I am an atheist thread 3

[_A]

Yes. Can you prove otherwise?

No, but that is not what I am on about. You are suggesting that it is a person.
Is it that same person all the way through until it finishes school?

 

[_A]

As we’ve said before, it all boils down to free will. God doesn’t get his kicks off watching us suffer… far from it. But in the same way a father must let his children make their own choices (good or bad), so does God do with us. If he prevented us from choosing love freely, we’d either rebel or give up and give in not knowing differently. Perfect love has to be given freely - both ways. If you restrict that love, then it’s not perfect anymore.

We choose our own paths. For better or worse. God our father is there to support us and accept us back when we make mistakes like any father should . If we choose to disown ourselves, that’s our problem and he’s given us plenty of help in the meantime.

I believe (although this is speculation- and that there is no Church document that even mentions this but it’s still within possibility), that when we die, we have the power to choose either heaven or hell. Those of us who have lived good lives, trying to please the lord will accept that they hold enough good within themselves to accept heaven. Those of us who have lived poor lives and fought God every step of the way will see their errors and knowing how perfect God is, would be so ashamed as to choose an eternity of suffering. When you’re in front of a perfect being, you recognize all the flaws within yourself and are either humbled or ashamed. I think ultimately it’s our choice. I mean just imagine being in front of an all-perfect creator and father, then think of everytime you’ve ever sinned, rejected him ect… I think the shame would be so incredibly great, you would just go into despair… Of course, that’s probably hard for you to imagine since you don’t believe at all, but I’d still suggest you try, just to get an idea of what I’m talking about.

Repeating the previous disclaimer, this is just speculation on my part. Nothing tells me it isn’t true so I am free to philosophize on this. If the Church were to say otherwise, I’d believe them over my piddly speculations, but I doubt they would ever say one way or the other on this particular matter. Still possible though.

Even if that particular belief that when we die, we get to make the ultimate choice weren’t true, it doesn’t take away from the previous statement of free will and perfect love.

I still say that torturing souls for eternity is evil when he could just uncreate them.
Also, killing every creature in the world by drowning(the great flood myth) is vile and horrible, too. Your god seems to like suffering.
Perfect, you say? I say that you are fully capable of thinking for yourself. Think about that.

 

[_A]

" As a child I found a sparrow that had falled from it’s nest. And I nursed it back to health till it grew stronger than the rest. But when i tried to hold it, then it pecked and scratched my chest till I let it go. And I watched it fly away from me with it’s bright and cheerful song. And a part of me was cursing I had let it grow so strong. And I feared it might go hungry and I feared it might go wrong. Cause you can not hold the acorn once the oak begins to grow. And you can not close your heart to what it fears and needs to know, that the hardest part of love…and the rarest part of love… and the truest part of love… is the letting go".

-Children of Eden.
Musical

Nice bit of poetry (prose?).

 

[_A]

Do you, or do you not, understand the mutually exclusive difference between “gods” and “God”?

Firstly, do you understand why a “god” cannot exist if “God” exists?

Your god is not named ‘god’. You see, gods are a group of characters in fiction which includes Apollo, Yahweh and Zeus. I use the specific names to avoid confusion.
There have been many gods…most of which are not believed now…

 

[_A]

Do you not understand that it is not God, but those in hell themselves who have chosen to be there, and are only tortured (in hell) by those things which they decided to “hang onto” which are not of God?

All suffering qua suffering is due to the consequences of sin. The simple application of pain, such as having one’s leg knocked off by a falling meteor, let’s say, is not the infliction of “suffering”.

We CHOOSE to suffer, which is a REACTION to pain, and we either choose to suffer such that we “condemn the gods (or God, or the fates, or random-chance)”, or such that we look for the “lesson” in that suffering.

Your understanding of “hell” is also in error. Since atheists have no concept of hell per se and when they use the term they are refering to the Catholic concept, might you be interested in actually finding out what “hell” means, and avoid making statements devoid of relevance to any “valuation” of the so-called “myth of hell”?

Oh, I understand your myth well enough…your god (is he calling himself Yahweh or Jehova these days?) created everything, and included everything he liked.
An all-powerful being gets things all his own way.
Suffering, pain and fetuses that self-abort more than half the time are all that way because that is what Yahweh wants.
Unless of course it is all made-up.

 

[_A]

You know, until I came to this thread I was unaware of how much my faith is a gift. It seemed to me easy to believe if you were open to God (in face unavoidable). But being open to God is a grace in and of itself. So if I get anything out of this conversation at all, it’s more of an appreciation for that which God blessed me with. Don’t know about the rest of the Catholics/Christians here. It’s just amazing to me that some people can still doubt after all these talks…

It is not so much that I doubt, it is that there is nothing convincing enough to believe.
For example, I asked what is in heaven that is so attractive - noone seems to have an answer. I have not heard anyone say what heaven is. Hell has been described as a ‘furnace of fire and gnashing of teeth’, but nothing so specific for heaven. What would someone do for an eternity in heaven? Worship? That sounds like life in North Korea…with everyone worshipping their god-king.

 

[_A]

A person has a soul, by definition.

You have proved here that you are mistaken. Can you see it. It is a glaring error.

The first day, it is a person with a soul?

 

[_A]

He’s not. He just wants to be able to parrot “love me or burn, love me or burn!” I tried at length, to no avail.

Feel free to give it a shot, of course. Maybe you can do better.

Natural, you offered YOUR interpretation. I am sure that it makes you feel right about your belief. I used the biblical interpretation. It is unacceptable to both of us, as is evidenced by the fact that you don’t like to accept ‘furnace of fire’ either. Makes that Yahweh look like he burns people who don’t love him in just the right way.

 

[_A]

Well I am not a god, but I will give it a go!

Do you believe that evil exists?

No

Do you have proof?

It is impossible to prove a negative. Remember Russell’s Teapot.

Which god convinced you of this if you believe that evil exists?

I do not believe that evil exists. If I did, why would I assume that a god installed it? How would I choose **which **god? (there have been many)

Is evil from the one God or from the one Satan?

It is an absolute which does not exist invented by the church.

 

[_A]

In spite of the increasing ugliness in this thread, it has been sometimes interesting. I’m especially interested in the “evidence for God” idea. A has asked for evidence to prove God. He never answered my question about what sort of evidence would convince him, though. lkddav says that a prayer-induced terraforming of the moon would convince him.

There’s a notorious wrinkle here, even if you leave the supernatural out altogether. Everything we learn about quantum mechanics tells us that our apparently deterministic universe really isn’t. Determinism at the macro level is a statistical illusion. Statements like the 2nd law of thermodynamics (tendency towards chaos) are not hard and fast rules. They are statistical tendencies which are so strong that they are virtually certain.

But, momentum of particles changes spontaneously. That means that there is a chance (obviously remote) that all the particles in the Diet Coke can on my desk will spontaneously move upwards, and the can will start to levitate. There is a chance, however remote, that the molecules on the moon will spontaneously organize into a lovely garden. There is a finite, theoretically calculable probability for any event imaginable.

So for whatever event we’re discussing, we have two possible explanations. First, God intervened directly. Second, a natural molecular reorganization. How do you determine which is correct? How do you assign a probability to God’s intervention? It sounds like lkddav believes that God is more probable than the bloom o’ the moon: P(God) > P(moonbloom). How did he determine that? I don’t want to put words in his mouth, but I’m guessing it’s purely subjective.

psyche23 says that she (?) believes that God is more probable than her friend’s cancer remission: P(God) > P(remission). How did she determine that? I’m guessing it’s equally subjective.

I wonder if the value of P(God) is best determined philosophically. Aristotle believed that P(God) was 100%, based mainly on the First Cause argument. Dawkins suggests that P(God) is 0% (in all fairness, I haven’t read his latest book, so please correct me if I’m wrong). But I’ll be darned if I can figure out an objective way to assign a value to P(God). I suspect that psyche got it right:

Maybe that’s exactly right. Faith is a gift of the Holy Spirit – if you ain’t got it, you ain’t got it. Maybe that subjectively assigned value of P(God) boils down to inspiration from above.

I’ve just started CS Lewis’s Miracles, which deals with this subject – hopefully it’ll be enlightening.

Anyone have any thoughts?

A, let me ask you a specific question. If Jesus appeared before you right now, and answered all of your questions to your satisfaction, and performed any miracle that you asked, and then told you to go join the Catholic church, would you do it? If such a thing happened to me, I would make a bee-line to the nearest emergency room for a battery of neurological tests. But assuming that there’s no evidence that you’ve suddenly flipped your lid, would that convince you? Why or why not?

God bless!

I would not join a church just because some guy named Jesus said to. If someone performed miracles, I would suspect magic tricks. What evidence would I accept? Strange question, but I will try. I think the moonbloom thing would do it if it was predicted by the pope in extreme detail.
The fact that the bible says prayers will be answered is interesting. If it is true, there should be a question we can ask through prayer that will be answered clearly, and in a way that only an omnipotent being could.
For now, I will accept a pope-predicted moonbloom (with details such as exact times and dates). I will try to think of a question that, when answered in any way, will prove that a prayer has been answered…I must say I can’t think of one right now…help me out everyone. The imaginary being promised to answer prayers, let’s find some evidence here.
Oh, and if there is no way to make that bit of the bible mean something in the real world, then there is another part of the bible which is just story, or allegory, or whatever you like to call it when it is wrong.

 

[_A]

What is your background?

Cradle catholic with a background in aviation and social work. How about you?

 

[_A]

By definition “A”, you are not an atheist. You believe in God, you just don’t believe He exists so by definition you are a hypocrite.

Don’t call me a hypocrite for that, you are mistaken.
I don’t believe in any god more than any other - they are all interesting stories and no more.

 

[_A]

Not to butt in here or anything,

OK, I want to butt in, too…hope it’s OK

I always leave the door open to the possiblity that God is truly intervening.

Do you just leave the door open for Yahweh, or is the door open also to the possibility that Krishna exists? How about Allah?
Did you choose the god of the catholics because your culture provided a bias in that direction, or because of an exhaustive search of your own?

 

[_A]

Sometimes skepticism is a good thing, nothing wrong with reasoning and thinking and asking questions. Faith comes along with this. On another thread some spoke of this. When you were little your parents told you they were your parents and you had to develop faith they were telling you the truth and believed it and told others when introducing them that here are my parents and called them Mom and Dad. Yes you could see them but God has presented truth through the Church. It is the visible, real walking and talking, existing living with beings on earth and in heaven, I stopped listening to snakes a long time ago.
So pray for the gift of faith.
I’m very proud of my God. I’m never skeptical of my God.

Which god?

 

[_A]

I am sorry you had that experience. I wish you could meet my priest.

Send him up and we will go fishing! I don’t by any stretch think that all priests are nasty folk, any more than I think that all imam’s are. I just happen to have had no interaction other than what I mentioned there.
There are priests here, they just don’t run in my circle of friends. In fact, I have never known priests to participate in any ‘circle’ other than their parish…
Perhaps outreach is not as much a priority for the church in areas where the ‘word’ has been spread already.

 

[_A]

For those who can’t read, members of the Church who can read and are schooled in the Faith can teach them. Just like in Catechism classes for children. The early members of the Church were taught orally by Jesus, and they passed these teachings on orally to the first mission churches.

If you were a Catholic and thought that Krishna sounded better, you would be absolutely free to choose that. You would, of course, no longer be considered a Catholic, and would not expect to take part in any of the Sacraments.

So the other faiths, if they are convincing enough, are just as valid.
What about no faith? Is my position OK, too? I was raised Catholic, and learned all about it. I was not convinced.

 

[_A]

I expect this thread to be closed soon, since it is over 1000 posts. I will continue here until it is closed, then I will make thread 4. I hope you all join me.

 

[freesoulhope]

I expect this thread to be closed soon, since it is over 1000 posts. I will continue here until it is closed, then I will make thread 4. I hope you all join me.

Come to the philosophy folder and enter the thread called
“I Am The Mind Of The Universe”

 

[psyche23]

No, but that is not what I am on about. You are suggesting that it is a person.
Is it that same person all the way through until it finishes school?

It is a person no matter the age. And I was under the impression everyone here was looking for proof for either side of the arguments. That’s why I brought that up.

 

[psyche23]

Nice bit of poetry (prose?).

musical.