The existence of God and the efficacy of prayer

[Pup]

You've been staring at your straw man for so long you think it's the real thing. You're reacting to a caricature of religion, focusing on its worst aspects, either ignorant of or ignoring all that is best in it.

Can you believe, though, that religion is truly not right for me, just as it is right for you? Or does everybody have to be like you?

I wonder if theism encourages that sort of blindness. If there's a worldwide god, it must be everyone's god, so if people don't feel it, something is wrong with them.

I'm glad you seem to have found your purpose. But do you then say that life has no purpose, because when you say things like 'I've never had a moment's doubt about what the purpose of my life was' you sound as if you are admitting that there is such as thing as purpose, which I equated in part with meaning.

I say life has no purpose because there's no evidence it didn't just mindlessly evolve. But along with that evolution came some useful and enjoyable traits, including a subjective sense of having a purpose, which I inherited strongly. Some people have a strong sense of religious awe or the sense of a godlike figure, which they can enjoy, but i was apparently born with that trait very weak. I don't believe I'm an inferior human because of it, though. People are different.

 

[Delvo]

Unless you can delve into specifics, it's not worth answering, except to say that it's far more than 'feelingism'

The specific were right there in the quote box in my post. Every single thing you said was a feeling, not a point of reasoning. Are you now trying to claim that there was something rational somewhere in that pile of feelings? That would just be absurd... not only the claim itself, but also the reversal, after you were just so open and unabashed about making it perfectly clearly all about feelings with no disguise when you first wrote it. It's like you can't remember, or even see, your own words. Any rationality you appear to now wish you had put in there is something you quite obviously and unmistakably weren't even trying for originally. Nowhere near having any resemblance at all. If you want to now start contending that that pile of feelings contained something rational, quote it and show how on Earth it qualifies.

"Feelings feelings feelings... ←hey, look at that totally rational point I just made!"

What a load of crap. We're talking about reality here and how we grow into new understandings. The problem with your argument, and indeed your view of things, is that you have an eyepatch on and can only see in 2D, when there's stereoscopic vision available.

Stereoscopic vision discovers real information about the same reality that monoscopic vision does, just more of it at once. Where is the additional real information about reality that religion discovers and rational/scientific processes do not?

 

[abaddon]

You've misunderstood what i was doing. I was simply turning your own argument on its head to show how ridiculous it is.

And the burden of proof argument can be turned on its head too. Whoever is making a point has the burden of proof, not theists, so it's time to give it up.

Your affirmative claim, your burden of proof. You have yet to present any evidence for your affirmative claim.

Do you know why that is? It is because you have no evidence. None.

 

[Delvo]

You are making a claim. You're claiming there is no meaning to life, no purpose, no God, no afterlife, no mind other than an epiphenomenon of brain functioning, no psi, no NDEs, no miracles, no inspiration, etc, etc.

The red parts are more meaningless pseudo-philosophical gibberish conveying nothing that could even be true or false. The parts I didn't do anything to the color of are all things that, if they existed, would result in a world observably different from this one, so yes, I do say they don't exist, because that's what the evidence actually tells us. The blue one is a real thing that actually exists in a way, but not what I presume you mean: people who have been near death or even temporarily technically dead have indeed perceived effects of that state on their brains, but the increasingly unorganized activity of a dying brain conveys no information about anything outside that brain.

I hesitate to call it them positive claims, because they are so bleak, but they are, because they relate to a worldview, a philosophy, which is a positive claim and therefore has as much of a burden of proof on it as any other claim.

No, but that's OK. The real world keeps confirming them anyway by constantly continuing to give us the same results every time, and those results are the results that would happen in a world where those things don't exist, not one where they do. Location of the burden of proof makes little difference when it keeps being met on one side and not the other anyway.

They reduce... life to a meaningless accident.

Why are religious people so fixated on the word "accident"? Yall know perfectly well that an accident is when someone intends and tries one thing but fails and does another instead, so that word can't possibly make any sense in a scenario in which there's no someone to have been trying & failing to do anything... but yall still always end up dredging that word up even when talking about exactly that scenario, pretending to think that someone who thinks there's nobody behind it all would still think that non-existent entity is around to be having "accidents" anyway. What do you think insisting on a word you can't possibly think really applies will accomplish? Trick us into accidentally letting it slip that we really think God is real after all and are lying when we say we don't?

Interestingly, people who have done exorcisms say that demons espouse the same nihilistic philosophy.

Of course they do. What an enlightening piece of information.

I'm talking here though about the larger worldview that comes from spiritual awareness.

Larger how? (It appears to be by including stuff that's purely fictional as if it were real.)

Awareness of what facts that are real and not available otherwise? (You have yet to provide a single one.)

Much of religion has been hijacked by fundamentalist movements and all kinds of distortions of scriptures, themselves barely understood and misread by most believers.

And you know they're the ones who are getting it wrong, how? What part of their process is any different from yours?

 

[abaddon]

How can the next life have value and not this life? Tell us again how much you know about Christianity.

I have told you before, I was raised christian. I am more than familiar with the nonsense claims made. And they are nonsense claims. All of it.

 

[Desert Fox]

Is this an admission you've misunderstood your Christian buddies?

The Bible says the evidence for the unbeliever is the creation.

Seriously though it wouldn't matter if God sat on your shoulder, you still wouldn't believe.

You seem to be arguing that Christians are just one thing. . . .They are not. There is so much variation in Christians that one cannot say "X" is a Christian. Not all believe in the Trinity for example.

The Bible states a lot of things that simply are not true such as Moses wandering around the desert. Simply put, archaeologists can find evidence of stone age humans in the desert yet no signs of the Exodus.

It is interesting how you argue that the Universe needs a creator yet you give God, and specially the Christian God, a free past. If God does not need a creator, why not the universe. Unless you are Solipsistic, you at least know the universe exists.

If there is an all powerful being, I am sure he/she/it knows how to convince me. Might not be able to use it to convince anybody else but could at leas convince me.

 

[blue triangle]

Lol

BT bet you never dreamed someone would call you egotistical for trying to explain your well thought out position. .

It's like trying to explain colour to someone who is colour blind.

 

[blue triangle]

So how come I don't feel despair? You believe such thoughts would cause you to feel despair, and I won't disagree. But it seems such a literally self--centered view to judge how everyone would feel based on how you would feel.

I didn't feel despair either when I was an atheist, but looking back now I can see how limiting that worldview was and I'm very glad to be free of it.

Personally, I find it exciting, because it frees one from having to listen to tradition and instead one can explore wherever the evidence leads.

That's appropriate in the sciences. It can't be applied wholesale to religion though. Tradition is part of what religion is. The Bible isn't meant to be revised like a hypothesis, but understood more deeply over time.

And don't imagine that science is as free-thinking as you would like it to be. Science has its high priests, it's faithful flock, its temples of reason, its traditions, its orthodoxies and its heretics.

I see you're sticking rigidly to your straw-man version of religion, though.

I'm not in the hard sciences myself, but the freedom to follow evidence and challenge any accepted status quo, whether based on previous science or religion, is exciting enough just as a concept, and let the prevailing evidence win, till more comes along.

Religion, in some cases, deliberately takes that away and insists they have the unchanging answers, which one must believe or suffer. That's what I'd call depressing. But those believers don't think so, because a sense of stability is what they want. People are different.

Still straw-manning.

 

[blue triangle]

The specific were right there in the quote box in my post. Every single thing you said was a feeling, not a point of reasoning. Are you now trying to claim that there was something rational somewhere in that pile of feelings? That would just be absurd... not only the claim itself, but also the reversal, after you were just so open and unabashed about making it perfectly clearly all about feelings with no disguise when you first wrote it. It's like you can't remember, or even see, your own words. Any rationality you appear to now wish you had put in there is something you quite obviously and unmistakably weren't even trying for originally. Nowhere near having any resemblance at all. If you want to now start contending that that pile of feelings contained something rational, quote it and show how on Earth it qualifies.

"Feelings feelings feelings... ←hey, look at that totally rational point I just made!"

Well, let's have a look at what I wrote. Here it is:

It seems to bother many atheists I've spoken to, who congratulate themselves for having given up traditional Christian belief and imagine that they are now seeing clearly and thinking rationally. It bothers them that some of us have had the experience of discarding atheism, for a larger, richer and much more meaningful worldview. In fact some of us have had both experiences, rejecting biblical literalism and embracing scientific naturalism, then eventually rejecting scientific materialism and embracing spirituality, and for exactly the same reason, because the old worldview became too small.

I cant see a lot of feelings in there. The only parts that could reasonably be connected with feelings are my statements that it bothers atheists (and it does) that there may be something beyond atheism, and that some theists have rejected atheism for spirituality. But I also state that many of those theists had previously rejected Christianity for atheism! Unless you imagine they rejected the comforting certainties of fundamentalist Christianity for the astringent worldviews of naturalism and atheism for emotional reasons (maybe they fell out with their pastor?) I can't see the logic of equating that decision with feelings. No, it seems to me they outgrew fundamentalism. That's not feelings. What I also state is that by the same process of growth, they moved beyond atheism and naturalism. Again, it wasn't 'feelingism', for which a better world would be 'emotionalism'.

That only leaves us with the emotions some atheists have when they read that some theists have outgrown atheism. I would imagine that frustration would be among them, since atheists often claim that they've outgrown theism - and there's nothing more frustrating than having your own words used against you.

 

[MikeG]

........The only parts that could reasonably be connected with feelings are my statements that it bothers atheists (and it does) that there may be something beyond atheism,......

Does it make you feel better to believe this nonsense? I don't give a damn that anyone thinks there is anything beyond the reality of the physical, rational, world, nor that there are theists who don't get it, or atheists who might harbour some irrationalities. The only thing I have ever a damn about is that such people don't attempt to twist the minds of my kids, but they're perfectly capable of seeing through ******** themselves now, so I don't even have that to worry about. The only time in the last 30 years that the subject of religion has ever entered my head is when using this forum.

If you want to lie about the way atheists are, fine. Lie to yourself. I only bother to rebut such lies because young impressionable minds might be reading this.

 

[blue triangle]

Does it make you feel better to believe this nonsense? I don't give a damn that anyone thinks there is anything beyond the reality of the physical, rational, world, nor that there are theists who don't get it, or atheists who might harbour some irrationalities. The only thing I have ever a damn about is that such people don't attempt to twist the minds of my kids, but they're perfectly capable of seeing through ******** themselves now, so I don't even have that to worry about. The only time in the last 30 years that the subject of religion has ever entered my head is when using this forum.

If you want to lie about the way atheists are, fine. Lie to yourself. I only bother to rebut such lies because young impressionable minds might be reading this.

Still waiting on that rebuttal. . .

And I'll thank you not to use the word 'lie' about my description of the process some atheists go through. I went through it myself and I know that others have. I hope those young impressionable minds aren't taking your posts as models of civil debate.

 

[Pup]

I didn't feel despair either when I was an atheist, but looking back now I can see how limiting that worldview was and I'm very glad to be free of it.

That's similar to what anyone tells me when they find some new thing they love, whether it's a new area to live, a new religion, a new hobby (hobby seems too weak a word--a new life-consuming activity, maybe). I totally agree that it seems that way for them. But it's not objectively true, and it may or may not be true for me.

I wish others could understand that.

That's appropriate in the sciences. It can't be applied wholesale to religion though. Tradition is part of what religion is. The Bible isn't meant to be revised like a hypothesis, but understood more deeply over time.

But I want something that can be revised like a hypothesis. I don't want to have to reconcile some old book with everything new.

Again, that doesn't make me better than you. It just means I want something different. But it doesn't make me lesser than you, either.

And don't imagine that science is as free-thinking as you would like it to be. Science has its high priests, it's faithful flock, its temples of reason, its traditions, its orthodoxies and its heretics.

That's about as productive as me pointing out how many theists are criminals. Of course some scientists act like theists. Wanting leaders, wanting tradition, is attractive to many humans and that's why so many are drawn to religion. But those scientists aren't applying the scientific method, if they're following each other rather than the evidence. Fortunately, it doesn't last, and eventually the evidence prevails.

I see you're sticking rigidly to your straw-man version of religion, though.

Still straw-manning.

What are you going on about? Is the straw man my statement that religion is full of tradition and claims of unchanging answers? But you said the same thing when you claimed science was like religion above.

Of course religions change with the times, if that's what you mean. But they don't brag about that as an advantage. What attracts people is the idea of an unchanging God, and if the church changes, it's not God changing. Even my wife's church, which believes that God can give new revelations and produce new scripture whenever he wants, is more conservative than most and rarely uses those possibilities. People like the sense of something bigger than themselves to lean on.

 

[blue triangle]

The red parts are more meaningless pseudo-philosophical gibberish conveying nothing that could even be true or false. The parts I didn't do anything to the color of are all things that, if they existed, would result in a world observably different from this one, so yes, I do say they don't exist, because that's what the evidence actually tells us. The blue one is a real thing that actually exists in a way, but not what I presume you mean: people who have been near death or even temporarily technically dead have indeed perceived effects of that state on their brains, but the increasingly unorganized activity of a dying brain conveys no information about anything outside that brain.

NDEs are often very detailed and compelling, as you should know. They often seem more real than waking consciousness, hardly the random firing of distressed neurons. That's the only part of it worth answering, but I do love the way you sweep over the paragraph and assign colours based on your little schema.

No, but that's OK. The real world keeps confirming them anyway by constantly continuing to give us the same results every time, and those results are the results that would happen in a world where those things don't exist, not one where they do. Location of the burden of proof makes little difference when it keeps being met on one side and not the other anyway.

The naturalist argument that the universe we see around us is all there is is hardly an argument against religion, since most theists claim that the spiritual realms lie outside the universe. Science was developed to study this universe, not what lies beyond it, and is therefore limited in its scope, we say. It is minds that can contact God, not scientific instruments (although God can affect the material universe if He so wishes, hence miracles).

Some scientists are aware of science's limits and wisely say nothing about religion. Others get out their colouring pens and make a nuisance of themselves.

 

[I Am The Scum]

That's similar to what anyone tells me when they find some new thing they love, whether it's a new area to live, a new religion, a new hobby (hobby seems too weak a word--a new life-consuming activity, maybe). I totally agree that it seems that way for them. But it's not objectively true, and it may or may not be true for me.

I wish others could understand that.

I see you've been conversing with My Little Pony fans.

 

[Delvo]

First a little reminder of the original words BT is now working so hard to distract from, before moving on to the distractions themselves:

...discarding atheism, for a larger, richer and much more meaningful worldview... rejecting scientific materialism and embracing spirituality... because the old worldview became too small... As for having a sense that life has meaning, atheists are hampered there. They may have some sense of it, but there is more to be had, much more.

Larger: feelingism
Richer: feelingism
More meaningful: feelingism
Materialism/spirituality: feelingism
Small worldview: feelingism
"Having a sense that ___": feelingism
Meaning (again): feelingism
Hampered: feelingism
More to be had: feelingism
Much more: feelingy feely feelingism

The whole thing consists entirely of "Here's how I feel, and here's how others simply must feel instead, so that means I'm right and they're wrong, which gives me these feelings and simply must leave other people stuck with those feelings"... right down the line, point for point, every step of the way: not a single attempt at even pretending to have anything other than feelingism anywhere in there for a moment.

Why in the world someone would lay it all right out like that so abundantly clearly and then act surprised that somebody might have noticed some feelingism somewhere in there, I don't get.

'feelingism', for which a better world would be 'emotionalism'.

I'm keeping it separate because it means something separate: making claims about reality with nothing but feelings behind those claims.

Now, on to the attempts at distraction from the above...

The only parts that could reasonably be connected with feelings are my statements that it bothers atheists (and it does) that there may be something beyond atheism, and that some theists have rejected atheism for spirituality.

Not the part I was talking about, but I'll go along on the subject for a moment... You're simply making up feelings to claim atheists have (or parroting back feelingist nonsense that was made up by someone else).

But I also state that many of those theists had previously rejected Christianity for atheism! Unless you imagine they rejected the comforting certainties of fundamentalist Christianity for the astringent worldviews of naturalism and atheism for emotional reasons (maybe they fell out with their pastor?) I can't see the logic of equating that decision with feelings.

I didn't. I said nothing about converting from religion to no-religion at all. But, to just play along with it for a moment anyway, yes, it is possible to do so for irrational reasons.

Among those who do so (which I expect are a rather small but real number), I can see two broad categories of explanation that I suspect cover all examples. One of the favorites for some Christians to try to paint all atheists with is simply finding that God is evil and the only feelings to be had from following him or used as an incentive to follow him are bad ones, not the "comfort" you claim is somehow inherent in being subject to such a monster... which I'm sure has been true for some atheists somewhere. In other cases, it would be by falling for the flawed feelingist arguments presented by theists and failing to apply the logic to see through them. In fact, just a few days ago I saw a video clip from an atheism-themed talk show in which a caller described his own double-conversion, and the atheist host told him that he'd dropped Christianity "for bad reasons".

In both cases, I expect that such people, as opposed to those who reached atheism by reasoning, would be particularly easy to reconvert because that would just be asking them to repeat the same feelingist process again. If they'd gotten to atheism by reasoning instead, then reconverting would be a completely different thing because there's no reasoning by which it is possible so it must happen by some other feelingist process which such a person would already have rejected, and I have never heard of a single example of that happening.

No, it seems to me they outgrew fundamentalism. That's not feelings.

Of course it is. There's nothing else it possibly could be.

What I also state is that by the same process of growth, they moved beyond atheism and naturalism.

Using the words "growth" and "beyond" is also feelingism. It has the feely claim that theism is somehow bigger & better than atheism built in.

That only leaves us with the emotions some atheists have when they read that some theists have outgrown atheism.

...which you (or someone who was influential to you) made up. But no, that's not all that's left here. You're avoiding the one thing I was actually talking about, which was about your own argument for theism over atheism, not anybody else's conversion or double-conversion.

 

[Pup]

The naturalist argument that the universe we see around us is all there is is hardly an argument against religion, since most theists claim that the spiritual realms lie outside the universe.

Christianity and Islam together make up more than half the world's population.

It seems most theists claim that a god can hear and respond to their prayers, meaning that the god interacts within this universe, and that he sends prophets to say exactly what he's been doing with earth and what he wants people to do.

 

[Delvo]

most theists claim that the spiritual realms lie outside the universe... lies beyond it

No, they really don't. They start by making claims about how this world works... then back off to pretending they're only talking about some vague fluffy extra-universal stuff that's been stripped of anything that could affect the real world and distinguish it from non-existence because that's a safer position to defend in debates... and later try to sneak back to the original claims about how this world works when they think nobody's looking anymore.

The version they start with and later sneak back to is the one they actually believe in.

The one in the middle step, the vague do-nothing one that wouldn't matter even if it were "real" in some way that's the same as being unreal anyway, is a lie: a smokescreen they try to hide behind when the one they're really trying to argue for gets debunked, not what anybody I've ever known of actually believes in, certainly not anywhere near what any religion actually claims.

 

[blue triangle]

I'll deal with the rest of it later, but in the meanwhile.

Of course it is. There's nothing else it possibly could be.

Using the words "growth" and "beyond" is also feelingism. It has the feely claim that theism is somehow bigger & better than atheism built in.

You are actually stating that the process of psychological growth can be reduced to . . . feelings? So when a person brought up in a fundamentalist Christian home begins to think for himself and one day has the courage to confront his parents and say "Mum, dad, I'm sorry, but I no longer believe in the God you have taught me. The Bible doesn't make sense to me any longer. I been having doubts for years now, and so . . . [pauses for courage] . . . I'm now an atheist." That was just an accumulation of feelings? They hadn't been learning critical thinking skills? They didn't feel it would be a betrayal of their integrity to pretend to believe?

I would like to make the audacious claim that people do learn critical thinking skills (and more integrated ways of thinking) as they grow and mature. I might add that they also learn observational skills, and even how to compartmentalise those powerful feelings they have, so they don't interfere too much with their thinking. Your claim that 'feelingism' explains this process is bizarre to say the least.

 

[John Nowak]

It's like trying to explain colour to someone who is colour blind.

Most sighted people can attest to color perception, and agree on the colors of test objects. Color is explained as the perception of different wavelengths of electromagnetic energy, which in turn is well understood by physics.

 

[Delvo]

You are actually stating that the process of psychological growth can be reduced to . . . feelings?

I'm stating that describing changing one's mind about something as "growth" is feelingism: putting an inaccurate but irrelevant feel-good label on it that hides and distracts from the issue of whether the change of mind made sense or the new conclusion was sound or correct.

So when a person brought up in a fundamentalist Christian home begins to think for himself and one day has the courage to confront his parents and say "Mum, dad, I'm sorry, but I no longer believe in the God you have taught me. The Bible doesn't make sense to me any longer. I been having doubts for years now, and so . . . [pauses for courage] . . . I'm now an atheist." That was just an accumulation of feelings?

Changing his/her mind about something isn't "growth". It might be a result of part of the process of growing up in that kid's case, but other kids grow up without the same thing happening, so it can't be "growth".
"Growth" is a funny-sounding word. Growth, growth, growth. Groath. Grothe. Groweth. Growingness.
Calling it "growth" is attaching an inaccurate but irrelevant feel-good label to it to try to affect how people feel about it.

They hadn't been learning critical thinking skills?

Apparently (s)he had. But the story you just told isn't about learning; the learning has already happened off in the background, and it's about telling someone else the result of a single specific example of the application of those skills (which the kid could instead, as some other kids do, learn but fail to apply to this subject, and they would have "grown" and learned just as much as this one did). That's a separate thing from the growth learning that led to this scene.

They didn't feel it would be a betrayal of their integrity to pretend to believe?

Maybe. But that's a matter of how (s)he feels, not growth, and not feelingism. Feelingism would be telling such a story in a way that depicts the feelings as if they had any bearing on the facts of reality. Whether the kid in the story is right or wrong is not determined by how (s)he feels about it, or by emotional labels that the narrator applies to it.