Is it possible for a Religious person to go full circle and become atheist

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rosejmj said:
Faith is an excuse for not having any good logical reasons to believe
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I’m not sure about this.
Faith is evidence of things not seen, we read in the Bible, our holiest book.
Now, one way I can think about this is in relation to history. I did not live in the times of the Napoleonic Wars, but i have read the Napoleon and his army entered Russia.
I have not seen this myself, but i have faith that such an event occurred.
I base this faith, on my faith in the credibility of historians who have written about the event.
Faith may have a basis in reality; faith may reflect reality.
 
Attempting to delete. My question was answered upthread.
 
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Pattylt said:
To a fish, we are inferior because we can’t breathe in water. :hugs:
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I don’t know; I think we are supposing that fish can or do judge us, which would, I think be difficult to prove. We may be practicing anthropomorphism here.
 
kapp19 said:
My friend… If you want to argue about a point, which is based in a text, on a complex subject, maybe it’s better not to lead off with, “That’s arbitrary and without objective merit!” and then say, “Can you clarify the main point?” and then move to say “It’s a bad source, the author knew nothing.”
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I’m terribly sorry to enter the discussion in a late state and having a knuckle dragging capacity when it comes to philosophy. Mea maxima culpa.
We are trying to measure a certain kind of goodness - which would entail a knowledge of what we mean by “good.” For Thomas, goodness is the appetitive apprehension of being (whereas truth is the cognitive or intellectual apprehension of being). So, the key is being, which is the ground for “doing”.
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How are you measuring goodness? What scale, if any, is used and how is it devised? And how do you define “being” and “doing”?
Of COURSE xyz creatures do this or that stuff better than humans. That is not the point - which creature is nobler as a substance in general? It will be the creature with the form oriented towards a fuller appropriation of goodness, namely, a wider possibility for apprehending being.
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Here you describe something you call “substance” having a property of nobility as if it is something of common use and knowledge. Can you give an example of this more or less noble substance?
How are you measuring goodness? What scale, if any, is used and how is it devised?
(The form of humanity is the rational part - as opposed to the matter, which is the bodily part.)
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I have yet to see a separation of rationality from matter.
The rational appetitive power (as opposed to the merely sensitive or vegetal appetites) can take in an indefinite amount of being by the process of abstraction of sensible forms (which is, nevertheless, a process mediated by the senses, which makes us lower than purely intellectual substances), thus is ordered towards something higher (viz. nobler) than mere animals and plants and dead things.
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I have yet to see purely “intellectual substances”. Perhaps you can point me in the right direction? Are you saying humans are the only creatures posessing rationality?
This higher ordering - which is rooted in the being of the creature itself (rather than something which is tacked onto it - as rational animality simply is what a human IS) - makes humans nobler creatures than other bodily creatures.
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According to whom? Thomas or you?
 
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jeannetherese said:
Would you find evidence from miracles and eye witnesses attractive?
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Solid empirical data would be greatly appreciated. Anecdotal evidence is on the other hand the weakest possible form of evidence. And with the modern understanding of human neuropsychology anecdotal evidence hold even less attraction than it did a century ago.
 
jeannetherese said:
Would you find evidence from miracles and eye witnesses attractive?
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No, I don’t find eye witness testimony of supernatural events all that credible, otherwise I’d end up having to believe every person who claims to have seen ghosts or had premonitions.
 
Something for which claimants basically state no empirical explanation is possible. It’s not that there isn’t a possible natural explanation that we don’t know about, but rather that the claimants maintain that no natural empirically measurable explanation can ever exist. The Resurrection is just such a claim. People dead three days don’t come back to life. Ever.
 
jeannetherese said:
I don’t know; I think we are supposing that fish can or do judge us, which would, I think be difficult to prove. We may be practicing anthropomorphism here.
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Of course I was! Sorry the little emoji didn’t reflect that. I was just pointing out that we, as humans, define what’s a superior trait and what isn’t. We have no other reference. If aliens came to earth, they may look at our reasoning abilities as quite primitive and beneath them. We may not have a good perspective on how superior we really are.
 
jeannetherese said:
What, in your mind, makes an event supernatural?
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There are plenty of claimed medical miracles, for example large cancer tumours vanishing in a timespan that cannot be explained. The problem with claiming supernatural miracle in such a case is that we do know that the human body not only has the ability to fight cancer cells, but also do so on a daily basis. That this well established system suddenly fails to stop a cancer from growing large but then all of a sudden kicks back in, in a way we can’t explain, is in my eyes hardly evidence for something supernatural. It is on the ohter hand a good example of how we are not even close to knowing all there is about cancer and how the body combats it.

Interestingly enough, all medical miracles occurs in conditions which the human body is known to heal on its own. Even though the exact mechanism for such healing is not known and those cases are rare. There has on the other hand, to my knowledge at least, NEVER been a miraculous regrowth of a leg amputated above the knee.

And reports of dead coming back to life is always about people being “dead” for a very short time. The risen dead are never like five years dead or at least been confirmed severly decomposed. This in combination with the knowledge of various conditions where a person can appear dead, even to the point where medically trained people mistake then for being dead, makes claims of risen dead not too convincing. But one or two milennia ago when we did not have such knowledge such cases was naturally seen as solid proof for the supernatural.

Lastly, if we can’t in any way observe, detect or interact with something outside our universe. How can we declare events in our universe having a source outside the universe? In order to do this we have to fully understand our universe to begin with. Which we do not. Not even close. Not even remotely close. We are not even close to being remotely close to understand this universe. Which makes philosophical claims about metaphysics rather… peculiar 😄
 
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englands123 said:
We’ve all heard or read about an atheist finding God and how inspirational that can be.

But is there any examples of folk going the other way ?
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I visit a lot of atheism forums (fora) which are full of atheists who used to be Christians. Those forums also have entire sub-forums devoted to so-called ‘deconversion’ stories where users talk about their path from belief to atheism - how, why, when, etc.

As I read their individual stories I’m struck by how one single theme continually emerges. And I’m sitting there thinking…Yep, if I thought God was like that, (the way they mistakenly describe Him,) I wouldn’t worship a god like that either. Nor would I stay in a church like the supposedly horrible one they described - the polemical way they described it.
 
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EndTimes said:
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Freddy:
(a position that they reach by interpreting what the church teaches)
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Wrong

Those with Faith in Jesus now have God’s Spirit to Guide them
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Why does the Spirit guide people to different conclusions?
 
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