When I choose to believe it, my life becomes better than without.

That doesn't mean that it is actually true.

Your book sounds interesting. I will have to check it out sometime. I am skeptical, of course for people have been philosphizing for thousands of years and each philosopher is so convinced they have the answers, only to find out later that... no there is another way.

A thing that the book points out, ad nauseam, in its first few chapters. However, it explains why this is the case. The question isn't "what are the answers", because the answers can only be made in terms of premises, and premises are arbitrary choices that cannot be proven within the theory -- any theory, even mathematics and logic. The question is: What is the best set of premises, given that we cannot "prove" them. Not "what is truth", just "what is it best to believe, given the evidence".

For what it's worth, answering this question in a quantitatively reasonable way leads one to a worldview that is very close kin to scientific realism, but which allows a bit more strongly for doubt and mistake and also for beliefs that go beyond the strict evidence, extrapolatory beliefs. If I had to describe it, what I'm attempting is to axiomatize "common sense". Believe what you can doubt the least, given all the evidence and all of your least doubtable beliefs, while maintaining an open mind about possibly being wrong. Not terribly outrageous, but more than sufficient to reject any system of beliefs that is internally inconsistent or in significant conflict with the belief set we call "scientific knowledge" or (to a lesser extent, as our knowledge is more doubtable) "historical knowledge).

The point being that a good theory of knowledge cannot be dogmatic, because historically as you note dogma has not only often proven false, it has almost always been proven false. One must subject one's system of beliefs to a critical process all the time, and never let it stand upon its laurels or believe it because some Authority supposedly came up with it or refuse to subject it to stringent tests of its truth or continue to believe it just as strongly even when it fails such tests.

Evidence, you see, needs to strengthen beliefs when it supports them, weaken beliefs when it contradicts them. Is that such a radical system?

As far as the way Joseph Smith interpreted the plates, he would look at the images and say the words that came to his mind while his scribe would write it down. So there are a lot of 18th century ameican culture tones in it, for it was how Joseph thought.

Or there were never any plates, Joseph Smith simply dictated a story that he made up, stealing whole chunks of words verbatim from the New Testament (which presumably hadn't been written at the time the nonexistent plates were supposedly written). Mark Twain wrote scathingly upon this. In a modern literature class, Smith would have just plain failed the class for plagiarism. This explains the science fiction in the story -- nonexistent rivers flowing into the Red Sea, nonexistent compasses, nonexistent steel swords, nonexistent old world crops and animals in the new world. It's implausible the way Jules Verne stories are implausible, only more so.

When you say it doesn't really matter it just makes me sad. The criterion for "truth" in the world isn't how something makes you feel; if only it were that easy! Smoking pot makes (well, at one time made) me feel just great! I felt very holy and connected, because it plugs into receptors in the brain that stimulate the kind of feeling you refer to. Was it "truth"?

It is pretty easy to come up with this feeling without drugs, because those receptors are receptors for things produced in the human body that can be released if you think the right thoughts, the same way that substances are released that cause you to have an erection if you think the right thoughts about sexual activity OR if you observe sexual stimulus OR if you have a sexual dream OR if you engage in actual sex -- sometimes. Similarly, thoughts can make you impotent.

Relying on feelings to gauge truth when you know that feelings in the brain are largely emotional responses to certain thought or experience patterns has bankrupted many a gambler, wrecked many a home, caused many a young person whose FEELINGS of invulnerability turned out not to be correct to die, and have caused untold misery and war in the past -- it doesn't seem to be terribly, well, wise.

Wisdom seems to be doubting your feelings and looking past them for some sort of defensible, objective basis of truth. You might feel that white people are superior to black people -- a common enough feeling for most of western history and one that Joseph Smith and Brigham Young both openly subscribed to -- but that feeling might not be correct, when subjected to an critical analysis and compared to objective, unbiased observations.

Even "your life being better" is not terribly good evidence. First of all, it is difficult to know what it would have been like if you had held completely different beliefs but acted in much the same way. One can choose to act in good ways without the Book of Mormon or any religious text at all telling you what they are. It's easy. Lots of people do it. Second, people who rely on (say) antidepressants such as Prozac will report that they feel better and are more functional on the drug. That is great, of course, and is a very good reason to take the drug. But that doesn't mean that the drug is "true" -- some sort of necessary thing that everybody needs in order to be content. At most it means that the brain of the person who needs it to get by is dysfunctional in some way that the drug treats, e.g. a serotonin imbalance that causes a mood disorder.

This is a very common reason people give for believing in some mythology. It makes them feel better, by stimulating the release of feel-good hormones associated with belonging, importance, empowerment, being loved by Jesus if by no other human on the planet. We need love, and being loved by a stuffed rabbit or imaginary friend is better than not being loved at all.

Also, believing in a theistic morality as divine revelation truth means that they don't have to think -- they can just follow its rules when confronted with moral choices instead of thinking things out for themselves and actually making a moral choice.

Unfortunately, many people do not like to think. It takes biological energy, and causes stress. It is so much easier to simply memorize a set of rules, especially fairly simple rules, and use that instead. It is much much easier to go to a church once a week to have the rules explained and exemplified in a sermon than to have to develop and think through a complicated morality capable of handling edge cases, exceptions, and so on -- a simplified morality that is often casually cruel, is often obviously wrong, and that ends up being justified by the extortionist hook buried in most theisms -- believe it even where it doesn't make sense or you will be tormented for an eternity.

rgb

to RGB

Your book sounds interesting. I will have to check it out sometime. I am skeptical, of course for people have been philosphizing for thousands of years and each philosopher is so convinced they have the answers, only to find out later that... no there is another way.

Anyways, having said that, I do commend the idea of putting philosophy into a mathematical language. That sounds like a good way to sort through it, for we all have different interpretations of words.

As for the book of mormon... yes it is implausible that Israel descendents came to the new world. It is also extremely implausible that a boy/young man with little to no scholarly education could write such a book.

As far as the way Joseph Smith interpreted the plates, he would look at the images and say the words that came to his mind while his scribe would write it down. So there are a lot of 18th century ameican culture tones in it, for it was how Joseph thought.

But none of this really matters as I have stated before, for I still can't deny that feeling I get that tells me it is truth. When I choose to believe it, my life becomes better than without.

I will check out your book. It may be some time before I sort through it, but the idea of a math philosophy language sounds interesting

Aharonsmith wrote: "I agree with you. When one tries to reason his way to truth or even use empiricism he cannot reach it per..."

Dear Aharonsmith,

Well said, for the most part. You misinterpret my statements about Berkely and/or Hume, but that is understandable as I'm sure you still have not read e.g. Probability Theory the Logic of Science and hence do not understand the systematic development of a rational theory of knowledge. I urge you to acquire it and to slog through it -- you can almost certainly manage the first five chapters where the algebra is pretty simple and there is little or no calculus.

Berkeley isn't wrong so much as he is irrelevant. The question of whether the Universe is mind or matter is obviously unanswerable, one of the stupidest questions imaginable. I dislike Berkeley because he invented an enormously complex metaphysical basis for observational reality by redefining it in something that was even less well understood -- "mind", awareness, God. This needlessly multiplied causes, needlessly introduced complexity, and based that complexity on an arbitrarily selected mythology and poorly understood psychology.

As for my accepting it simply because it can't be disproven: Surely you wouldn't argue that Solipsism, irrefutable as it might be (although I am fond of Johnson's thumping of the table with a `thus I refute it') is truth simply because it cannot be disproven? Berkeley's assertion could be read as: "we are all solipsistic imaginings in the mind of God". I prefer Johnson's argument to any other -- thump the table and roar "Thus I refute you!"

The question you see, is not "what harebrained scheme can I think up that cannot be refuted by any evidence". It is "what network of hypotheses seem to work to explain the evidence I can see". One path leads to unreason, to "truth" in the form of any assertion one cares to make, because who can prove you wrong? The other path leads to reason, to "probable truth" in the form of a mutually consistent network of assumptions that work to explain past observations and continue to work as we compare their predictions to the continually unfolding future.

There really is an enormous difference between the two. Berkeley is the first. Hume is also the first, because he failed to find the correct argument for how to decide what best to believe, given the evidence -- he never understood induction and inference.

We (the human species) really have made considerable progress since then. The only problem is that the progress we have made has been increasingly mathematical and precisely stated. Human language as a suitable language for philosophy all but died during the Enlightenment; it is far too easy to make ambiguous or self-referential statements that make logical analysis impossible or that guarantee inconsistency (and hence the ability to "derive" any conclusion as a theorem).

This creates a quandry, I admit, for the non-mathematician. You can either accept the fact that a sound axiomatic basis for human knowledge has been discovered and quantified, one that justifies inference as a means of discovery subject to some very broad axiomatic priors, on my word for it, or you can roll up your metaphorical sleeves, obtain the readily available works where this is all laid out, and work through them until you understand them and can judge for yourself. I really cannot offer you any third alternative. You can reject it all you want otherwise, but you are rejecting it in ignorance of just what it says and why it says it and thus are reduced to making statements like:

I think you are pretty bold to believe that you have the know all answer to the philosophical questions of the ages. From my experience convinced surety is the path to a dangerous place.

Let's think about this for a moment. First of all, the answer that I "know" is that most of the "philosophical questions of the ages" have no answer, at least no answer that we can point to and claim "this is absolute truth and cannot be reasonably doubted". This is anti-arrogant; it is the fundamental definition of humility. Yet you all but accuse me of intellectual pride and hubris for daring to think that I know why I know what I know, including the limitations on that knowledge.

Curiously, the rest of your reply I agree with in detail (not that I agree with your personal beliefs -- I'm referring to the part about imperfect knowledge and the importance of tolerance of other viewpoints as a consequence. This is a meta-axiom of my poor effort to build an axiomatic basis for the building of worldviews in my book-in-progress Axioms; if you would care to read the first two parts of the book (which are finished) you can grab them here:

http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/axioms.pdf

Note especially the list of meta-axioms on page 114, but by all means read through the rest of it. You tell me where some aspect of the basis of reason laid out in it is wrong. It is a book in which I am developing the algebra of imperfect reason -- which turns out to be Bayesian probability theory, with axiomatic priors. If you read it carefully, you can come to understand the basis for the worldview of many individuals, including yourself, including worldviews that are commonly associated with particular superorganisms or groups. You can also -- I hope -- come to understand how one worldview may not be as good as another in quite objective terms. A worldview can be openly contradictory, for example, or a worldview can assert its own completeness and consistency.

In any event, I do rather think that the meta-axioms so listed permit one to both understand the nature of worldviews and to comparatively judge them and ordinally rank them in terms of a somewhat fuzzy degree of plausibility.

Using this sort of ranking, I think one can fairly easily analyze e.g. The Book of Mormon and demonstrate that as the basis of a worldview, it is almost certainly false, almost certainly pure fiction in fact, and of absolutely no value in understanding the real world historically, scientifically, or morally. The events it portrays never happened. The science it portrays generally contradicts what we know of science today, and is anachronistic besides for the time in which the book was supposedly written. The morality it portrays, with God "darkening the skin" of unbelievers and rebels, and "whitening the skin" of the pure and saved, is abhorrent. It impossibly quotes whole chunks of the New Testament word for word, and sprinkles "biblical sounding" phrases like "it came to pass" all over the place to where it is a bit of a joke, almost a satire of the actual Bible. It is quite obviously a complete piece of fiction made up on the spot by Joseph Smith and hence (as a pack of lies, a story, a myth, as falsehood) it is heretical and anathema to the very Bible it seeks to reinforce with a modern myth.

I'm really surprised that you can even stand to call yourself a LDS, given that you must know perfectly well that it is implausible in the extreme that a "lost tribe" of Jews made their way to the New World using a compass that hadn't been invented yet, carrying steel swords to the New World that hadn't been invented yet (pre-Columbian America was still in the stone age, bringing old world plants and animals to the new world that "thrived" according to TBOM, but mysteriously were entirely vanished without a trace when Columbus arrived. But Mormon brainwashing is among the best on the planet...

rgb

Eric_W wrote: 1. God is not a liar. He would not leave extraordinary evidence for how we evolved over millions of years unless He were.
2. Evolution says absolutely nothing about creation.

Evolution says nothing at all. What we have is the evidence of the real world, all of it. It tells us that the visible part of the space-time continuum is between 13 and 14 billion years old. It tells us that our Sun is a second generation star, built out of the remnants of a prior supernova that assembled the heavy elements out of the primordial light elements that were all that burned in the first sun. It tells us that our planet is roughly 5 billion years old or a bit less, that life appeared between 3 and 4 billion years ago, and that the original highly primitive lifeforms systematically evolved following an undirected process of mutation followed by natural selection in an environment that was highly chaotic, as random as anything one can imagine being random in a deterministic Universe that evolves according to fixed natural laws. It tells us that around a billion years ago life forms achieved a notable degree of complexity, and that a bit over half a billion years ago they evolved a backbone and vertebrates appeared. We can then trace the evolution of vertebrate fishes into amphibians into reptiles into mammals into primates into us.

At no point in the fossil record is there any evidence of anything other than an impersonal, mechanical, statistical process at work. There is not a single step that one can point to and say -- this is evidence of God (violating the laws of nature) as opposed to the laws of nature working themselves out. The history of the natural world offers no evidence whatsoever for either "creation" or the supernatural (defined to be a clear violation of natural law).

3. To suggest that we humans "know" how God does things is the height of arrogance. For an entity supposedly without beginning or end, time is irrelevant and billions of years of evolution would be as a fleeting second (maybe even seven days?)

Or seven seconds. Or seventeen point six four two years. Or pi over 6 irrational years. To write an entire Bible (a book that from cover to cover purports to record "how God does things" is the height of arrogance; to believe ex post facto that it is all correct is the height of stupidity. So if your point is that the Bible is a mythical work written by ignorant Bronze Age shamans seeking to explain things they were clueless about, I agree. If you seek to argue that what they wrote is correct -- if one applies an arbitrary, unknown, scaling factor to their time references (made, one should point out, in plain and straightforward language) -- well hell, why bother reading it in the first place if you're just going to redefine the meanings of all the words in ways that suit you and your prior decision to find them true no matter what?

4. There are two views of God: as a magician who snaps His fingers and bingo everything is done, or the artist who builds a painting slowly and lovingly over time, gradually. Unfortunately most unthinking people adopt the magician view.

Perhaps because that's what the Bible clearly portrays him as, especially in Genesis but all the way down to Matthew and the dead hopping out of their graves and be-bopping all over Jerusalem the moment Jesus died.

Don't get me wrong -- if one is a deist (not a theist) and believes in a rational God that can be known through Nature (and not through scriptural mythologies with origins back in pre-history), then we obviously will never disagree about what Nature implies -- we use the same methodology to analyze it, and will arrive at the same results and natural history and laws of physics.

The sole difference will be that the atheist will see no reason that God is necessary, because the laws of physics are a sufficient explanation of everything that we observe. The atheist won't (usually) assert that God is impossible or logically contradictory, only that God is not a necessary or rational inference to be drawn from nature, because it is not reasonable to insist that the laws of physics, which describe "causality" in the observed world, must themselves have a cause. They are all that we can refer to as "cause" and they leave no room for anything else. A rational deist will then identify the laws of nature and the Universe, visible and invisible, with God, accepting that this cannot be proven, the atheist will simply refrain from this step, and otherwise they will be in perfect accord as to the way the world works; neither of them will believe in the supernatural, both of them will be properly skeptical of evidence for phenomena outside the apparent bounds of currently accepted physics, but will nevertheless be open to the notion that our understanding of physics could be (indeed, almost certainly is) bounded and incorrect in some places.

5. Evolution is God's creation, to be admired and understood. The evidence for it as a process is overwhelming. To deny it, is to deny God.

To deny that evolution occurred isn't to "deny God" -- but it definitely shows that one is irrational and perhaps a bit stupid. As you say, the evidence for it is overwhelming. However, as noted above, there is no logically necessary or even weakly plausible connection between the process observed through the data and God. One can assert "Evolution happened and God exists" without contradiction. One can assert "Evolution happened and no God exists" without contradiction. And to be quite frank, neither of these statements can be proven or disproven (made more or less plausible) by means of evidence, and there are esthetic reasons outside of the consideration of evidence to favor either one. No God is the simpler explanation, and so wins the Ockham's Razor award; God is arguably prettier, implying an overarching observer that can serve as a source of entropy on a Universal scale and hence define time. However, Ockham's razor is not a necessary condition for a true theory, and neither is prettiness. So in truth, the most accurate statement is at all times -- "We have no idea if God (as we envision It) exists or does not exist; we only know what we cannot answer this question by any finite series of observations, any more than we can prove that the Universe is infinite in extent from our finite vantage point and given our finite range of vision."

6. ID and "creationists" (a misnomer because they deny that evolution is God's creation) are engaged in a battle to promote a particular religious view which they have designed, misplaced loyalty at best, heretical most likely.

The word "heresy" means "choice" (little known fact). Granting that the meaning of intellectual freedom is "freedom to choose what to believe", our natural state is one of heresy and critical thought as we sift through the infinite set of possibilities in search of the things we can doubt the least because they are the most consistent with observation.

I prefer the word "stupid" to "heretic". ID and Creationism are stupid, because they directly contradict what we know best and can doubt the least.

7. The Bible was never intended as a natural science textbook.

How can you claim to know the intention of its many authors? It certainly has lots of (incorrect) natural science in it. It is certainly true that for most of recorded history it was considered blasphemy to deny the literal truth of Genesis. It is clear from reading the New Testament that Paul and Jesus both believed in the literal truth of Genesis (contradicting anything like perfect knowledge of the real world).

8. Evolution "implies" randomness; it does not exclude direction, but it remains a fact."

It does not support direction. So why assert it?

rgb

To RGB:
So perfect truth is beyond our grasp. What is left? How about imperfect truth?

I agree with you. When one tries to reason his way to truth or even use empiricism he cannot reach it perfectly.

The reason you think Berkeley is wrong is because he offers a simple solution to the question of the universe. However, his reasoning could work just as good, if you were willing to buy into it. Same as Humes. Same as all the philosphers. I think you are pretty bold to believe that you have the know all answer to the philosophical questions of the ages. From my experience convinced surety is the path to a dangerous place.

If you really, truly need your monkey to keep off the gorilla, then by all means keep it, imaginary or not.

I definately will. You can think of it as a monkey, but I see it as foundational center that has brought into my life more meaning than I ever received following the athiesm approach. Do I know with an empirical surety that it is true? No, I do not. and this discussion has really gotten me to consider what it is about that experience, and continuing ones I have that I really do know. This is what I know. I know that it feels true. and I know that when I choose to believe that feeling, my life opens up in a way that it never has before. So I choose to believe. Do I understand it all? By all means, no. Do I blindly follow every whim of doctrine taught by the LDS church or any other person for that matter? No. I struggle every day. I meditate on them. My meditation includes discussing it with God.

Through this discussion, a core maxim that I hold dear has become relevant to me. I will try to explain it:

We all have certain beliefs of how the world works. Some believe in God, Athiests, from what I have observed believe in a random universe. Either way, these beleifs cannot be proven, for we cannot have perfect truth. Imperfect truth is as close as we can get, as you described it.

So each and every one of us builds a core philosophy. This philosophy is what we hold sacred and dear. Is it true? We can never know. But it is definately worth believing in, for it is what gives us the foundation, the purpose of our lives.

Now dangerous things can arise when we hold our philosophy as absolute. We can be tempted to assume that we are right, and everyone else is wrong. I believe that this is the cause of so many wars and destructions that we as a species have done to each other.

I greatly admire the ideals that the founders of our nation protrayed when it came to religion. They saw it as an essential way to teach morality, but demanded that we are tolerant and respectful of each others beliefs. I think that it is so very important for us to follow this path. We can hold our core philosophy as how it is, but we must respect and tolerate each others beliefs.

I have a better understanding why athiests can get so upset and Christians. Christians cannot be very tolerant sometimes. Nathan, your comment,

"I would be relatively happy if Christians would start strictly using "I believe" instead of "I know." "

rung a chord in me. However, be aware that when a Christian says that he is basing it off of that feeling that he or she has had, and is choosing to believe it to be true.

Anyways, I hope this maxim makes some sense.

Eric, welcome to the discussion. It is good to see someone who sees evolution as God's creation. I agree.

Dan, I do not see God as violating the laws of physics. Much is yet to be learned about the laws of physics. What may seem like a violation, could be because it follows an unknown law of physics.

God is not a liar.

Unless you count, for example, that time that Jesus, who is also God, sort of, said that he would return to Earth within a generation of his crucifixion.

To suggest that we humans "know" how God does things is the height of arrogance.

I agree. And I assume that you will not, within the next few sentences in your post, do the very thing that you claim is arrogant.

Evolution is God's creation, to be admired and understood.

Oh well. I guess I was wrong.

The Bible was never intended as a natural science textbook.

Baseless claim. The Bible explained how things work for Bronze Age people who didn't know any better. It only "isn't intended" to do this if you begin with the presupposition that it is inerrant and realize that, clearly, it would be a horrible textbook.

There are two views of God: as a magician who snaps His fingers and bingo everything is done, or the artist who builds a painting slowly and lovingly over time, gradually. Unfortunately most unthinking people adopt the magician view.


They are both magician views. To have created the universe, to have guided evolution, and to have violated the laws of physics are all pretty good magic tricks, whether done quickly or slowly.

1. God is not a liar. He would not leave extraordinary evidence for how we evolved over millions of years unless He were.
2. Evolution says absolutely nothing about creation.
3. To suggest that we humans "know" how God does things is the height of arrogance. For an entity supposedly without beginning or end, time is irrelevant and billions of years of evolution would be as a fleeting second (maybe even seven days?)
4. There are two views of God: as a magician who snaps His fingers and bingo everything is done, or the artist who builds a painting slowly and lovingly over time, gradually. Unfortunately most unthinking people adopt the magician view.
5. Evolution is God's creation, to be admired and understood. The evidence for it as a process is overwhelming. To deny it, is to deny God.
6. ID and "creationists" (a misnomer because they deny that evolution is God's creation) are engaged in a battle to promote a particular religious view which they have designed, misplaced loyalty at best, heretical most likely.
7. The Bible was never intended as a natural science textbook.
8. Evolution "implies" randomness; it does not exclude direction, but it remains a fact.

I do believe that the Earth is billions of years old. Scientific evidence shows such, and the Bible gives no contrary: I believe God is timeless, so there is no reason billions of years couldn't be described as mere days.

Or rather, the Bible contradicts it dozens of times and places, from Genesis on down, but you are willing to blind your eyes to these contradictions.


rgb

Aharonsmith wrote: "to Dan:
That is a good question, and the answer is no I have not. I don't feel a need to. However, for the couple of years that I did not believe in God, I did look into other ways of belief tha..."

Scary. The Celestine Prophecy is a very, very scary thing to be influenced by. Again, you sound very much like a lost soul seeking any sort of anchor in a spiritual storm, easy meat for all the charlatans and hucksters and sects out there that make a living from exploiting people just like you.

TCP is, after all, pure and unadulterated bullshit. I have read it, and it is trash from cover to cover. Serious, evil trash. And just perfect for ex-heads! I can just see Redfield sitting there and writing it: "Wow, man, <toke>, like, everything is connected, y'know? <exhale a big puff of smoke> Nothing happens by accident, man, it's all part of a plan. <toke> I mean, y'see, um. <three minutes pass> Oh, wow, man! Was that cool, or what? I was watching the wall and it was flickering, and I just realized that it was the fan, man. The fan was making the light flicker! Far out! Feel the energy, man. <two more minutes> Hey, are you going to keep bogarting that bong or what?"

So you can buy into Redfield's spiritual "energy", or you can actually study the real thing. You can imagine that everything has a "cosmic purpose", or you can look at a picture of the Universe with its trillion or so galaxies, each with a trillion or so stars, most with a handful of planets and lots of other trash, and with a tiny, tiny, tiny dot -- a dot the relative size of an atom in your thumbnail to the size of your thumbnail -- on which you are a tiny, tiny dot (where a flea on the ass of an elephant would be enormous by comparison) -- labelled "you are here".

Cosmic, man.

I am reminded of the following story. Once there was an flea who thought he was real hot stuff. He had read somewhere that the flea has the largest schlong of the entire animal kingdom and was so excited by this discovery that he failed to finish the rest of the sentence and read relative to its tiny size!

He was hopping around the jungle, looking for some big animal to pork to prove his maniliness, er, flealiness upon, when who should come along but a female elephant! Well, this was just what the doctor ordered, so up hopped Mr. Flea, and proceded to make his way up to Ms. Elephant's enormous pachydermic ass.

Well, eventually he finds a pore in the Elephant's skin in about the right place and "hops" on and starts to do the dirty deed, and just as he is humping as only a flea can hump, the elephant steps on sharp rock and stumbles a bit and gives out a big, elephantine moan.

"Suffer, bitch..." cried the flea.

rgb

As I thought these things,I saw my face light up. The room seemed filled with light. At that moment, I knew that Jesus was real, I knew that there is a God, and I knew that Book of Mormon was what it claims to be.

My friends from college who ended up as born again Christians had a very strong association with the use of LSD. People who drop acid burn religious grooves in their brains. This is (I'm certain) why many religions incorporate hallucinogens -- God is an irrational, mind-altering trip, after all, especially the "experiencing" of God as you describe. Even pot can potentiate this sort of experience; it is a hallucinogen, after all, if only a mild one. If you eat it, use it mixed with other drugs or alcohol, or smoke particularly potent modern hybrids it can lead to a state that is very close to that of "religious experience". I speak from moderate experience, although I stayed a million miles away from LSD because it was and remains a pretty scary thing, carving permanent new channels through all those synapses.

So your story surprises me not at all, especially when you add a heavy layer of guilt courtesy of your parents, society, religious upbringing. And hey, drugs can cause you to waste your life -- that's why they call it "wasted". So it's not a bad thing to move on. Just remember, it is entirely possible to go completely cold turkey on the drug experience, and give up the self-induced euphoria you are calling religious experience too. Or at least scale it back so that it isn't an actual rush.

When you read this, analyze your own experiences before you reject it because I'm threatening the monkey on your back (even the one that helped you throw off the five hundred pound gorilla that was there before). The rush, that feeling of oneness with the Universe, the feeling that everything has meaning, everything is part of a pattern, nothing is accidental -- where did you feel that before? Guilt or not, why were drugs attractive? Why is listening to music, watching a light show, when stoned a near-religious experience?

If you really, truly need your monkey to keep off the gorilla, then by all means keep it, imaginary or not. If you're ready to take the next step to personal freedom (a step that as you get older will get easier and more natural) consider learning to meditate. Consider taking real charge of your own brain, by learning to acknowledge your own feelings as feelings -- states of your own mind -- that have causes and consequences.

Meditation, for whatever it is worth, its an areligious experience and practice. Christians meditate. Buddhists meditate. Muslims meditate. Atheists meditate. Deists meditate. It simply helps one regulate one's own mind, centers you, so that you can experience the now of your own existence without all the filters carefully installed by your parents, your church, your society, your goals, your past, your desires, your lusts, your fears.

Be. Right here, and right now.

Only with your feet solidly planted in the moment can you see clearly. Otherwise, you are trying to see through a fog that, when you wake up to it, turns out to be pure illusion, myth, imagination, and certainly not "the best you can do" in terms of a state of knowledge about all things.

In the meantime, try to grasp the mere possibility that your "experience" of Jesus was entirely self-induced hallucination, enabled by the fact that you'd altered the sensitivity of your brain to certain neurotransmitters by basically flooding them with artificial analogues to produce a state very similar to the state you experienced.

rgb

to Rgb
You state that Berkely is wrong and Hume is right. Why is Hume right over Berkely? Is it because he gets rid of God? I personally like Hume's view over Berkeley's, but I don't think it can be verified any more than Berkeley's can.

Sigh. C'mon, don't fun with me.

Hume in a nutshell: "We cannot be certain of anything we assert about the real world using pure logic because we cannot deduce anything about it without unprovable assumptions that cannot themselves be deduced. We cannot prove anything about it with inference because inference itself cannot be proven (and is often mistaken, at least in the short run). Therefore the stated goal of philosophy to this point -- to provide us with certain knowledge of the real world -- is impossible, and philosophy itself is basically bullshit."

Berkeley in a nutshell: "Everything in the Universe must be mind, not material. Furthermore, its material aspects are sustained by the one mind, the mind of God."

rgb in a nutshell (concerning Berkeley): "Bullshit!"

Q.E.D.

What, do I have to address each and every bullshit theory advanced by philosophers from the beginning of time and point out the explicit places where their reasoning depends on unprovable assumptions that precisely beg the question in each and every case and lead to the conclusion desired by the philosopher in question.

Hume is the "seal of the philosophers" -- the death of old-school "pure reason" Aristotelian philosophy. Post Hume there is precisely one sort of philosophy that survives -- the philosophy of uncertainty. No, we cannot prove any certain truths about the real world beyond the ongoing empirical observation of our own existences (I grant Descartes this one single point -- I find it just as difficult to doubt my own existence as he did).

So perfect truth is beyond our grasp. What is left? How about imperfect truth? How about choosing to believe the most that which -- given the evidence -- we can doubt the least? How about assembling not a "perfect truth" or "divinely revealed" or "logically necessary" worldview, but rather a worldview that satisfies the sloppy, gritty, real-world requirements of global consistency (as best as we can achieve it), of agreement with reproducible experience, of sheer common sense?

So Berkeley isn't just wrong, he is badly wrong. He's right down there with Hegel, proving that a planetoid that had already been empirically discovered could not exist using "pure reason" (those nasty time delays in the days before fast communications). With Bellarmine, lecturing Galileo on how the evidence of his own eyes were injurious to the church fathers and offensive to all of the philosophers of the day because they were in conflict with the clear statements in the infallible Bible. With Aristotle, asserting that women have a different number of teeth in their mouths then men do when he was married!

I've gotta finish my book. This all drives me mad. Aharonsmith, you are clearly a fairly bright guy. You are not stupid. So why do you not use your mind at its full capacity? Stop believing what you "want" to be true, what you were taught to be true when growing up, and take a long, hard look at why you should believe anything at all, and what you should best believe, and on what basis that belief should rest. Try to develop at least as much cynicism about what you are taught as is clearly justified by common sense.

If you get an email offering you $7,128,000.000 if help a slightly corrupt bank manager in Nairobi steal the intestate funds left by an oil magnate known to have died in a plane crash without heirs, are you going to jump right on it and send them your SSN and bank information? If not, why in the world would you jump right on the Book of Mormon, on Christianity in general? Is it just a matter of the hook not being big enough? If you got an email offering eternal life, but only if you send somebody your life savings in small bills, are you going to jump on that?

Look, buddy, you are spending far, far more on a much bigger scam than "just" your life savings. Open your eyes! Apply at least as much common sense to the problem as you would to Nigerian scam email!

rgb

Nathan, I agree with you.

But at the same time, I see the same argument can be used about whether the sun will rise tomorrow. No one can possibly know that the sun will rise tomorrow, unless they went to the future and saw it happen.

That's the thing. I never say, "I know for a fact that the sun will exist to morrow." I am pretty sure it will be based on the scientific evidence that it will not burn our for billions of years. Christians say they know god is everything they think he is all the time. I would be relatively happy if Christians would start strictly using "I believe" instead of "I know."

to Dan:
That is a good question, and the answer is no I have not. I don't feel a need to. However, for the couple of years that I did not believe in God, I did look into other ways of belief than that of LDS. Also, after my experience, I did not fully decide to go back to the LDS church. I looked into 'new age' type of stuff. I was greatly influenced by The Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield. I would highly recommend reading the book, and I am not saying that because I want to convince you of spiritual power, but rather it shows an interesting viewpoint of what has been classified as new age spirituality.

to Jill: You bring up a good point about polygamy.

I don't think that Joseph Smith got the polygamy thing wrong.

From what I understand from LDS church lessons and what not is

The LDS church sees the practice of polygamy to be something done only in times when God has commanded it. The book of mormon actually condones it. Jacob, the religious leader from the book of Mormon tells his people that they will not be like David and Solomon and have many wives, but only have one wife. Yet Abraham, Isaac and Jacob practiced polygamy and they are not considered as unrighteous people. Here is the book of mormon reference: http://scriptures.lds.org/en/jacob/2

the latter part of the chapter talks about it. verse 27 is where polygamy is directly pointed out as not allowed.

as for me, I am glad the LDS church has gotten rid of it, because I don't think I could do it. I know there are break off religions from the LDS church that practice it, but the LDS church will excommunicate any of its members that take on more than one wife.

to Nathan: from a certain point of view, what you say is true. No one can possibly know about the existence of God. (unless they saw him I guess) But at the same time, I see the same argument can be used about whether the sun will rise tomorrow. No one can possibly know that the sun will rise tomorrow, unless they went to the future and saw it happen. Maybe it will go nova tonight and swallow the earth. They can only assume it will rise, based on the empirical evidence they have received in the past.

Now, when I say that I 'know' that God lives, I base it apon my personal interpretation of experiences I have had. I am not about to say that I have based it on the scientific method or any similar type of approach to my interpretations, for the experience is completely subjective to my feelings. Anyone can interpret it as they wish.

As far as my belief in the LDS religion, it is based upon the feelings I got when I prayed and asked God if the Book of Mormon came about the way that Joseph Smith claims it did: by him translating an ancient record.

When you conducted this experiment, did you also pray to all other possible gods to ask them if their particular holy books were also divinely-inspired and inerrant? Or did you just pray to the Mormon God?

As far as my belief in the LDS religion, it is based upon the feelings I got when I prayed and asked God if the Book of Mormon came about the way that Joseph Smith claims it did: by him translating an ancient record.

OK, I swear I'm not being snarky here, but what did this conversation with god tell you about Joseph Smith's plural marriage/spiritual wifery/polygamy thing? Because I've genuinely always wanted to know how mainstream LDS revere Joseph Smith and the book he wrote, but have totally tossed aside the tenet on plural marriage (publicly, anyway). I mean, if you're going to believe that he spoke to god and Moroni and all that jazz, then did god mumble when it came to discussing marriage with Joseph so that Joseph got it wrong and thought god said "Marry whichever woman gives you an itch in your trousers, regardless of whether or not you have a wife" when god was really saying "No, you asshole, keep your pee pee for your wife only"?

I mean, if Joseph Smith got it wrong on the whole plural marriage thing, how do you know he got anything right?

To Nathan: When someone of another religion says they "know" this to be true, it is basd on their testimony or personal experience. At least that is what I mean when I say "I know that I receive personal revelation from God". Yes, it is wrong to force someone else to know what you think you know but it is ok to encourage someone follow your beliefs.

No, when they say they "know," they are lying. If you say you "know," you are lying. Why? Because you (and they) are claiming to know something that you (and they) cannot possibly know.

To Nathan: When someone of another religion says they "know" this to be true, it is basd on their testimony or personal experience. At least that is what I mean when I say "I know that I receive personal revelation from God". Yes, it is wrong to force someone else to know what you think you know but it is ok to encourage someone follow your beliefs.

to Rgb
You state that Berkely is wrong and Hume is right. Why is Hume right over Berkely? Is it because he gets rid of God? I personally like Hume's view over Berkeley's, but I don't think it can be verified any more than Berkeley's can. Maybe it is more verifiable if one comes to the table that there is no God, and as such Berkeley's argument that the reason you and I would have a similar idea of a chair if it was sitting between us in a room is because it is a forced idea from God. Berkeley philosophy is more complex, because you throw in God, and so maybe that makes Humes's philosophy more credible. But to say that all of our beliefs come from feelings of the mind cannot be verified. They could just as easily come from an unknown being. I would like to hear your thoughts on that.

I don't have time to sort through the rest, and I hope to in the future. As far as my belief in the LDS religion, it is based upon the feelings I got when I prayed and asked God if the Book of Mormon came about the way that Joseph Smith claims it did: by him translating an ancient record.

I grew up LDS, but I left the church for a few years. I saw people who didn't follow what they preached. I still had much to learn about the nature of man. Anyways, I saw them all as being brainwashed and blindly following what some guy they claimed to be the prophet told them to do.

However, I cannot forget or deny the power that I feel in my heart when I talk about the translation story of the Book of Mormon. I remember talking with a college buddy about that rediculous mormon religion, and as I talked about it, I felt that power in my heart. I shrugged it off as delusions.

Unfortunately, I had chosen to do some things that were not beneficial to my life. I got invovled in drugs and man was I miserable. I hated myself. One night, I came home from a party and I felt so despised. I remember looking in the mirror at myself and I absolutely hated what I saw. I was frustrated. I usually would look away, because I did not like what I saw. This time, I choose to stare myself down. I choose to look myself right in the eye, demanding to know who the reflection of that person was. As I stared myself down, I had an experience that I term as sacred. I remember looking myself down and then seeing who I really am. This experience happened, when I began to think about what I was taught about Jesus Christ. I was taught that you can pray to him, and he will answer. I remember asking in my mind if he really was real, or if it was a bunch of goobly gook.
As I thought these things,I saw my face light up. The room seemed filled with light. At that moment, I knew that Jesus was real, I knew that there is a God, and I knew that Book of Mormon was what it claims to be.


Was it an induced feeling that my mind overcame me with as Hume might say?

I have been accused here of not caring about reason, but rather caring about what makes me feel warm and cozy at night, and perhaps that is right. I do know this though, after that experience, after I chose to believe that Jesus is real, that feeling of lostness in my heart disappeared. Now, I'm not a mister good boy and I still struggle. It took me some time to kick the habit of the party life, but even when I was out partying and what not, I didn't feel that lostness that I felt before.

So maybe my mind did trick me. I really don't care anymore because the benefits of my belief greatly out weigh the possibility of me being wrong. It has made my life better. If I die, and just sit in my grave, then so be it. I will still have lived a better life than if I did not believe.

This reminds me that I'd been planning to write a review of Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer. (Sneak preview: I liked it.)

Aharonsmith wrote: "Rgb, I agree with you that it is wrong for someone to lie, but it is not wrong for a person to tell others what they believe in. It is not wrong from muslims to go out and convert other muslims or for christians to do the same."

I disagree, to at least some extent. I very much disagree when the "conversion" comes at the end of a Kalishnikov, or when a woman is stoned to death for being raped just in case she willingly indulged in "adultery". Both of which are everyday occurrences in the Middle East these days. I disagree more mildly when Jehovah's Witnesses show up at my door and annoy me, or when "Christians" threaten to shove oars up the ass of the guy who made up the church of the flying spaghetti monster and pushed the Kansas School Board to accept and teach its particular version of creation myth (his noodly appendage!).

What I really think is that when people invite philosophical discussion in forums such as this, it is fine to express your view. It is fine to stand up on a soapbox in a public but easily avoidable location. And otherwise, I think it is polite to leave proselytizing any brand of mythologized crap at home, however "legal" it may be to annoy people with it.

One of the things I admire about my church, the LDS religion, is that the missionaries share the beliefs and then invite the investigator to ask God if it is true. No force involved.

One of the things I find incredible about the LDS is that you seriously believe that Joseph Smith found these plates with a supposedly unknown language on them, translated them using divine inspiration, and told a story that involves Bronze Age people using a compass to navigate halfway around the globe, fight New World wars with steel swords (Bronze age, Bronze age), take Old World plants and crops and animals with them that "did exceedingly well" (no trace of which remained at the time of Columbus, and which just happened to word for word copy all sorts of lines from the New Testament, written some 600 years later than its purported date.

And then there is the open racism, both of the text (where "light skinned" good guys battle "dark skinned" bad guys) and of e.g. Brigham Young and other elders.

So hey, at your convenience, why not analyze the following hypothesis:

"Hmm, maybe -- just maybe -- Joseph Smith just made up the entire Book of Mormon on the spot, and it is nothing more than a bad, racist piece of science fiction".

One derived, I should add, from the even more racist and ethically flawed works known as the Old and New Testaments.

"What is wrong though is when a person is forced to believe. It is also wrong for a person who does not believe to lie and try to convince others that it is true."

So why do you persist in acknowledging that science contradicts the story of creation in Genesis and yet continue to assert that the Bible is "true"? Is this not a lie? If you read your own posts, are you not engaging in sophist evasions and trying to assert that truth is somehow a matter of opinion or personal philosophy instead of an objective state of the Universe that attempt to discover by examining that Universe? You speak out against "moral relativism", but you engage in physical relativism and historical relativism routinely to avoid the physical and historical evidence that the Bible is fictional and filled with indifferent philosophy mixed with myths, legends, and lies.

The physical Universe is what it is. It doesn't give a rodent's furry behind whether or not some Bronze Age "thinkers" imagined the world to have been created by some omnipotent being what somehow existed outside of the Universe (where the word "Universe" means "everything that exists", making this an openly oxymoronic belief that cannot be true by pure logic. It is not relative. Our beliefs about it are either mistake or not. We need to do our best to ensure that our beliefs are not mistaken, and therefore have to engage in a systematic process to determine the most probable, mutually consistent worldview.

The worldview pushed by the Bible is simply, and obviously, incorrect. That's all there is to it. Once that is accepted, one can start to figure out what might be true. In the meantime, knowing that it is false and still supporting it on the basis that some people gain "value" from its lies is ethically and philosophically dishonest in the very worst of senses. It is morally reprehensible. IMO, we all have a moral obligation to do our best and not be lazy or accept a known error in our search for truth.

Can you honestly say that the point of view you are advancing meets this standard, based on your entire empirical knowledge of the Universe?

rgb

Aharonsmith wrote: "Rgb, the problem I see with the phrase "no good excuse to believe the bible to be true" is the fact that their is philosophical truth in the bible."

There is philosophical truth in The Simpsons. There's rather a lot of it in Terry Pratchett's Diskworld series. The book Siddhartha is sodden with it. Even Lord of the Rings has a dollop or two. In fact the veritable definition of literature vs trash fiction is that the former has some philsophical truth to it, a message that illustrates some human aspect of life, some lesson, something beyond the merely banal or adventurous.

The difference, my friend, is that we know The Simpsons to be a work of fiction! Nobody asserts that we should "Believe in Homer" simply because he once visited 3d land and learned about higher dimensional spaces. Nobody asserts that Marge has transcendental goodness because she had Bart without actually having sex. Nobody worships the baby even though it is capable of solving complex problems in human dynamics while sucking a pacifier preverbally.

Do you see the difference? If you want to assert "the Biblew is a worthwhile work of fiction because it contains some very good philosophy mixed in with a whole lot of bad philosophy and crap" our argument would be over. We could then debate in perfect reason whether this or that particular piece of it is worthy of consideration not as perfect truth given to us by God but as ideas advanced by mere humans (like the writers of The Simpsons) that we happen to agree with, and whether
or not the really bad pieces are as bad as they seem to be. You could say "the `Jesus' character likes' the Golden Rule and so do I", I could say that I don't dislike it but I prefer the inverse Golden Rule, refrain from doing unto others what you don't want them to do unto you, as it better preserves privacy (the regular Golden Rule "require" that you try to save everybody's soul even if it annoys them, the inverse rule says don't bug people with your personal beliefs if you don't want to be bugged by theirs).

such a relative term? For example we have Berkeleys way of viewing the universe which is very contradictory to Hume's view. Both of them are true from certain perspective.

No, Berkeley is simply wrong, and Hume is correct. Berkeley is worse than wrong, he is irrelevant. His assertions are all lovely sounding -- and absolutely impossible to verify, because Hume is right. One cannot use pure reason to arrive at definite truths about the real Universe. What Hume didn't get right (although he was quite correct as far as he went) is that -- as Richard Cox and E. T. Jaynes have shown -- is that the best that we can do can be shown to be empirical scientific reasoning: Bayes/Boole probability-valued logic. References available on request, especially if you'll actually read them and work through their content. Both physicists, and if/when you take statistical mechanics you will learn that this same mathematics and logic is the basis for all statistical mechanics including the laws of thermodynamics.

I don't think that you are referring to the philosophy of the bible as being not good to believe in. From what you have said, it is the belief in the miracles and divinity of the Christ that you have a problem with.

I have a problem with both. For one thing, I know a hell of a lot more philosophy than Jefferson ever did, if only by virtue of coming later and devoting a lifetime to its study without having to e.g. be a gentleman farmer, father children with my slave women, and found a country. I love Jefferson (more than I love Jesus, truth be told, as a philosopher) but I love Newton too for similar reasons and Newton was wrong as well. Don't both name dropping with me. I don't care who said or did what; I only care what was said or done, and I assess it with reason.

Here is a short list of some of the moral imperfections of Jesus as evidenced by the mix of myth, legend and possible history in the New Testament (where the exact mix is both unknown and unknowable at this point):

* Jesus believed in the Old Testament, including Genesis. Genesis was wrong. The morality, the ethical basis for human behavior as a once perfect species that fell from grace through original sin, of Genesis is an evil, horrible, completely backwards mistake that has caused untold misery in humans without number for well over two thousand years. If Jesus were a morally perfect or even reasonably intelligent young man, he would have realized this and corrected the error by denying Genesis. Instead he directly endorsed it (possibly because it emphasized his own importance as a possible Messiah). Whether he was lying for personal gain (utterly reprehensible and entirely possible) or simply locked into the prevailing myths of his culture and unable to rise above him, this is not the mark of a brilliant moral philosopher.

* The doctrine Jesus preached was one of personal redemption (from this nonexistent original sin) by acceptance of a lie -- Jesus's own divinity. I will leave it to you to work out the ethical virtue in accepting somebody's alleged divinity instead of behaving like a good person with a slide rule. I will also refrain from pointing out the horrible, atrocious, evil historical consequences, consequences we continue to suffer today as they are available to anyone who opens a newspaper or reads a history book.

* Jesus was a racist. He called at least one gentile woman a dog, telling her that he was here only for the Jews but he might deign to help her with her troubles.

* Jesus supported slavery, or at the very least he failed to speak out against it on the many occasions he could have. Paul endorsed slavery and told slaves to be good little slaveys and obey their masters. If they hadn't, I'm certain the Roman government wouldn't have endorsed Christianity, but two wrongs don't make a right and good ends do not justify evil means.

* In fact, Jesus openly -- and I do mean openly, with a clear Commandment -- endorsed his followers to obey Old Testament Law. This law endorses slavery and beating slaves ALMOST to death. This law requires us to stone Wal Mart employees who work on Sunday and preachers who have divorced and remarried to death. This law prohibits the eating of Barbecue, fried catfish, shrimp etouffe. This law prohibits us from eating cheeseburgers, as it was generally interpreted in Jesus's day. It requires you to get your foreskin removed, if it hasn't already been. It permits "marriage by rape" with certain conditions. Its punishments are excessive, and its rules are abhorrent. If Jesus had been morally admirable (to me), he would have explicitly rejected Old Testament law in favor of a far more human and tolerant approach.

* If Jesus didn't endorse the idea of a punitive hell to which sinners are condemned, his followers (claiming to communicate what he told them) certainly did. Jesus basically threatened people with eternal punishment if they refused to accept his pronouncements without any doubt or consideration. This is not the mark of a great man or admirable moral theoligan. It is the mark of a swindler, of a weak and pusilanimous man whose arguments lack force to the point where they must be backed up the the threat of violence. If there is one single thing that makes Jesus far less admirable than say, Buddha, it is this. Buddha did not demand believe or threaten retribution. He merely pointed out a path for people to try for themselves. Jesus passed on secret knowledge, deliberately obscured, and demanded compliance or else.

Yuk.

rgb

I agree with you that it is wrong for someone to lie, but it is not wrong for a person to tell others what they believe in.

Aren't all of these people of different religions lying when they say they know what they believe is true? I have never had a major problem with someone who says he believes something is true. However, that is not typically the case. Religious people tend to say they know what they believe is the truth and that is a lie.

Some other thing I want to add:

Rgb, I agree with you that it is wrong for someone to lie, but it is not wrong for a person to tell others what they believe in. It is not wrong from muslims to go out and convert other muslims or for christians to do the same. What is wrong though is when a person is forced to believe. It is also wrong for a person who does not believe to lie and try to convince others that it is true.

Religion has used both methods to convert people to their way of thinking. Force is wrong. But there is nothing wrong with missionaries going out and telling people about their beliefs and asking them if they want to join their faith. One of the things I admire about my church, the LDS religion, is that the missionaries share the beliefs and then invite the investigator to ask God if it is true. No force involved.

Rgb, the problem I see with the phrase "no good excuse to believe the bible to be true" is the fact that their is philosophical truth in the bible.

But to say there is such a thing as 'philosophical truth' is kind of a wierd statement, because what does truth actually mean? I mean can we really know if one philosophy is more true than another, since philosophy is such a relative term? For example we have Berkeleys way of viewing the universe which is very contradictory to Hume's view. Both of them are true from certain perspective.

The way that we can tell if a philosophy is 'more true' than another is by looking at the benefits received from it. We both agree that the golden rule is beneficial to society. I actually did some studying on Jefferson and found out that he wrote in a letter that he thought the teachings of Jesus Christ was the most beneficial moral code than any other teachings found. I don't have the quote with me, I will try to get it, for it is pretty profound.

I don't think that you are referring to the philosophy of the bible as being not good to believe in. From what you have said, it is the belief in the miracles and divinity of the Christ that you have a problem with.

Of course I am biased, for I do believe that Christ is divine, but even if I was of another faith, I would still say there are good reasons for people to beleive in it. I think that there are good reasons for people to put a belief in diety, and I think you do to, for if you are a diest, you believe in some sort of a creator. I think that there are good excuses for people to believe in the qua ran and good excuses for people to follow confuscious's writings and there are good excuses for native americans to believe that animals and the land will talk to them as they go on their vision quests. Those particular faiths aren't for me, but I see a good reason to believe.

It is true that the bible is full of contradictions, and I smiled when I read your comment about schizophrenia. One will go crazy if they literally believe everything the bible says, for there is no reason to it! One thing to note is the bible has been changed time and time again over the years. It has many misinterpretations, done by accident and sometimes on purpose. It has fallen into the hands of bad men, who used it as a tool to control the masses. So I take most of it with a grain of salt.

I do believe in Christ's miracles, despite the fact that physics shows it as at best a very high improbability. I think that it can be explained by a natural process, but we have not figured it out yet. I believe the power of the mind is a very unknown thing to the sciences and I suspect that it has the power to perform miraculous things. I think that is the key to performing these miracles that Christ says comes from faith. If you have not read it, I would recommend reading the Celestine Prophecy. It talks about the idea of Christ's miracles being done by being in the higher self.

It is true that the bible has been used in the doing of bad things. The same has been done in the name of science, such as social darwinism. These things are what they are but I think the real truth is that men decide to to good or evil with them.

Aharonsmith,

Dan wrote this
You're a moron. You didn't hit a nerve, you just made me realize you have zero logic skills and near to zero intelligence. Therefore, moron.

No I didn't. Nate wrote that.

You have failed several times to see my argument and I don’t know how to spell it out any more for you.

I haven't failed even once to see your argument. I see it and reject it. Your argument is that if believing in something benefits you, you should believe it to be true, even if it is demonstrably false. Several of us have stated that this is illogical and unethical, and have repeatedly clarified our position that there is no evidence to support biblical claims. You seem to be the one who is not understanding.

I even tried to use your word of “positive benefit” to explain. That is a word you yourself criticized as being redundant. A very moronic thing to do.

"Positive benefit" is not my word. It's not a word at all; it's two words. And it is redundant. How is pointing this out moronic?

In other words, according to him.. for us to be a free people, we have to follow the golden rule. (kind of scary to think about) The golden rule is the message of the bible.

Post hoc ergo proctor hoc. You may as well say that both the Bible and the Constitution were written using complete sentences, therefore the Constitution is based on the Bible. The Golden Rule predates Jesus by centuries if not millennia.

Your claims about the founding fathers are hardly accurate or honest, but even if they were, it wouldn't make anything in the bible true.

Abolitionists during the 18th and 19th century used the bible to denounce slavery. Yeah its true and horrible that others have used it to support it. But the fact is that it was used to denounce it as well.

This simply demonstrates that the Bible is a bunch of incoherent nonsense that can mean anything to anyone, anywhere anytime. The fact that sometimes people are simultaneously good and Christian hardly proves that any of it is true.

Rgb said there was no good excuse to believe the bible to be true.

I say there is since it has benefitted people.

The returning argument is no, because it is not true. There may be benefits from believing it to be true, but since it is not true there is no good excuse to it being true.

My response is that with the bible it is different. The bible teaches a philosophy and in my opinion, philosophy is relative. We all have our own versions of it, we all have our beliefs that we cling to. The philosophy a person follows could be true or not.

Well, since physics is nothing but natural philosophy and since a great deal of the errors in the Bible derive from their direct conflict with the non-relative truths inferred from nature, I foresee a great deal of schizophrenia in your future, trying to juggle a sense in which Genesis is true, somehow, sort of, as you take courses in cosmology that directly conflict with its account line by line, word by word. But suit yourself.

We still disagree on something very fundamental. I personally consider deliberately lying to be one of the most unethical acts a sentient being can perform. I'm not talking about telling the minor social lies -- I see no particular reason to tell a person who is fat and ugly for reasons that are utterly beyond their control and who is unhappy about it "Hey, you are fat and ugly" or any of the other things Twain (IIRC) satirized. I'm talking about big lies, lies about the way everything works, lies about fundamentals.

I see no particular reason for you to consistently argue with this position. After all, is not Satan known as the "father of lies"? Does not evil live in the dark, ashamed, hiding behind a web of lies? Is not truth a bright light that cleanses the soul, even when it is a painful truth (it isn't completely clear that even social lies are justified ethically, but that is too trivial to argue about here)? Do we not become angry when people lie to us "for our own good" and we later discover the truth; didn't you feel just a little bit of anger on the day you finally realized that Santa was a complex lie, even as a child?

So honestly, and this isn't name calling (hating the sin and not the sinner and all that) I find your continued assertions that it is OK, somehow to lie about the truth of the Bible when we know it is false, to lie about its degree of reliability and the degree to which we should doubt the simple factualness of even its bare historical accounts, to lie about the massive empirical evidence that contradict entire blocks of it, to lie about the moral reprehensibility of e.g. the entire Old Testament and to pretend somehow that Jesus, who explicitly endorsed the Old Testament did not commit a morally reprehensible act in so doing that in and of itself disqualifies him by the very arguments of the Christian apologists as any sort of deity, all of that is simply despicable if you indeed know the truth, know better, but continue to promote this pack of lies.

Truth is not relative. Our understanding of truth may be imperfect and subject to constant correction, but truth itself is not a matter of personal belief, it is the objective reality to which personal belief is directed.

Here's your ultimate problem, and how you solve it is up to you up to and including the deliberate schizophrenia you are inducing in yourself.

In your studies of science you have learned and continue to learn a standard criterion for discerning truth, given the sum totality of your knowledge and experience (which includes all of the evidence and reason accumulated over the entire period of recorded history). That standard is the basis for everything you learn in physics. There are reasons for every single thing you are taught in a physics class to be considered probable truth.

In no case are you taught things that are supposedly true "because Newton said so". We accord nobody the status of "divinely inspired source of truth" because the very same reason we use to figure out what best to believe tells us there is no such thing. If you do not accept these precepts of knowledge, you will be an appallingly poor physicist, prone to believe wacko theories without evidence just because the theorist is persuasive or convinces you that they have "special" knowledge about The Universe, or because their theory seems somehow to tie in with your prior ideas of God or the like.

On the other hand, you are giving special prior divinely inspired preternatural holy ghost given status to the writings of certain humans. You hold those writings to be exempt from the rules you use to address matters of fact about the real world. You don't apply rules at all to determine their truth or falsehood; you accept them as a priori truth. This is perfectly inconsistent with the scientific criterion that there is nothing that can be accepted a priori as truth about the real Universe.

As is always true in axiomatic reasoning, an inconsistent worldview can be used to "prove" anything you like. Once you admit an open contradiction into any theory, you can prove any assertion as a "theorem" of your premises. All this means, of course, is that the worldview is false and utterly useless as knowledge, because you can (of course) prove the opposite of any assertion as a theorem of the same premises.

For example, resurrection of a truly dead body is thermodynamically impossible in modern physics. You can do the computation yourself, when you learn statistical mechanics, except that you won't have to -- it takes around five seconds to go "Wow, that would never happen" once you understand why e.g. all the air molecules in a room don't go over into a corner and form a blob of liquid air and leave you gasping in a vacuum.

Ultimately, you will have to face the choice. Either you believe the laws of physics and mathematics govern the time evolution of the Universe (which is then an ordered place, subject to natural law) or else that visible Universe is whimsical, apt to be altered without warning in unpredictable ways that violate natural law and common sense. And you have to believe the latter in spite of all evidence to the contrary -- the absence of one single reproducible exception to the rule of law.

Anecdotal evidence is not acceptable in a court of law. It is doubly unacceptable in science, where if a truth is not reproducible and accessible to everyone, if a truth is in any sense "special knowledge" available only to the privileged few or secret knowledge passed on to trusted disciples, it isn't considered truth at all. Physics is taught and understood in the plain light of day, as truth always should be.

So which will it be in your life? Truth that you can count on, truth that can be verified, truth that doesn't depend on who is telling the tale, truth that is in no sense secret -- or lies?

You choose. I already have.

rgb

Dan wrote this
You're a moron. You didn't hit a nerve, you just made me realize you have zero logic skills and near to zero intelligence. Therefore, moron.

Pretty sure I wrote that, not Dan.

If that is what you think, fine. You are one as well.

Nice comeback.

That is a word you yourself criticized as being redundant.

I didn't criticize anything as being redundant.

You have failed several times to see my argument and I don’t know how to spell it out any more for you. I even tried to use your word of “positive benefit” to explain.

I guess you didn't read my post. You are more of an idiot than I thought. I explained that if you change what you originally said to what you are now claiming (that some people benefit from false belief), I agree with you.

The whole point of Jesus’s teachings is the Golden Rule.

That was his whole point? I guess he wasted his time coming to earth then, because Confucius said the same thing long before Jesus.

Lots of things to respond to. I wasn't able to get to them all, but here is some of it.

Dan wrote this
You're a moron. You didn't hit a nerve, you just made me realize you have zero logic skills and near to zero intelligence. Therefore, moron.
If that is what you think, fine. You are one as well. You have failed several times to see my argument and I don’t know how to spell it out any more for you. I even tried to use your word of “positive benefit” to explain. That is a word you yourself criticized as being redundant. A very moronic thing to do.
RGB, I disagree with your argument that the bible did not inspire the Enlightenment era. The printing press came about and the bible was the most published book of the time. The Protestant movement was brought forth in an attempt to reform the church. Why did people want to reform it? Because they read the bible and realized they weren’t following it.
The founding fathers used the precepts of the bible in creating the constitution.

Rgb, I am really surprised that you would label yourself as a diest. A diest is a person who believes in a supreme being. Either you are not fully aware of the definition or you have completely contradicted yourself in your accusations about those who believe in God.

The whole point of Jesus’s teachings is the Golden Rule. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. The fathers called this type of belief system virtue. Montesquie, when studying the governments of the world determined that this type of behavior from the citizenry is necessary for a republic to thrive. According to him, once that starts to go, the republic will eventually fall. In other words, according to him.. for us to be a free people, we have to follow the golden rule. (kind of scary to think about) The golden rule is the message of the bible. Sure there is a lot of crazy weird stuff in there, but the main focus of christianity is the golden rule.

John Locke bases his philosophy on it.
In Second Treatise of Government, Chapter 2 section 5, he makes reference to the Golden Rule. He continues in section 6 to say that we are all the property of God and that is why we cannot hurt each other. I brought over the quote:

“The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one: and reason, which is that law,
teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and
independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or
possessions: for men being all the workmanship of one omnipotent, and
infinitely wise maker; all the servants of one sovereign master, sent into
the world by his order, and about his business; they are his property, whose
workmanship they are, made to last during his, not one another's pleasure:”(Second Treatise chapter 2 section 6)

According to Locke the whole reason we cannot hurt each other is because we are the servants of God, created by him and are his property. The idea of us being servants of God is central to the teaching of Jesus. “about his business” is a direct quote from the bible. Locke obviously was inspired by the bible when writing out his philosophy, the same philosophy that Jefferson used in writing the Declaration of Independence. Some interesting points: Jefferson was accused of copying Locke when he wrote the Delaration. Also: When the famous words of the declaration were written: “We hold these truths to be self evident…” Jefferson originally wrote the words “sacred and undeniable.” Franklin and Adams reviewed the document together and Franklin changed “sacred and undeniable” to “self evident” for the previous sounded too based on God.

While Jefferson may have been against the idea of a savior (and some of his later writings he talked about a savior) He was still greatly inspired by ideas that came from the bible.

The founding fathers saw religion as an essential element for a republic to survive, for they saw it as the teacher of morality.

The founding fathers believed in a Supreme Being. They thought of it as being self-evident, and they used Descartes and Locke’s arguments as the basis its self evident.

RGB, I don’t know much about the quakers, just from what I have learned about William Penn and his house hold by Philadelphia. I would like to see your source about them rejecting the bible. I find them as a very fascinating group of people where were years a head of their time.

Abolitionists during the 18th and 19th century used the bible to denounce slavery. Yeah its true and horrible that others have used it to support it. But the fact is that it was used to denounce it as well.
I would like to write more in response to the arguments presented, but I don’t have the time. So I am getting what I can.

Chris, you talk about being delusional for having an imaginary friend, and yeah, if it helps you to have one and you aren’t hurting someone else in the process of course then by all means, that is a good reason for you to believe in it. The last thing I am going to do is tell you that it is not good, or an evil myth.

I am glad to know that you are against social darwinism. That is a result of people just believing (or following) something because it is real. I am arguing that it is good to put belief in something that we may not know if true or not, but still gives us postive results. I am glad to hear RGB acknowledges the idea of rights coming from God as a good thing, although in his opinion not true. It is that type of thinking I am advocating.

Well said, Dan!

But "Blintork"? I thought the god's name was Zul, and he is due to manifest as the Stay-Puf Marshmellow man...

Otherwise I have very little to add to your concise and precise deconstruction. Oh, well, maybe ONE little thing, more as a comment -- remember in Religulous, Bill Maher's remark when he is interviewing the Jewish Christian shopkeeper that sells the magnetic Jesus's that will ride on the dashboard of your car (for a price)? Asked why he converted and became Christian, it's because he went to a party and was thirsty and wanted a glass of water, and there wasn't any. Somebody told him to stick his cup out of the window and pray to Jesus for rain, so sort of as a joke he did, and it started raining! Raining hard! Why, it would have filled his cup right up in half an hour or so!

Bill's comment was something like: "Are you kidding? This was a miracle? Hey, you know, sometimes IT RAINS. You look outside and it is raining, or starts raining. You don't think that it maybe, just possibly, was just raining? You know, this is one thing that I find really astounding. Christians have a remarkably low threshold for miracles. A burnt piece of toast. Rain."

In the meantime, the guy he's roasting is looking more and more uncomfortable, as he realizes that it really was pretty silly to believe that Jesus rearranged the ENTIRE UNIVERSE -- ahead of time, using his preternatural knowledge -- just so that it would start raining right as he stuck that cup out of the window, a rain that couldn't possibly have filled his cup with enough water to actually drink unless he stood there, getting soaked, for thirty minutes or an hour or a day or a week. An inch an hour is a hard rain, an inch a half hour is a deluge downpour that only happens in e.g. hurricanes or tropical storms, and it would probably require 2-3 inches of rain to fill your average drinking cup to not-quite full. Do the math.

The same math nobody ever does for Noah's flood. 30000 feet x 12 inches = 360,000 inches. 40x1440 = 57,600 minutes in forty days. 360,000/60,000 = 6, take a way a bit for land mass projection and it has to rain roughly 5 inches PER MINUTE on EVERY SQUARE FOOT OF THE PLANET to lift sea level over Mount Everest.

Now that's a miracle! What is a bigger miracle that a God that could make this happen, could create all of the water out of nothingness and make it all disappear again (as it damn sure isn't around today) couldn't find a better solution to the "human" problem and all of those son's of God that were misbehaving than to use brute force and mass extinction and death of innocent animals and a truly absurd method of preserving species.

Of course, this God is repeatedly described as just loving it when people killed and burned not kittens but sheep, lambs, doves, cattle, and possibly even humans in sacrifice to Him. Sacrifice well, he indeed did give you what you want. Keys miraculously are found (this NEVER happens without God's help). Rain miraculously occurs one night when you've been drinking heavily. Just don't want your relatives to be cured of terminal cancer, or want to regrow a limb, because that kind of miracle -- or any other "miracle" that couldn't have entirely plausibly happened naturally -- is every seen to occur.

Or (kid's, don't try this at home!) go find a lamb. Yeah, a nice, cute, stumblefooted newborn lamb, all cute and everything. Build an altar. Cut the cute little lamb's throat, and ritually splatter the blood on and about the altar (instructions on request courtesy of the Old Testament, and don't omit any key rituals, see Indiana Jones!). Then split the lamb up the middle and hack out its ribcage. Finally (and I am not making this up) wave the ribcage, in ritual fashion, at the sky.

This is called a "wave sacrifice" and God loves it! And the best part is you get to roast the ribs afterwards and eat them! Or rather, the priest does. You don't. The other approved method is to throw the whole lamb carcass onto a big fire burning on your (hopefully stone) blood spattered altar so that the smell of burning meat goes up to heaven. God simply adores overdone immolated lamb chop smoke, the way some of his neighboring competing Gods liked the smell of tasty roast Baby. He'd make covenants with you and everything, if only you burn or wave enough recently and ritually slaughtered small clean sacrificial mammals in the general direction of the sky (because everybody knows that God is OVERHEAD even though the earth is a ball, so overhead for Abraham is pretty much underneath my feet as I sit here typing this.

I personally would rather spill a libation. It's just as likely to lead to a truly miraculous reward, like finding a parking place right next to the store even though it is a busy shopping day and the entire lot is jammed full or slowing down right before you round the curve and see the speed trap on the far side. It's definitely a lot easier on small furry mammals and turtledoves, doesn't require a burning permit, keeps PETA picketers off of your front yard, and gives you a religious excuse to wander around with a class of wine in your hand.

Evoe!

rgb

Aharonsmith,

Religion has given us a foundation for our morals and ethics.

No it hasn't, and this is easy to demonstrate. The Bible is chock full of immorality. Slavery, rape, murder, etc., are everywhere in the Bible. If this was the foundation of our morality, then we would think all of these things were acceptable, but we do not. We are able to judge the Bible and separate the good from the bad; so, we must have some other source of morality that allows us to judge the Bible.

I'm not going to address your "finding the keys" miracle, because it's a clear instance of confirmation bias, and as an experiment for proving anything it's horribly designed.

Did you know that the basis of alcohol annonymous is that there is a higher power?

Yes, I know that, and I think it's despicable. To prey on people in need of real help and foist religion on them is reprehensible.

I am not arguing that the bible is true or not.

Then, a few sentences later you say:

RGB says there is no good reason to believe the bible to be true. I say otherwise and I use the evidence that it has bettered people's lives as a result of their belief in it.

Make up your mind! To believe something is to hold it to be true. As there is no evidence that the Bible is true, and there is plenty of evidence contradicting its supposed truth, there is no reason to believe it is true. Being "useful" and being "true" are not the same thing. No one has argued that faith in make-believe has never helped anyone; we are simply saying that there is no evidence that it is true, and there is no reason to hold things to be true if they lack evidence.

Let's say that instead of praying to God to find your keys, you killed a kitten as a sacrifice to God, and then you found your keys. Would this be a good reason to believe that animal sacrifice is good, that there is a god who gives you what you want if you sacrifices animals to it?

But the thing about God is my claim of him being real is just as valid as your claim that he is not.

No it isn't. Your claim of him being real is the same is my claim that there are invisible unicorns living in your attic. Neither of us has any proof. Absent proof, the default position is to believe that something does not exist; otherwise, we'd be required to believe anything anyone could think up.

It is the same process used in science. Scientists use what works best to progress and advance our society. Newton's laws, although false, are still used today in solving phyics problems. Why? Because it gets you a credible answer.

No it isn't. Your method is to say, "This makes me feel better, so it must be true." This is the opposite of science. For certain calculations, you can treat the Earth as being flat, round certain constants, use simplified equations, etc., and still get usable results. This does not prove that the Earth is flat, and no one believes that the Earth is flat based on this method.

They seek for the most probable explanation not because it is right but because it is the most beneficial way to explain phenomenom and is congruent with the evidence.

No they don't. "Beneficial" has nothing to do with it. Consistent with the evidence is the only thing that matters. In the case of the Bible, there is no virtually no consistency with the evidence.

Now as RGB has pointed out, there have been bad things done in the name of God. Maybe what we can conclude is that for some it is a good reason to believe and for some it is not a good reason. But this doesn't cancel out the benefits that have come to society from it.

Of course it cancels it out. If you're defending religion on the basis of its benefit, the only thing that matters is its net benefit. If I create a vaccination that inoculates 20% of the people who use it against some disease, but kills 25% of the people who use it, could I say that the vaccination is ultimately good, because the deaths don't cancel out the successes? Of course not. And if I marketed this vaccination as being beneficial despite knowing about its fatal side-effects, I'd go to prison. By your logic, it doesn't matter that religion is almost certainly the single biggest cause of warfare, genocide, discrimination and oppression in human history, because it helped you find your keys, maybe.

You are saying that the definition of 'positive benefit' is different than 'good reason' They mean the same thing.

No they don't. When was the last time you saw a health product marketed as providing lots of "good reasons?" Also, "positive benefit" is redundant: there's no such thing as a negative benefit.

Use the theory of evolution as your basis of morality (social darwinism) and see how far that progresses society. No thanks!

Use the Bible as your basis of morality - the whole Bible, every last word - and see how far that takes society. I predict lots more war and genocide, the return of slavery, the subjugation of women, etc. No thanks!

no evidence to show God exists? Plenty! Everything had to come from something. Where did all the stuff come from?

If everything had to come from somewhere, then God had to come from somewhere. If God can be exempt from this criterion, then so can the universe. We have never witnessed an act of creation, so we have no reason to believe that one is possible. Basically, you're saying that it's impossible for the impossible to not have happened. Not a sound logical argument.

I also base it on personal experience, for when I pray, I get answers to prayers.

This method of "proof" would be soundly rejected by any scientist for any number of reasons. First of all, have you kept track of every single time you prayed, and determined the percentage of the time you received the desired outcome? And have you also kept track of the number of times you've wanted something and not prayed for it, and still gotten it? Have you randomly chosen when to pray or not pray, in order to prevent data collection bias? Have you compared these percentages using statistical methods? Have you prayed to all possible gods during these experiments - again, randomly chosen - in order to prevent confirmation bias, including the thousands of ancient gods in which no one still believes, and hypothetical gods that could exist but are not (yet) believed in on Earth? I highly doubt it.

So prove to me that God does not exist. You can't man, and thats the whole point. It is relative.

I'm not making a claim. The burden of proof is not on me to prove or disprove your claims.

Let's try it this way: I claim that there is a god named Blintork who lives in the clouds and has chosen me as his conduit to the human world. In the year 2011 he will begin destroying the human race in a horrible, painful way, unless you send me $100,000 so that I might begin construction of a temple to honor him. Prove me wrong.

Aharonsmith wrote: "So what is wrong with someone who believes in him (or her. Nothing. Let's look at the results of the belief and then determine whether it is good or not. If the results are good, then there is a good reason to do it. Its that simple..."

That makes me feel much better. You see, I have a friend called Fred. He's 10 inches tall and sits on my shoulder. He gives me lots of advice and makes me feel better. He helps me at work and even helps me with my family. Overall the results are good.

For a minute I thought I was delusional for having an invisible friend.


Aharonsmith wrote: "Use the theory of evolution as your basis of morality (social darwinism) and see how far that progresses society. No thanks! "


Double wow. Just how does the truthfulness of Evolution lead you to believe it should be used to base a society on? True / false, why would anyone want to do that? How we came to be and how we should organize our societies are two entirely different things. We have the ability (thanks to Evolution) to rise above it so to speak.

Actually thats one of the more beautiful ideas that makes me feel inspired. That for all the life that came before us, its we here and now that understand the process (not fully yet) and can rise above the life and death battle that nature uses to scrutinize each species.


Seems like you choose to believe what makes you feel good as opposed to whats true. Its a wonder you left Santa behind.

Aharonsmith wrote: "There is irrefutable evidence to show that people who believe in the bible have benefitted much to society. I can't believe that RGB, one who claims to be a scientist makes the claim that there is..."

Ah, so much to comment on, so little time. I'll really try to be terse, although I'll probably fail.

During the dark ages common people were not reading the bible. The break off from the church happened because people began to read the bible.

During the dark ages and most of the middle ages and quite a bit of "modern times", the common people of the world could not read. So yeah, I guess that is true. It took the invention of the printing press -- an Enlightenment invention -- for there to be Bibles out there for them to read. Before that, all Bibles were handwritten, error-spattered copies of handwritten, error-spattered copies of handwritten...(iterate for 1200 or so years) and because they were handmade, they cost a fortune in human time in an era where one had to work from sunup to sundown just to stay alive.

All that "the common people" knew about the Bible is what they were taught or told by their "betters", which they had to believe and affirm on pain of torture or death should they question it.

The enlightenment era was sparked because people began reading the bible.

You must be living in a fantasy world, not the one whose history I have studied. This is categorically false. Have you ever actually studied the Enlightenment? Do you even understand who we are talking about here? Let me help:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Bacon

A monk who advocated the use of mathematics and empiricism, and (sigh) was imprisoned and persecuted by his own Church as a consequence.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Bac...

Very probably a closet homosexual (homosexuality being a capital crime at the time), inventor of the scientific method, and one of the people that might have written Shakespeare's plays (if Shakespeare did not write them). He was not an atheist, but neither was he a theist, and in any event both of these Bacon's merely ushered in the Enlightenment, setting the stage for the great discoveries by:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolaus_Co...

and

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_Gal...

and

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes_Ke...

and

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newto...

In no case was the work of these people inspired by the Bible; in every case their conclusions and methodology systematically contradicted it. Most of them were persecuted to a greater or lesser extent because of this conflict.

If you prefer the non-scientific part of this era, Hobbes, Hume, Locke, Jefferson -- all of them except for Locke were in more or less continual conflict with theistic religion (and Locke advocated the separation of Church and State!). Descartes also deserves honorable mention for his non-Biblically inspired invention of rationalism, which failed in its goal of proving God's existence and in the way that it failed inspired Hume to prove that God's existence cannot be proven either with pure reason or empirically.

People were inspired by its words, and sought for a better society. People came to the new world, to start this new way of life. Pilgrims came to america, to try something different, something better, and used the bible as their guide.

Or rather, they came to America to avoid being tortured and executed for heresy by the Church, and when they arrived in short order tortured and persecuted people for heresy according to their own believes. Have you actually got a clue about the history of protestantism? Cromwell? William of Orange? Martin Luther? Europe was wall to wall war, much of it religious war between the Catholic Church and countries that subscribed to Catholicism and the various Protestant heresies and the kings and countries that subscribed to them. A small sect viewed as heretics by both either fled or burned. Alive, more often than not.

Pennsylvania became a haven for quakers, a pacifist group of people who using the teachings of Jesus as their guide, to love and help each other, built a society that was hundreds of years ahead of its time.

They used some of the teachings of Jesus. They were actually one of the first religious groups to reject the Bible as an inerrant religious scripture. According to the Quakers, God speaks to everybody, and you don't need no stinkin' Bible or to be a Christian to hear Him. They have no ministers -- all Quakers are equal and no one is more qualified to speak for God than anyone else. They use reason, not a paper bag, to work out God's message. Quakers refuse to bow to any man, be they Pope or King. I like Quakers. You can be an atheist Quaker or a deist Quaker, and other Quakers don't care. I don't feel called to attend meetings of Friends or I'd call myself a deist Quaker, but labels like this really don't mean much either way.

They denounced slavery, because of the bible.

No, they denounced slavery because they knew in their hearts that slavery was bad. The denounced it in spite of the Bible which openly endorses it in both the Old Testament and the New.

They lived in harmony with the natives, because of the bible.

Again, you don't understand Quakers -- it wasn't because of the Bible. The Bible provides nothing but examples of conquering tribes of heathens and enslaving the ones you leave alive, preferrably young female virgins. The proper model for Biblical conquest of the New World was that of Spain: Good Catholics, they enslaved all the local Indians, burning alive the ones that failed to convert to Catholicism, taking their wealth, taking their land, destroying their culture. That's Biblical conquest. The Quaker model is anti-Biblical, based on personal revelation (a.k.a. secular compassion and common sense).

Another obvious and awe inspiring great thing that the bible has brought to us is the idea of liberty. The founding fathers of this nation, believed that we are endowed with inalienable rights, given to us from God. We have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and the very foundation of these rights is based on the idea that there is a God to give them to us.

Again, this displays only proof positive that you haven't actually read any of the writings of Hobbes, Locke, Jefferson (espe.cially Jefferson!) or Hume. None of these ideas are based on the Bible. Show me one word in the Bible about "liberty", or the right to do as you please as long as you don't hurt anyone. The Bible is, from the beginning to the end, a diatribe justifying the removal of liberty and choice from its adherents.

In the Old Testament this is so obvious as to be inescapable. Would you care to practice "hermeneutics" for me to show how stoning people for breaking the Sabbath, how raping young female virginal captives, how dashing babies brains out happily, how ripping babies from their mother's slashed open bellies is all about "liberty"?

In fact, the words of the atheist/deist Jefferson about Life, Liberty and Happiness were not from the Bible, and God was invoked only to give them weight, to trigger that part of the brain that judges "rightness". They conflicted with the Bible then, and do now. And they are pure inventions -- not reality. They define what we want to accept as right, not because it is divinely inspired, but because it makes sense.

You might want to read:

http://www.beliefnet.com/resourcelib/doc...

It's free online. Note well that Jefferson cut out all the miracles and assertion of Jesus's divinity. What's left is the story of a moderately good, mortal, non-divine man and curiously, is remarkably close to what is in the earliest manuscripts.

rgb

You're a moron. You didn't hit a nerve, you just made me realize you have zero logic skills and near to zero intelligence. Therefore, moron.

I am not the one redefining words "good reason" and "positive benefit" don't mean the same thing. This is why rgb and I were arguing with you. Neither one of us ever claimed that people have not benefited from believing things that are not true. If you want to change your argument to "People sometimes benefit from believing things that are not true" fine, but don't pretend that we were disagreeing with that argument. If you had stated your argument in proper terms in the first place, you would not have received dissenting viewpoints.

Aharonsmith, as best I can tell, doesn't care about evidence. He's only about what makes him feel warm and cozy at night. There's no reasoning with that, because reason isn't involved.

Jill, you greatly misunderstand me. I care greatly about evidence. I have plenty of personal evidence that what I believe about God is true. For you it may be otherwise. That is fine. Believe what you want. I'm not telling you what to believe in. I am saying that if there is postive benefits from believing in something to be true, then by all means, believe in it.

However I do get a point from your arguments and that is we should not try to force our beliefs on others. Just cuz I have all this personal evidence that God is real doesn't discredit whatever evidence you have in your belief system. But man, quit going on and on about the bible and religion like it is the worst thing that has ever happened. Maybe it was a bad thing for you, that is fine, whatever. But don't tell me it is evil or has destroyed humanity for it clearly hasn't.

You're a moron if you can't understand the difference between what rgb is saying and what you are saying.

Looks like I struck a nerve. Simmer down dude. You look bad when you start calling your opponent names.


No, it isn't a good reason to believe. There is a positive benefit I receive from believing it, but I do not have a good reason to believe bees actually have rabies.

You are redifining words. You are saying that the definition of 'positive benefit' is different than 'good reason' They mean the same thing. But we will use your word then. There are many many positive benefits that people have recieved from believing the bible to be true.

"If the results are good, then there is a good reason to do it. Its that simple."

Wow, I never thought anyone could have this bad of an understanding of logic.

There is no reason to argue anymore about this if you see that as bad logic. I guess you would say that just as long as it is real, then it is a good reason to do it. Use the theory of evolution as your basis of morality (social darwinism) and see how far that progresses society. No thanks!

no evidence to show God exists? Plenty! Everything had to come from something. Where did all the stuff come from? I also base it on personal experience, for when I pray, I get answers to prayers. Sure the athiest can say that it was always there and it randomly moved into where it is today, but his explanation is no better or worse than mine. So prove to me that God does not exist. You can't man, and thats the whole point. It is relative.

No, the poor logic is you thinking that a positive benefit is evidence that the original assumption is true. It isn't.

I bolded your statement because this is NOT what I am saying at all. I am not saying ANYTHING about something being true or not. I am saying that there are good reasons (oh wait I'm sorry- positive benefits) in believing the bible to be true because it has (here is where you are losing me) BENEFITED others. Whether it is true or not is irrelevant. It is still a postive benefit to that person is it not?

Aharonsmith, as best I can tell, doesn't care about evidence. He's only about what makes him feel warm and cozy at night. There's no reasoning with that, because reason isn't involved.

There are people who have benefitted society who don't believe in the bible sure. It doesn't prove or disprove anything.

Okay. So why the hell would you bring up the point that people who believe in the Bible benefited society? That doesn't prove or disprove anything either. You are not too smart. You essentially proved my entire point.

I say otherwise and I use the evidence that it has bettered people's lives as a result of their belief in it.

You're a moron if you can't understand the difference between what rgb is saying and what you are saying. Until you get it, I can't help you. I mean, Jesus Christ, it isn't that hard to understand.

If you believe that bees have rabies and you don't go near them, while this is not true, it is a good reason because you save yourself from getting stung.

No, it isn't a good reason to believe. There is a positive benefit I receive from believing it, but I do not have a good reason to believe bees actually have rabies.

If the results are good, then there is a good reason to do it. Its that simple.

Wow, I never thought anyone could have this bad of an understanding of logic.

There is much evidence to show that there are good reasons to believe in God.

No, there isn't. What is the evidence?

But to say "no good reason" is a falsity and poor logic.

No, the poor logic is you thinking that a positive benefit is evidence that the original assumption is true. It isn't.

Your first sentence doesn't really make sense, but if I am to assume you mean either that people who believe in the Bible have benefited society or that people who believe in the Bible have benefited from their belief, all I can say is......so freaking what? People who don't believe in the Bible have benefited society. So does that prove the Bible isn't true?


My sentence makes sense. The whole point I am making is that there is a good reason to believe in the Bible, for society has benefited by those who do beleive in it. I am not saying that you or I or anyone has to believe in it. I am stating that we (humankind) have been benefited by people who have beleived in it.

To make such an absolute claim that there is no good reason to believe the bible to be true is just bad reasoning.

There are people who have benefitted society who don't believe in the bible sure. That is fine. I am not arguing that the bible is true or not. You can think 'so freaking what' to the point I am making, but that point is the evidence I am speaking of that shows that there are 'good reasons' to believe in it.


rgb never said that people can't benefit from believing in the Bible. What he said was that there is no good reason to actually believe the Bible is true. Which there is not. To say someone benefits from believing it doesn't mean there is evidence what they believe is actually true. I might believe bees have rabies so I won't go near them. This might benefit me in that I will never be stung, but it doesn't actually mean that bees have rabies. The fact that some belief may benefit someone does not make the belief true.

RGB says there is no good reason to believe the bible to be true. I say otherwise and I use the evidence that it has bettered people's lives as a result of their belief in it. Perhaps they may have found another way to better their life than believing in the bible. That is fine. I don't really care what you choose to believe in or not. If it is benefitting you, then there is a good reason to believe in it. Come on, even you can see the logic in that.

Thanks for giving such a good example of a good reason for someone to believe in something that is not true. If you believe that bees have rabies and you don't go near them, while this is not true, it is a good reason because you save yourself from getting stung.

But the thing about God is my claim of him being real is just as valid as your claim that he is not. So what is wrong with someone who believes in him (or her. Nothing. Let's look at the results of the belief and then determine whether it is good or not. If the results are good, then there is a good reason to do it. Its that simple.

It is the same process used in science. Scientists use what works best to progress and advance our society. Newton's laws, although false, are still used today in solving phyics problems. Why? Because it gets you a credible answer.

The theory of evolution cannot be 'proven' nor 'disproven' a good scientist will tell you that they can't prove anything. They can only look at the data and make an explanation for it. They seek for the most probable explanation not because it is right but because it is the most beneficial way to explain phenomenom and is congruent with the evidence.

The theory of evolution is the simplest explanation, and it is a very practical theory to use when working in other things, such as battling HIV or creating computer chips. Why is it the best? The most important reason is because of the benefits we receive from using it.

So let's look back at the God and religion argument. There is much evidence to show that there are good reasons to believe in God. Now as RGB has pointed out, there have been bad things done in the name of God. Maybe what we can conclude is that for some it is a good reason to believe and for some it is not a good reason. But this doesn't cancel out the benefits that have come to society from it. To say "no good reason" is a falsity and poor logic.

You can choose to live in a narrow-minded world like that if you'd like.

religion is not all bad.

There is irrefutable evidence to show that people who believe in the bible have benefitted much to society. I can't believe that RGB, one who claims to be a scientist makes the claim that there is no good reason to believe the bible to be true, or that it is the evil myth.

Jesus Christ. Your first sentence doesn't really make sense, but if I am to assume you mean either that people who believe in the Bible have benefited society or that people who believe in the Bible have benefited from their belief, all I can say is......so freaking what? People who don't believe in the Bible have benefited society. So does that prove the Bible isn't true?

rgb never said that people can't benefit from believing in the Bible. What he said was that there is no good reason to actually believe the Bible is true. Which there is not. To say someone benefits from believing it doesn't mean there is evidence what they believe is actually true. I might believe bees have rabies so I won't go near them. This might benefit me in that I will never be stung, but it doesn't actually mean that bees have rabies. The fact that some belief may benefit someone does not make the belief true.

There is irrefutable evidence to show that people who believe in the bible have benefitted much to society. I can't believe that RGB, one who claims to be a scientist makes the claim that there is no good reason to believe the bible to be true, or that it is the evil myth. One has to shut their eyes, or look at history with half closed ones, in order to make such a bold statement.

Let us talk about the difference between the dark ages and the enlightenment era, that RGB spoke of in his previous argument. During the dark ages common people were not reading the bible. The break off from the church happened because people began to read the bible. The enlightenment era was sparked because people began reading the bible. People were inspired by its words, and sought for a better society. People came to the new world, to start this new way of life. Pilgrims came to america, to try something different, something better, and used the bible as their guide. Pennsylvania became a haven for quakers, a pacifist group of people who using the teachings of Jesus as their guide, to love and help each other, built a society that was hundreds of years ahead of its time. They denounced slavery, because of the bible. They lived in harmony with the natives, because of the bible. Oh wait though, let's not talk about that. RGB would have us focus on the salem witch trials or other bad things that have been done because of the bible. The point of my argument is that while bad things have been done in the name of religion many good things have been done in its name as well, and to just throw them away as RGB tries to do, is irrational.

Another obvious and awe inspiring great thing that the bible has brought to us is the idea of liberty. The founding fathers of this nation, believed that we are endowed with inalienable rights, given to us from God. We have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and the very foundation of these rights is based on the idea that there is a God to give them to us. If we take God out of the picture, then we don't have those rights. If we base evolution as our role for morality, then the right to life becomes a hinderance, for the way for evolution to work, it is needed the weak to be taken out of the gene pool. Unfortunately some have taken evolution to this extreme, and have tried to base a sense of morals from it. Look up social darwinism if you don't believe me.

Religion has given us a foundation for our morals and ethics.

The argument that is given to me by Dan is that those who tell others that God exists are liars and are trying to decieve people. First of all, the way I tell others that God exists has nothing to do with deception. I tell them of my spiritual experience and encourage them to do the same. They can find out for themselves if they want to.

Second, and more important, what is there to say that God does not exist? That is what you think. Many people think otherwise. They base it on evidence they have recieved. I base my belief on feelings of peace and comfort I have received when I have prayed. I will share an example. One time I couldn't find my keys. I said a prayer, and soon as I was done, I got up and looked up in the top of my closet and there they were. I do not know how they got there, for I never place my keys up there. I assume they were in my pants pocket and when I put my pants up there they fell out.

How did I know to look up there right after my prayer. I believe that God inspired me to look up there.

But, I want to look at this story from an athiest viewpoint. Let's say that my subconcious mind already knew that my keys were up there, (It was aware that they fell out of my pants when I set them up there)and since I have convinced myself that I will get answers after I pray, my subconcisous revealed it to me immediately after I finished. Sure that is possible.

However, either explanation, could the true.

But the point is, that I found my keys It doesn't matter how I found them so much as that I did. If either explanation could be true to how I found them, then who cares! The fact that I believe that God answered my prayers is not a placebo effect, because it could be valid.

Also, as far as addictions go, I am aware that there are other ways to get rid of an addiction besides believing in the bible or God. Did you know that the basis of alcohol annonymous is that there is a higher power? A bunch of lies by your viewpoint, but again, we can't prove that there is no higher power. So if this belief is helping others, and we can't disprove it, then it is a good reason for them to believe in it. It is a good reason for us all, for we are benefited by that person overcoming their addiction.

RGB, you show an expirement where "Intercessory prayer did not demonstrate clinical benefit in the treatment of alcohol abuse and dependence under these study conditions." (see RGB's thread)

That expirement shows that in this case, others praying for those in an addiction did not have an effect on them. It says nothing about those who use prayer to overcome their addiction.

On a personal note, I have friends who have freed themselves from their addiction and they say it is because of their belief in God and through reading the scriptures. They say that when they stuggled, they would get on their knees and pray, and after their prayer, their desire to do their addictive behavior subsided. A good reason for them to believe.

A belief in God and the bible has done much for our society. The idea of human rights is based upon it. To say that there is no good reason to believe in it is rediculous. The evidence is irrefutable.

Abby wrote: "Here is a story I heard once that I'd like you all to read.

Susie was in science class one day. The teacher stood up and said, "Billy, do you see the desks?"...

Just what is the point of this story?

In the Bible it is asserted that disease was caused by some mix of evil spirits, God's will, demonic possession, retribution for sin, and bad luck.

That is of course incorrect (one of the many, many flaws in the Bible). The reason the silly men who wrote the Bible without any sort of divine inspiration whatsoever got it wrong is because they (like all the equally silly people in your equally silly story) could not see the cause, any more than you can see galaxies with your naked eyes.

If the Bible had been divinely inspired, Genesis might have mentioned the trillion trillion stars we cannot see with the naked eye. If the Bible had been divinely inspired, Leviticus might have indicated that the cause of disease is microbes, not curses or devils. If the Bible had been divinely inspired, it might have pointed out that slavery is a horrible evil, instead of giving you rules for beating your slaves almost to death, instead of (in the New Testament) advising slaves to faithfully serve their masters no matter how horrible and cruel those masters are. If the Bible had been divinely inspired, Moses would have been told by God that no matter what the Midianite adults did that merited death, the children were innocent and must be spared. If the Bible had been divinely inspired, it wouldn't have said that the Earth is fixed and immobile in the center of the Universe. If the Bible had been divinely inspired, it wouldn't have changed over time as the same Author of its supposedly inspired words would have taken the trouble to insure that those words were accurately preserved (or what's the point?). If the Bible had been divinely inspired, Jesus wouldn't have endorsed the Law of the Old Testament. If the Bible had been divinely inspired, it wouldn't have commanded people to put witches and sorcerors to death, it would have pointed out that there is no such thing. If the Bible had been divinely inspired, it wouldn't have forbidden the consumption of shrimp, pork, catfish, oysters, lobster, and it definitely wouldn't have commanded men to cut off their foreskins. If the Bible had been divinely inspired, it would have established the equality of women instead of their subjugation and inferiority. If the Bible had been divinely inspired, it wouldn't have started out with an evil myth that claims that humans were created perfect and then fell from grace by committing a completely inane "sin", when in truth they evolved, a process that starts with a very imperfect and primitive life form and ends up with still-improving humans, where death isn't a punishment, it is a crucial and natural part of the evolutionary process.

If the Bible had been divinely inspired so that humans could write down God's words, God could speak to each human directly, making the Bible unnecessary. If the Bible had been divinely inspired, it wouldn't have implied that pi is 3 or the world was flat or the sky was a solid bowl with windows through which the rain was poured. If the Bible was divinely inspired it wouldn't mention hell one single time, as hell is incompatible with a loving God. Parents don't throw their children into a vat of boiling acid that will burn them forever if they love them -- that is called child abuse and is a crime whether committed by parents or by God.

Fortunately, the Bible is not divinely inspired. Humans wrote it, badly, preserving myths and legends that helped shape a particular primitive society. For strictly political reasons it was adopted by the dominant worldly empire 1700 years ago as the state religion, and that very empire forced it to be rewritten to better serve its needs, doing such a good job that while that Empire has long since crumbled, the imperial institution it created chugs right along, preserving wealth and political power over a staggering 1700 year stretch of human history.

In the future, if you want to tell allegorical tales, think about their moral. The moral of your story is that there are things that we cannot directly see that are nevertheless real. Like cholera, malaria, diptheria, HIV, and a trillion trillion stars. Like atoms, molecules, protons, electrons, neutrons, quarks. Like (as you point out) you, as far as I'm concerned.

The way we come to believe in the invisible things in the list above as because there is evidence that they exist. If you build microscopes and telescopes and accelerators and so on, you can see them after all. Even in your silly example, the way students know that the teacher has a mind is empirical -- the teacher behaves and speaks like she has a mind. You can "see" the mind by its action.

You cannot do this with God. There is no reasonable alternative to explain the teacher's actions and speech but a mind behind them. There is not one single thing you can point to in the entire natural world and use it to definitively infer God. "No God" is always a completely consisten alternative.

rgb

Abby wrote: "Because I have seen the words he has written. Because I have read his words."

His words? Are you sure about that:

http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/europe/07/...

"The world's oldest known Christian Bible goes online Monday -- but the 1,600-year-old text doesn't match the one you'll find in churches today."

Funny, one would think it would be the unalterable words of the one and only creator? Who could be messing with those words!


"Discovered in a monastery in the Sinai desert in Egypt more than 160 years ago, the handwritten Codex Sinaiticus includes two books that are not part of the official New Testament and at least seven books that are not in the Old Testament."

"The New Testament books are in a different order, and include numerous handwritten corrections -- some made as much as 800 years after the texts were written, according to scholars who worked on the project of putting the Bible online."

Wow.... 800 yrs later someone is messing with Gods word?

"And some familiar -- very important -- passages are missing, including verses dealing with the resurrection of Jesus"

Oh oh... that could be trouble.

"Juan Garces, the British Library project curator, said it should be no surprise that the ancient text is not quite the same as the modern one, since the Bible has developed and changed over the years."



I think, you have been reading the words, thoughts, and ideas of ordinary men. Men who had their own motives, ideas and bias.

But I'm sure you will invent reasons and somehow rationalize away these changes and alterations. Hey, maybe God was speaking to each of those editors. Telling them to correct and change the Bible as he had not got it quite right the first time. Could that have been it?

Here is a story I heard once that I'd like you all to read.



Susie was in science class one day. The teacher stood up and said, "Billy, do you see the desks?"

The little boy, now standing, nodded. "Yes, Teacher."

"Billy, do you see the sky?"

Again the boy nodded. "Yes, Teacher."

"Billy, do you see God?"

Here the boy looked puzzled. "No, Teacher."

The teacher, thinking she had explained something quite plainly, said triumphantly, "So what you are saying, Billy, is that there is no God? Thank you. You may sit down."

The boy sat down, still a bit confused.

Susie, glancing at Billy and then turning toward her teacher, raised her hand.

"Yes, Susie?" The teacher asked as she sat down in her seat.

"Teacher, may I please ask Billy some questions?"

"Yes, I suppose you may."

Susie looked at Billy. "Billy, do you see the desks?"

The little boy nodded. "Yes."

"Do you see the sky?"

"Yes."

"Do you see Teacher?"

"Yes."

A little smile played on Susie's lips. "Do you see Teacher's mind?"

Billy grinned. "No."

Susie, now washing out all of the teacher's triumph with her own victory, then asked, "So what you are saying is that the teacher has no mind?"



Think about it. Just because you cannot see something doesn't mean it doesn't excist. Have you ever seen a glaxy millions of lightyears away? Of course not. No one has. And yet we all know it's there. Have you ever seen a million dollars? No, but we know it's there. Have you ever seen me? No. You haven't seen me or my family, and probably not my friends. But here I am. How do you know I exist? Because I am writing you this right now? Because I typed this and posted it? Because you see the words I've written? You are choosing to believe that I exist because you are reading what I wrote. Now you ask how do I know God is there. Because I have seen the words he has written. Because I have read his words.

Also, rgb, you said that I could not believe that fairies would catch me if I jumped off my roof. No, because I do not believe that fairies exist. But how do I know? Maybe they do exist. Maybe they do live somewhere. Maybe. I am absolutely not the most intellegent person in the world. I MIGHT know 1 or 2 percent of all the knowlege in the world, so how do I know that fairies don't exist?

But no, I would not expect fairies to catch me if I jumped off the roof of my house. Although, if it was God's will, angels might catch me.

Here is a story I heard once that I'd like you all to read.



Susie was in science class one day. The teacher stood up and said, "Billy, do you see the desks?"

The little boy, now standing, nodded. "Yes, Teacher."

"Billy, do you see the sky?"

Again the boy nodded. "Yes, Teacher."

"Billy, do you see God?"

Here the boy looked puzzled. "No, Teacher."

The teacher, thinking she had explained something quite plainly, said triumphantly, "So what you are saying, Billy, is that there is no God? Thank you. You may sit down."

The boy sat down, still a bit confused.

Susie, glancing at Billy and then turning toward her teacher, raised her hand.

"Yes, Susie?" The teacher asked as she sat down in her seat.

"Teacher, may I please ask Billy some questions?"

"Yes, I suppose you may."

Susie looked at Billy. "Billy, do you see the desks?"

The little boy nodded. "Yes."

"Do you see the sky?"

"Yes."

"Do you see Teacher?"

"Yes."

A little smile played on Susie's lips. "Do you see Teacher's mind?"

Billy grinned. "No."

Susie, now washing out all of the teacher's triumph with her own victory, then asked, "So what you are saying is that the teacher has no mind?"



Think about it. Just because you cannot see something doesn't mean it doesn't excist. Have you ever seen a glaxy millions of lightyears away? Of course not. No one has. And yet we all know it's there. Have you ever seen a million dollars? No, but we know it's there. Have you ever seen me? No. You haven't seen me or my family, and probably not my friends. But here I am. How do you know I exist? Because I am writing you this right now? Because I typed this and posted it? Because you see the words I've written? You are choosing to believe that I exist because you are reading what I wrote. Now you ask how do I know God is there. Because I have seen the words he has written. Because I have read his words.

Also, rgb, you said that I could not believe that fairies would catch me if I jumped off my roof. No, because I do not believe that fairies exist. But how do I know? Maybe they do exist. Maybe they do live somewhere. Maybe. I am absolutely not the most intellegent person in the world. I MIGHT know 1 or 2 percent of all the knowlege in the world, so how do I know that fairies don't exist?

But no, I would not expect fairies to catch me if I jumped off the roof of my house. Although, if it was God's will, angels might catch me.

A more extreme version of this experiment would be to tell them you are converting to say Hindu. What would their reaction be to this?

A process you could give an honest shot to, instead of just pretend. You are self-admittedly only thirteen, and this means that you haven't ever read the sacred scriptures of, well, dare I guess any faith including your own self-professed one. What you know even of Christianity I have no doubt comes from what you've been told, not what you yourself have read and pondered.

For example, what do you think about the dashing of baby brains, the ripping of children from their mother's bellies, the slaughter of tens of thousands of innocent women and children by Moses, the taking of all of the virgin women in that encounter to give to his men (and keep for himself) as playtoys? Doesn't that sound more like the Taliban (who actually strongly resemble Mosaic Israelites culturally and behaviorally, albeit with modern weapons and cell phones) that you admire so much?

And yet Jesus just loved Moses. He commanded you to obey Mosaic law (which you don't do, of course, because your minister never preaches a sermon on why we should all go out and stone Wal Mart employees for working on Sunday just because Jesus ordered us to keep the Law that says that we should, and that minister himself should probably be stoned to death because like as not he's on his second or third marriage, which Jesus explicitly describes as adultery and deserving of the standard Mosaic punishment for adulterers, that is to say, stoning). Jesus hung out with Moses (genocidal baby killer extraordinaire) and David (homocidal adulterous wife stealer) on a mountaintop in full view of his Apostles just to prove that he (as God) fully approved of their actions.

No doubt today he'd include Hitler.

What you are taught in Sunday School and what is preached in church by priests and ministers isn't what the Bible says. It is selected portions of what the Bible says, ones that appeal to the modern secular view of morality that is not derived from the Bible -- it generally replaces it. Fortunately some relatively decent and philosophically enlightened people have contributed to the Bible so it does contain some good stuff that can be cherrypicked and taught, as long as you hold your nose and close your eyes to the rest. Doing the latter while trumpeting the Bible's inerrancy and moral perfection is rather hypocritical, however, but hypocrisy is what Christianity, in particular, is all about (see comment about all those divorced and remarried ministers above).

So please, if you're going to defend the Bible, start by reading it. Cover to cover. Possibly several times. Sure, most of it is uber-boring and I'm certain you're a busy young lady, but what do you think God is going to think of a person who is too lazy to actually read His Word.

While you're doing this, do a bit of research into how reliable our Bibles are -- are the words we read today even close to what was originally written? Can't follow the word of God if that word has been lost or altered by mistranslation, by the dropping of words, by the additions of some redactor in 197 CE. Remember, this book was preserved only in the form of manuscript copies -- hand copied by people who were often functionally illiterate in the language they were copying -- for well over a thousand years before printing presses were invented and a particularly corrupt manuscript was accidentally selected (because it was handy) and transformed into our "inerrant Bible". If you do this with zeal and energy, reading Ehrman's Misquoting Jesus for example, I think you'll conclude that we have no bloomin' idea what the Apostles originally wrote, or when. Their original manuscripts did not survive. 1st generation copies of those manuscripts did not survive. The earliest fragments of manscripts we have (which already fairly clearly demonstrate that whole sections of e.g. Mark were added by later redactors -- Jesus never said anything about speaking in tongues or handling serpents, for example) were written well over one hundred years later than the originals and omit a whole lot of the "miraculous" ornamentation that was added later by zealous copyists to reinforce that Jesus wasn't just a man wandering around and preaching.

Then give the sacred texts of Hinduism -- especially the Upanishads -- a try. Read the Quran, but be warned, it says that it is perfect truth and if you think the NT threatens hell for unbelievers, you should try the Quran. I think fiery torture is threatened an average of every ten to fifteen verses. If Islam turns out to be the one true faith we are all SO screwed...;-)

Don't forget Buddhism. Buddhism, mind you, isn't a religion. It is a philosophy. Buddha taught his followers to not argue about God, the soul, creation, or any other stuff of that sort, as it is nothing but an irrelevant distraction in his prescribed process for discovering truth and becoming Enlightened. Buddha's process wasn't perfect or correct, but it was empirical and hence self-correcting, and (along with the Upanishads) IMO is one of the few works of genuine ancient wisdom.

And Siddhartha was at least consistent. Buddhism is truly a nonviolent faith, not "sometimes" the way Christianity, Judaism, Islam are, not when one is not struggling against evil the way Hinduism does, but all the time. Conflict is unimportant, and violent conflict to defend possession is the antithesis of Buddhism. Christianity very likely borrowed a lot of its morality -- badly -- from Buddhism (the badly part being its inability to break free from the execrable Old Testament and the worthless and excessive ten commandments).

Good luck with that. Come back in (say) five or ten years when you've had time to complete a serious study that most of the "ignorant" people on this list have long since completed and let us know what your conclusions are. That is, if you aren't in jail for throwing rocks at hapless Wal Mart employees or the divorced and remarried woman who lives next door.

rgb

Ashleigh wrote: "Did you know that Charles Darwin, the founder of evolution, renounced all his claims on his death bed?"

Ashleigh; this is a complete falsehood. A lie. But as always I stand to be corrected, so if you could point me to the source where you got this information I would appreciate it.

Not brainwashed? Then try this experiment. Tell your parents that you and your sister don't want to go to church anymore. Don't go for a couple of weeks. See what your parents reaction is.

A more extreme version of this experiment would be to tell them you are converting to say Hindu. What would their reaction be to this?

Given the choice between helping people by lying to them and helping people by telling them the truth, why should we ever choose the lie?

Because Paul tells us to, and Paul is a saint and therefore was inspired by the Holy Ghost and must be right!

Sometimes you just have to make stuff up to convince people to believe in Jesus, but it's OK if it is in such a good cause.

rgb