Dear Spectrox War,
Depends. Do you use a dictionary or just make it up as you go along. Because if you use a dictionary your concern is unwarranted. If you don't you're probably having trouble reading any of this so...
I also can't measure love with a ruler, but fortunately all knowledge isn't empirical.
You mean my differing faith. Logic proves itself how? You presume your existence and the existence of others, rest on your experience.
No. Faith isn't an approach. It's a consequence. Hence
D) if you believed we had the same dictionary you'd accept faith as the death of particular skepticism.You're not skeptical about skepticism and yet you're still a skeptic.
lain: Or, I just answered that.I'd agree to that. I just wouldn't agree that it's the case. My initial experience of God and my subsequent walk are the only evidence that could satisfy, unlike the empirical, which can't even establish the criteria that if met would satisfy the question of God.
You want a list of scientific errors commonly and long held?
If you mean religious faith, the greatest human suffering and death in the history of civilization is at the feet of men who felt as you do about it. They were hugely skeptical where God was concerned.
No. Faith isn't an approach. It's a consequence. Hence
You're not skeptical about skepticism and yet you're still a skeptic.
:idunno: I don't think it factors. You've made some fairly straight forward claims with rational problems. I've been limiting my criticism to that.
I'd be happy to go into it with you at some point, but it isn't necessary for our purposes here.
And you're right. You can doubt your understanding of a thing, but if you extend that to God what you have is something other than trust, which is a necessary foundation of faith.
Well, no. Doubt isn't a virus or even a process. It's a decision. It requires entertainment and that's a product of will that illustrates that flaw in foundation I noted prior.
Then your faith was never in Santa, but in your parents and their apparent belief, which itself was a sham. Or did you experience Santa as a real and present being in relation?
Then someone else is making your decisions for you.
Except by deciding what evidence to exclude from consideration you're determining, not following.
God is relating something of His nature. Given the Law would proceed grace, the masculine makes perfect sense. Wnat doesn't make sense is thinking of God as being sexed when the entirety of creation, including sex, is created.
No. I'm simply noting logical contradictions and their consequence. I don't need a life history to do that or whether or not you were Catholic or Charismatic.
I don't doubt it. But you as undoubtedly reserved and failed in reliance and trust. That's not nothing, but it isn't the faith that marks the beginning of relation. What you had was what you talked yourself into and out of.
No more strange than asserting a thing cannot be both on and off and that someone is responsible for either state.
An unreserved and unconditional love and trust in Christ. It's merited, unlike grace.
It doesn't have to be. It rarely actually is. Your faith in your parents, misplaced as it might have been regarding Santa, wasn't without foundation. You had the experience of relation and relied on it. But your parents, like all of us, were imperfect. So they failed you. But faith isn't being gullible and trust isn't a character flaw...and God will never forsake you.
How so? That is, I don't think you can actually apply that and I'm game for you to make the attempt.
Again, I don't need to in order to address the rational problem and deficiency of apostasy, which is essentially what your limited narrative comes down to.
The form, to be certain. But mostly we accept that what a person says and what they do are indicative of an actual state. People who are adept at lying can produce the same words and acts. We don't typically hook the object of our affection up to various machinery to ascertain their veracity.
And of those experiencing a religious state of relation and elevation. Sure. Now what we can't empirically establish with either is what that particularly means, which is rather important.
Actually, religion is a word we slap over experience, unless we're talking about a dead form. So it's very much like love, being premised in it, though more than it.
They're both reliable within their contextual application and that's all you can say about either with authority.
I wasn't expressing a personal narrative. I didn't approach at all in any traditional sense. But the point I made, that Lewis and others would make is that you can absolutely approach life with skepticism and arrive at faith. I can make the argument that faith is a rationally superior construct to your chosen context. That's what I was getting at.
Odd. How did you get the gist but not the point?
Sure I do.
If you can't set out what you mean by your charge then I can hardy call that charge intelligible or meaningful. Empiricism simply isn't in a position to examine the question. There is no preponderance that would function to make the point. The parts would fail before accumulation. Try it.
Christianity teaches us a great deal about human nature and the reason for its state, what it cannot hope to do but longs for. And the proof is in our natures absent the thing which can provide the fulfillment of that desire. God.
Unlike the atheist who is restrained by...:think:
The peculiar religious example you noted. Is that a widely held belief today? Faith isn't the end of inquiry into any number of things. It's the end of being substantively alone in that inquiry.
I don't know if that's naiveté or hubris, but in any event it's remarkable. It is precisely because Stalin and Mao believed themselves to be the arbiters of moral authority, the inescapable consequence of their want of faith in an absolute and independent moral authority, that they could act as they did.
The belief that you decide your own morality is the logical end of an atheistic thought process. You are motivated and/or constrained by your belief in that particular.
Again, to be clear, it isn't the absence of belief in God but the belief absent God that is the potential problem. Dawkins was being either ill considered or disingenuous.
I don't know. I've met "Frodo Baggins" in the sense you are talking about. Tolkien was excellent at fleshing him out
My mother left my father when I was very young. I don't even remember him other than childhood nightmares. This doesn't make him less real.
Anything about my father is unconvincing and contrived. It doesn't make him any less real and his imprint and veracity on my, in my, life is real.
Have you really looked? Do you know where to look?
You are such a romantic! So that's love? Parts of the brain activating. We can also communicate effectively between those that feel similarly about religion. I bet we could measure brain activity during worship. There, religion is empiracally proven.
The same can be said for the religious experience. It can be observed by instrument, as well as by behavior. It's effects can be corroborated and reciprocated. And love, the corner stone of it, is as or no more mystical.
Or your ability to sustain your declaration on those points.
I noted as much in the very sentence quoted prior to your response here. But the value and truth of religion is in its experience. I was perhaps a little harsh in calling some of it a dead matter of form.
Self serving assumption. You apparently know less about religious life than you do about what I know about. Now we're even?
Or, life on the whole as we live it.There was a day when science had few answers for any number of natural phenomena and religion, being man's earliest serious attempt to understand his relation to the world, among other things, attempted to provide those answers. Christianity, beyond the application of grace, is first and foremost about relation, between men and God and then between each other.
It's rationally and irrefutably true.
Sure. Also not the point in examining the question and problem of inquiry into God's existence.
Then it wouldn't be a myth book. It's funny that you can't even within that context avoid displaying your ire/bias...but you can't begin get to the general existence of God empirically, as noted prior in my examination of the objectively impossible challenge on the point. So you're getting that cart before the horse by narrowing it even more.
Some, certainly. And hopefully we distinguish between metaphor or other literary devices and a literal narrative too. Though I have my doubts that some in your camp do.
Stuff and declarative nonsense, to match your proof if not your volume.
One that, in the Christian approach notes the difference between aspiration and practice and offers an understanding of why we habitually fail ourselves, among other things.
Have you an argument or is this ongoing insult all you're down to? To match your consideration: horsefeathers.
What time is it?
I did answer it: restrained by nothing. He need no more obey his skepticism, which isn't really a moral standard for action, than he need serve any interest at all. As I noted:
I don't know. And, more to the point, neither do you. But all in all a smattering compared to any of the three tyrants I noted.
Which is to necessarily believe yourself the arbiter of morality. It is from this vanity that Stalin and Mao and Pol Pot arise not as aberration, but as rational extension.
Emotion elicited from religious belief and practice can be as you describe. But the core truth of it isn't determined by its adherents emotions.
Failing to establish what is this God you speak of (in a meaningful and consistent way), makes this completely unintelligible.
Like I said, if you are correct, then empiricism is not set to examine any questions about the nature of existence. And this, of course, isn't true. If it exists in reality, and makes statements regarding the nature of reality, than it's perfectly reasonable to suppose that it can be examined empirically by falsification. And, in-fact, it has already been done: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efficacy_of_prayer. This one study proves nothing alone, but it is surely not evidence supporting a god hypothesis.
That's correct. It would start to appear less like myths and it would be an astounding find supporting whichever god is described within its pages.
Such as?
What is not absurd or horrific about human torture, sacrifice, and vicarious redemption? Especially since it comes from a being that is all-knowing/loving/powerful. If this is the best idea that could have been hatched by such a being, than I'm ashamed to be created in such an image.
Surely religion is not exclusively conducive to atrocity. But it does provide a really attractive vehicle and fuel for carrying it out. And it has a terribly long history of doing just this. As for Stalin et al.; These men answered to no-one. And this is not a humanistic or atheistic/naturalistic quality. Nor is it the "rational extension" of a skeptical inquirer. This is the same quality given to yours and other god/s who are recorded to have carried out equal horror (destroying whole villages in ethnic cleansing rampages. Ordering the murder and rape of women and children. And supposedly even wiping out the entire earth with a gigantic deluge). Of course we answer to someone other than ourselves. We answer to each other. So your argument is an absurd strawman. No one person is the arbiter of morality, and neither does this mean that morality has some metaphysical supreme arbiter.
It's the only truth we can access. It's really the only truth we can assert in any sense. The truth that appears to us. We may be right. We may be delusional. We may not even be. But we experience and process and come to grips with what we believe as best we can.
It would be a fine point were I trying to establish that for you instead of standing ready and willing to do the thing you (in the challenger sense) desire but cannot name for me. Fortunately, I have a means to circumvent our problem of communication. It's a simple matter of will and exercise. Or it would be provided you (in that broader role) didn't insist on having the impossible first.
It's true that your premise isn't. Empiricism is limited. It can measure, but it cannot value. It can describe process, but it cannot answer as to the origin of being and existence. And if you cannot say what would satisfy an inquiry I can hardly be expected to supply it...
Without going into the methodology or religious particulars of any such study, neither would the dramatic success of prayer have been evidence of God. It could have as easily been considered a quantum level manipulation by some unknown means or evidence of some operation of natural law as yet undetermined. Or it could be argued that man, having understood a cause effect relation in relation to intense desire and concentration had developed an elaborate explanation for it. God needn't factor in at all.
I find the witness accounts, generationally, of altered lives and relation to be fairly persuasive evidence that the Christian myth, to steal from Tolkien and Lewis, is a true one. I find that assertion buttressed by my own experience. And as that experience is the only means to approach the question...
Read Paul. With sad frequency that which we desire to do we fail to do and that which we would reject we do. Why? Is it that we're lying to ourselves about the desires of our heart? Or is there something in our nature that precludes our approach beyond the idea of it absent something else and other? History tells us that we desire the good. For all our ongoing and incessant failure we still laud and reach after the perfect. Why? If nothing matters unless and until we decide it does then there's no answering the question. To the Christian it is because in the perfect is God and we desire, in truth, a reconciliation.
Like asking what's not horrible about mutilation, theft and birthday parties, to note the first problem. The second is that you aren't in any position to judge any of that, only to note its effect. Or, you're in no better position and your judgment amounts to nothing more or less than a standard that itself has no authority. In other words, when an atheist attempts moral outrage he is his own problem.
Christendom doesn't teach that we're living in the best or even intended place for mankind. But we are creatures of will and creation is a place of consequence. As to your feelings, it's a silly business to judge that which cannot be judged within its context and is nonsensical to attempt outside of it. But suit yourself.
Any organized idea of man, empowered by structure, will give rise to abuse. Sociopaths adore management positions. And trusting people will frequently find themselves at the mercy of petty tyrants.
Again with the peculiar mixing for shelter. It is absolutely an atheistic quality. It is an inescapable truth that your value is no more controlling in relation to me than the next fellow's. I am not bound by it or by you. Now you can fashion any form of religious stand in, but absent a seat of authority independent of you or me it's just an invitation to agree or the imposition of will by fiat.
Supra and that can be whatever you fashion it into. It suffers the same fate and the argument is between faith in moral absolute or relativism.
You answer if you choose or you're just talking about replacing the tyranny of the good, in terms of ultimate consequence, with a more dramatically flawed tyranny in the here and now. One that must rely on power and cannot argue a standard beyond it since the valuation is necessarily and completely dependent on subjective valuation.
That's your moral notion. And that's all it can be.
Your claim was that Christians are less rational. I merely pointed out that irrationality is a trait of humans in general, not just the faithful. (Yes, there are irrational believers.)
They are incompatible in your mind because you have a bias. You are every bit is strongly biased as Stripe and that colors your ability to reason. You are, in fact, leading your evidence down a path that you want to follow. It is just a different path than Stripes.Spectrox War said: