Why atheism and atheists are just wrong

blü 2 said:

But Christianity isn't one religion but thousands, and Islam has much the same tendency, Buddhism exists in various traditions and sub-traditions, Hinduism has its major and a great many minor deities, and so on round the world.

Which one gets to prescribe religion for schools? What about the Wiccans, the Satanists (LeVey and other kinds), the Norse and Greek revivalists, the multifarious traditions of the Great Spirit, the Rainbow Serpent, and so on?
There never was a Genesis Creation or an Adam or Eve or talking snake or Noah or Tower of Babel or Nephalim or a talking donkey or Job, or Moses, on and on. And there may or may not have been an historical Jesus, and if there was, which, if any, of the bible's five or more was he, and regardless, he did no more miracles than Pilate did.

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I have been over the sequence for the first Genesis account. It
accords with that of science - and as for life being on the "land"
first, that is now the agreement as of 2018.
I don't accept the second account - it's been slipped in there,
and seems highly allegorical.
We can't answer yea or nay for many of the spiritual claims
the bible makes - that's faith, like we have faith in the ultimate
questions of existence that "science will one day figure out."
But the background to these claims is quite solid - ie the Bronze
Age culture, the monarchs, nations, empires etc..Most were
not believed going back 120 years.
If there was no historic Jesus then its remarkable as to how
his church swept through the Roman empire. The account of
the Jews as symbols of God's symbol of redemption, promised
land, God's people, sold into slavery, called out of the nations etc
is remarkable and can't be written off.
So yes, there's Depth to the bible. The one thing I find interesting
is that this book demands something of its reader - not a belief
but a life. Those "Christians" who created thousands of churches
don't detract from the fact there is ONE Christianity - that which
Jesus gave. His doctrine and life are honored in the breach - and
given lip service by people who find it too simple, too humbling
and too hard to live by.

lewisnotmiller said:

Why are you conflating one Catholic ministers position on gay marriage with 'religion'?
Also, the issue wasn't only his position, but the distribution of the leaflet he produced via the Catholic Education system. What is it he was charged with??

This is the same man who defended George Pell, and who has championed free speech BUT...

'Archbishop accused of free speech hypocrisy after priest silenced on marriage ... ' - Tasmanian Times

Meh. Lies and hypocrisy is not limited to any one side of politics or religion.

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I am not a Catholic. My reading of the Gospels finds the Roman Catholic Church to be poles
apart (ie own doctrines, Mary queen of heaven, Catholics ruling the world Middle Ages, the
Inquisition, indulgences, temples, priests, monks, merchandising of the congregation etc..)
But when people can go after an Archbishop for promoting was essentially is biblical then
you know the jig is up.
I haven't followed this story. I think the legal claim died a natural death due to its ambiguity.
But have no fear - the secular army marches on, now the Tasmanians want to remove
gender from birth certificates and allow anyone to change their gender on any given day.
Or worse, for children to appeal to to the state if they want sex changes over the objection
of their parents. It's just one more step, with the new priests being Nietzsche, Foucault, Sartre
and Marx. We are busy tearing down the past - statues are the new target, tomorrow it could
be museums. Even feminists are getting worried.

lewisnotmiller said:

Was Fenwick's assertion based on anecdotal evidence?
Do you have a link to the evidence for consciousness outside of brain function?
Do you have a link to the evidence for the percentage of hospital staff experiencing paranormal events?
What conclusion are you drawing based on these assertions?

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I never heard of Fenwick till about six months ago. Found his videos quite engaging.

I think this video might have that famous story of the Australian tourist who drowned
in England. If so, that's similar to my story.
Fenwick mentions the "anecdotal" side to this - hopefully in this video. He stated that
he cant' do this study anymore because the ideas are now popularized, and thus
less reliable.
And Fenwick tells of patients brought back from zero brain function who talk about
mental experiences during that time.
Fenwick doesn't believe in God or gods, and that makes him more interesting.
Worth a look.

ratiocinator said:

Now your confusing secularism with liberal social values. We could go off at a tangent about said values and their relationship with secularism but that would be straying far from the thread subject.

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You might be right. But I always thought liberal social values were secular
or at least secular in nature.
ps what is the formula?

Nakosis said:

I expect science will resolve those mysteries. Religion just hasn't provided anything reliable.

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Quote, "I expect science will resolve those mysteries."
That's what I have been discussing here - FAITH that science will sort out
the ultimate answers. Science can ONLY study the natural world - what
preceded it, how it came to be before physics and why it's here is purely
non-science.

Subduction Zone said:

Sorry, I should have been a bit clearer, you have failed to justify your belief.

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I don't have a belief. I'm an agnostic.

blü 2 said:

Do you hold that view of all who don't believe?

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No. Only of those who presume that if gods existed, they would certainly be able to know it, based on their own biased criteria for 'proof'. This is an absurd presumption, of course, as it presumes their own omniscience.

blü 2 said:

I ask because I can't think of any.

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Then you aren't looking, because I see this absurd presumption being posted all the time around here by atheists proclaiming their "unbelief".

PureX said:

Only of those who presume that if gods existed, they would certainly be able to know it...

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Who holds this belief? You keep on saying this and I've still never knowingly encountered anybody who actually thinks this.

PureX said:

Then you aren't looking.

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Excuse me, but those who are earnestly seeking something will usually always find it, usually illogically and via a personal faith. I could absolutely forego with reason and accept any concept on faith if all I cared about was the comfort believing in it provided to my well being. Unfortunately, I must instead resign myself to reality whereby something that has zero empirical evidence for its existence must be considered non-existent.

Polymath257 said:

And when we ask if unicorns exist, we typically mean in the second sense, not in the first.

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Do we? And remember that we aren't really talking about unicorns, here, we're talking about deities, of which there is no single, simple concept or phenomenon as there is with a "unicorn".

Polymath257 said:

The issue of God's existence is the second sense. If God only exists in the first sense, then there isn't much else to say.

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There is a lot more to say, even if we were discussing the existence of unicorns. Because the persistent and long-running phenomena of them as an idea, and as entities in multiple stories across multiple cultures means that they artificially represent something both universal and psychologically significant to we humans. Which would deserve some serious investigation if we are seeking to know more about ourselves.

If we're just looking for an excuse to dismiss the idea as quickly and thoroughly as possible because it doesn't comport with our materialist philosophy of existence, well, then I think we're being motivated by our own willful ignorance.

Nakosis said:

I don't insist you defend your beliefs, I just insist that you don't expect me to buy into them.

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I'm an agnostic, I don't have any "beliefs" about gods. My interest in the subject is based on it's value and importance to humanity, and to myself, as a spiritual/psychological phenomenon.

Nakosis said:

I expect science will resolve those mysteries. Religion just hasn't provided anything reliable.

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You can expect that all you want, but so far science cannot even investigate the subject, because it has no reach beyond the material realm. And I see no reason to believe it will soon be able to.

Also, religion is an enormously important and universal phenomena among we humans, such that no one of us could possibly know what all it has provided to the human experience.

ratiocinator said:

Who holds this belief?

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Anyone who claims their "disbelief" is justified by the lack of proof for gods existing. Which is nearly every atheist I've ever come across on here.

ratiocinator said:

You keep on saying this and I've still never knowingly encountered anybody who actually thinks this.

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My, that is one MASSIVE blind spot you've got, there!

Phaedrus said:

Excuse me, but those who are earnestly seeking something will usually always find it, usually illogically and via a personal faith. I could absolutely forego with reason and accept any concept on faith if all I cared about was the comfort believing in it provided to my well being. Unfortunately, I must instead resign myself to reality whereby something that has zero empirical evidence for its existence must be considered non-existent.

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Sure, because your "empirical evidence" is capable of defining and determining what does and does not.

PruePhillip said:

I have been over the sequence for the first Genesis account. It
accords with that of science - and as for life being on the "land"
first, that is now the agreement as of 2018.
I don't accept the second account - it's been slipped in there,
and seems highly allegorical.

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But the reason you prefer the one account and reject the other is because you like the one that seems to you more easily fitted to what science tells us. With respect, that's witness-shopping and retrofitting. And it still doesn't give you a credible result. I've already shown you chapter and verse on bible cosmology, and NONE of the major concepts of modern cosmology is present ─ not a spherical earth, not heliocentry, not sun or satellite or star or deep space. Instead the stars are 'lights' affixed to the hard sky ('firmament').

Tell me plainly ─ WHY do you want to wish knowledge of modern cosmology on the bible's authors when they've plainly reported the cosmology of their day? What can possibly be the point of that?

PruePhillip said:

We can't answer yea or nay for many of the spiritual claims
the bible makes - that's faith, like we have faith in the ultimate questions of existence that "science will one day figure out."
But the background to these claims is quite solid - ie the Bronze Age culture, the monarchs, nations, empires etc..Most were
not believed going back 120 years.

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The tide of knowledge has been rising since the Enlightenment, and the pace of that rise keeps accelerating. Reasoned enquiry learns more and our understanding changes, both of the physical world and of history.

PruePhillip said:

If there was no historic Jesus then its remarkable as to how his church swept through the Roman empire.

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Bart Ehrman thinks its initial successes were due to the novelty of the idea of personal resurrection. But when Constantine made Christianity the religion of Empire, the persecution of Pagans and the seizing of their property was a blueprint for later inquisitions ─ I refer you to Robin Lane Fox's Christians and Pagans.

PruePhillip said:

The account of the Jews as symbols of God's symbol of redemption, promised land, God's people, sold into slavery, called out of the nations etc is remarkable and can't be written off.

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This, from the inventors and administrators of antisemitism.

PruePhillip said:

So yes, there's Depth to the bible. The one thing I find interesting
is that this book demands something of its reader - not a belief but a life.

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The Tanakh, as you know, is about the Law. The effective ideas in the NT are from Greek philosophy, where philosophical writings on the proper way to live a life were already centuries old and highly sophisticated. Those parts of the NT, not least the Sermon on the Mount, which talk about shucking your possessions, hitting the road in order to converse with those you meet, and trusting in heaven, luck and like-minded people to feed you, are straight from the Cynic school of thought. And the number of ideas from Plato, and later from neo-Platonism, is well documented ─ think soul, underworld, judgment and sentence, for a start.

Although Judaism had been under Greek influence for 300 years by Pilate's time (words like 'synagogue' spring to mind), Christianity was the most Graecized branch of Judaism by a considerable margin.

PureX said:

Anyone who claims their "disbelief" is justified by the lack of proof for gods existing. Which is nearly every atheist I've ever come across on here.

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Yet, we don't see people so adamantly standing up for the existence of unicorns when we lack proof of their existence. I know, you're tired of the unicorn analogy, but yet you keep posting these tired apologist arguments that are not even logical.

PureX said:

Sure, because your "empirical evidence" is capable of defining and determining what does and does not.

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I know unicorns don't exist, want to tell me I should believe in them just because we don't have proof they don't exist?

PureX said:

Do we? And remember that we aren't really talking about unicorns, here, we're talking about deities, of which there is no single, simple concept or phenomenon as there is with a "unicorn".

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And I thought we were talking about what it means to exist.

And the fact that there is no single concept of phenomenon makes the whole situation *worse*. If there is no proper concept, then questions of existence are completely meaningless.

There is a lot more to say, even if we were discussing the existence of unicorns. Because the persistent and long-running phenomena of them as an idea, and as entities in multiple stories across multiple cultures means that they artificially represent something both universal and psychologically significant to we humans. Which would deserve some serious investigation if we are seeking to know more about ourselves.

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And yet, they don't exist. They are fictional. The myth may be an interesting social phenomenon, but unicorns, as represented by the myth, do not exist.

If we're just looking for an excuse to dismiss the idea as quickly and thoroughly as possible because it doesn't comport with our materialist philosophy of existence, well, then I think we're being motivated by our own willful ignorance.

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No, I am asking whether something really exists (in the sense that unicorns do not). The other sense of existence holds little interest to me except as literature (fiction).

Phaedrus said:

Yet, we don't see people so adamantly standing up for the existence of unicorns when we lack proof of their existence.

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We don't lack proof of their existence. They exist in several ways. You're just so biased in favor of philosophical materialism as being the only possible means of defining existence that you can't see it. As are most of the atheists on here.

PureX said:

No. Only of those who presume that if gods existed, they would certainly be able to know it, based on their own biased criteria for 'proof'. This is an absurd presumption, of course, as it presumes their own omniscience.
Then you aren't looking, because I see this absurd presumption being posted all the time around here by atheists proclaiming their "unbelief".

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I simply proclaim my ignorance of what a real God could be ─ by 'real' I mean a god with objective existence, not existing only as a concept in brains, a thing imagined. Plainly there's no definition of 'god' such that if we found a real candidate we could tell whether it were god or not.

And perhaps you can help me here. I've just googled 'How does God exist' and 'By what means does God exist' and got (a) very little at all, and (b) nothing by way of meaningful exposition. Can you point me to a site that actually addresses these issues, or are they simply off-limits in believers' thought?