You and I have been interacting a fair amount for several days on a variety of threads, where I've also seen you posting back and forth with a couple other skeptics. I'd say that everybody has accepted you, and treated you respectfully.
I did not say that people have not accepted *me* or that they had not treated *me* respectfully. I said:
“I do not understand why people do not accept people who believe differently than they do. I have to conclude that they either feel threatened or they just are not interested in what other people believe.” By *people* I meant people in general. I was not referring to myself… I will quote what I said to you on the other thread:
I did not say I thought *my words* were being rejected because people on this forum felt threatened or were uninterested. I was talking about
people in general who do not accept other people who believe
differently than they do. I was not referring to anyone on this forum, only to people in general. The key to understanding what I meant was in the previous paragraph. I said:
“I just love this forum because of all the different people with different beliefs and non-beliefs… It is like a beautiful garden full of flowers of different colors and varieties. The problem is I cannot get anything else done anymore.”
I meant I cannot get any chores done anymore.
The following is a rather lengthy, off-topic digression, so I will enclose it in a spoiler.
What we have all rejected are your claims and arguments, not you. You claimed that Baha'u'llah was an inspired messenger of God. You were told that you need to establish the existence of this god before claiming that He sent messengers to communicate with us. You said that we needed to study his words to see by his prophecies and character that Baha'u'llah was who he claimed to be, that in this way one could see that he spoke for a god thus establishing the existence of this god..
You were told that nobody wanted to invest the effort to do that without a reason, and to please provide snippets of the best prophecies or whatever else you had that might whet the appetite. I for one never saw anything that I considered special. I just got done reading the Baha'i instructions on love that you posted above. It's a nice sentiment, but a very commonplace one. Exhorting others to be kind, just, loving, and the like is not evidence that the message originates with a god or that a god had a hand in producing it.
I did provide a prophecy that I considered a good prophecy, the banks of the Rhine, and of course nobody thought it amounted to a hill of beans. What am I supposed to do when nobody likes what I present? My husband said I should not even bother talking to nonbelievers anymore after what happened on my previous forums. Yet I never did anything but answer questions and respond to what people asked for. I am not responsible to
think for other people. That’s their job. I am getting the same response here as I got from nonbelievers on my other forums, only they are more polite here.
People seem to think I am
responsible to convince them of what I believe but I am not. I explained that on the other thread so I will quote part of what I said there:
Everyone has to decide what to believe on their own. God created everyone with the *capacity* to recognize the His Messenger so I am not responsible to convince people of who He was. My only responsibility is to *proclaim* that Baha’u’llah has come and answer any questions people might have. However, people are responsible to do their own in-depth research. Gone are the days of the Christian clergy spoon-deeding religion to the masses. Everyone is on their own to independently investigate the claims of Messenger.
Who said that what I quoted about love on this thread was evidence? That is
not what the person who posted this thread asked for. He said: “Interested to hear all the different views out there on loving others and kindness.” So that is what I posted.
I'm glad that you're enjoying your time on this forum. So am I. To get the most from it, perhaps you should try to understand why rational skeptics are not persuaded by such arguments. I have spent a fair amount of time considering the words of believers (including yours) trying to understand why their conclusions are so different from those of us who reject them and their associated gods for ourselves.
You wrote that you think that we differ from you by feeling threatened or uninterested. Why isn't even the possibility that we were simply not convinced on your list, which is what you were told.
As I said above I never wrote that. You misinterpreted what I wrote, read into it what was not there. I am a counseling psychologist but I am not here to analyze people, although it would not be that difficult. People often project their thoughts and feelings onto others and people often blame others when they do not get what they want. I am not saying you or anyone here is doing that, but I have listened to more than one atheist blame God for three years. One atheist kept saying I was making excuses for God and it was drop dead obvious he was saying that because he could not get God to do what he wanted, directly communicate to him and everyone else in the world.
It's not hard at all for me or others to believe you when you say that you find those same words compelling, compelling enough to attribute them to a god and base your life on those words. That's obviously true.
But when told the opposite by others about themselves, it didn't seem to register as even a possibility. It's as if you consider the words of Baha'u'llah so evidently divine that nobody could possibly read them and come to any other conclusion that that they are god sent, so therefore, the only possibilities are that we were threatened by the message or not interested enough to evaluate it.
Oh no, that is not true at all. I would say straw man but at least you said “it’s as if.”
I know I do not think that people should think like I do about Baha’u’llah. The fact that I am passionate about what I believe
in no way means I expect others to follow suit. Baha’u’llah explained some reasons why so few of us believe and most don’t. I can share that with you later if you are interested.
That's simply not true. As I just indicated, I read what you wrote about your faith's take on love. There was nothing threatening there, nor was I uninterested. When I tell you that I found the words nice, but nothing new or special, that's exactly what I mean. The passages simply didn't give me the idea that this writer was channeling God or had unusual insights.
All I can say at this point is straw man. I am not angry, just frustrated that people misunderstand what I write. It was plain English but apparently people read into what I say.
The way that you and we evaluate evidence is probably the fundamental difference between us. When you suggested that the prophecies of Baha'u'llah were evidence that he was a messenger of God, you were asked to produce your best example as a sample. You gave us, "O banks of the Rhine! We have seen you covered with gore," written in the second half of the 19th century, and called it a prediction of World Wars I and II.
I don't see that in those words. Why are we so different there? Why do you read those words and see a god shining through, and I see a line of poetry that doesn't even sound like a prediction to me, but a report of something that already happened in words too vague to attach them to a specific event or even a time or place more specific than one of Europe's major rivers sometime in the past.
WWI and WWII had not already happened when Baha’u’llah wrote that Tablet to Kaiser Wilhelm I! As I said on the other thread, that Baha’u’llah wrote that Tablet in 1869, long before
anyone could have known about WWI or WWII. It was a *warning* of what would happen if they did not heed His call, in no way intended to be a prophecy. Baha’u’llah also warned Napoleon III that He would fall from power and one year later he was defeated in battle. The man who delivered the
Tablet to Napoleon IIIthought it was nonsense but he became a Baha’i after Napoleon was defeated, he was so convinced. Also keep in mind that we have Baha’u’llah’s original writings and there is no way these Tablets could have been tampered with.
The obvious answer to your question as to why we do not see the prophecy the same way is that I already firmly believed in Baha’u’llah before I *ever* read that Tablet. I never used that Tablet as evidence, I just considered it way cool because of the way Baha’u’llah talked to Kaiser Wilhelm I and all the kings and rules and all the Christian clergy, with vehement power and authority. The way He writes only further confirmed what I already believed… But that is cool
to me because I already believe Baha’u’llah is a Messenger of God, a Manifestation of God is what we usually refer to Him as. I do not expect it to be cool to you or anyone else who is not a Baha’i.
(Continued on next post)
