated into the divine mysteries. As believers we can believe we are initiated and be wrong.
I am not on the fringes of the Baha'i faith, nobody is on the fringes, they are either a Baha'i or not. We are all one unified group even though we are all different.
I did not mean that literally when I said that atheists are loyal to the Bible, but they sure seem interested.
Otherwise why would they talk about it so much? Nobody is holding a gun to their heads telling them that had better talk to Christians so they need to know the Bible.
If I was an atheist I would be off sunning myself on a beach somewhere, not here talking to religious people.
Ah. Well, it's probably time I mention the two criteria that I use as a first test for when I hear someone's approach for how they define atheism. I think both are reasonable:
- atheists exist: if how someone defines atheism implies requirements that would be so extreme that no actual person could practically meet them, then the definition is wrong.
- theists aren't atheists: if someone's definition of atheism could be met by any class of theist - e.g. because it just kinda ignores polytheism - then the definition is wrong.
Sounds like your definition fails the second test.
osgart
Nothing my eye, Something for sure
Are polytheistic gods all that different from monotheistic gods when it comes to their power over nature, supernatural qualities, power and authority over beings? Don't they have these four things in common with monotheism?
ratiocinator
Lightly seared on the reality grill.
I don't for a second believe that there is such a being but, if there were, how would it not be natural? I just don't get the label 'supernatural' and what it adds to anything.
ecco
Veteran Member
It really wasn't necessary to try to school me on the meaning of "argumentum ad populum". What was necessary was for you to remember what you wrote...
You asked a question, I responded to it. You were saying you believed in Balulah and not in others because: "What do they have to show for themselves...?"
All the people I listed did all the things you sneered about.
Do try to remember what you posted. Or were you hoping I would forget the context?
ecco
Veteran Member
Is the quote from Matthew one of the passages from the Christian Bible that is supposed to be taken literally, as opposed to Genesis which you stated you were instructed to consider as allegory? How would you even know?
You know this because the guy who started your new religion told you so. Just as the members of LDS "know" what Joseph Smith told them.
Here Bahá’u’lláh is saying the book is wide open. Weren't you just touting that something narrow is better than something wide open? Have you confused yourself?
In any case, it's just another example of: You know this because the guy who started the new religion told you so. Just as the members of LDS "know" what Joseph Smith told them.
ecco
Veteran Member
What you are saying is that you believe that some few people have had revelations from God. Those few people are the ones your Bahá’u’lláh said are people who have had revelations from God. Of course, Bahá’u’lláh includes himself in this list.
Joseph Smith would include himself and reject Bahá’u’lláh.
Rev Sung Myong Moon would include himself and reject Bahá’u’lláh.
Charles Taze Russell would include himself and reject Bahá’u’lláh.
Are you starting to see a pattern?
There may be others? Seriously? Doesn't your religion specify who is and who is not a primary Messenger?
ecco
Veteran Member
Thank you for your honesty.
Aw heck. Are ya sure we can't include Mormons and JW's and Moonies? Some of them are bigger than Bahai. So why do you want to exclude them?
Mormonism's origins are well documented from its inception. Ditto JW. Moonies, definitely.
Wrong! See above. Also, mostly second-hand. Shogi Effendi never met Balulah.
Even some Christians would argue that the Gospel writers were eyewitnesses.