Is there evidence your god beliefs are true while other god beliefs are false?

[Mobyseven]

Thought:

Why did you choose that shirt to wear this morning?

It was available.

It fits (works for) you.

DR

And at one point in his life he had to make the conscious decision to go out and buy that shirt, that particular shirt, and not a hundred other shirts that were on sale in the store.

See how I turned that analogy back on you?

 

[Lithrael]

I am still awaiting a response to why I should care about another religionist's beliefs. That is directly related to the OP. Given that this is page seven, I guess I'll accept I won't get an answer.

Because some of them as part of their beliefs embrace ideas that seem to be harmful or wrong, and can hurt people or hold back knowledge? But then, if you're not bothered by worldly concerns, I have no reason why you should care.

Or if you mean why should you care about that when deciding yours, again I don't have any reason you should care, because it looks like you think adhering to the negative aspects of a religion is foolish anyway. (I would agree)

There certainly seems to be a shared human ability to feel like you're experiencing something profound, and I can respect (without actually agreeing with) those who take this to mean there's something to religion in general. What I don't understand is the common assertion that there's still more to religion than choosing the one that feels right for you/finding one that gives you this sort of feeling.

I'm not saying you made this assertion btw.

But there are sects out there killing each other over something.

 

[Mobyseven]

I'll leave it to God. Your soul isn't my burden - mine is.

O RLY???

Ye shall be witnesses unto me.

Go therefore and make disciples of all nations.

Seems that it is your responsibility to spread the words, according to the bible anyhow. You know the bible - the book you told us to look at to see what true Christianity is?

 

[Mobyseven]

I already did. I will repeat it for you.

Why should I care?

The embedded assumption in the OP presumes that I hold the beliefs of other religions false. I admit that I could choose to be doctrinaire, and shout from the rooftops that Mohamed has to be a false prophet, based on the snippet from the NT about False Prophets, (ETA: for those who care, Matthew 7:15) or for any other doctrinal reason, but that's an empty position for me to take with any Muslim. He'll tell me I don't get it. He might even tell me that Mohamed is the latest revelation. Etc.

The solution for me, in dealing with that Muslim, is to focus on what he and I share, in common, and try to resolve practically where we don't agree. It can be done, between people who treat people as human beings, and not as abstractions. In some cases, however, folks who choose to be doctrinaire choose to be disagreeable. See my point further up regarding where body counts tend to rise.

Thanks to the embedded assumption I mention, the line of inquiry is rather pointless, unless the aim is bashing another person's world view.

If that is where you get your kicks, so be it.

DR

So are all religions equally valid?

 

[A Christian Sceptic]

deleted because - well I think I'll move on to other topics.

 

[arthwollipot]

Wow, I've missed a lot. But there's something which has been said which seems confusing to me. Perhaps plumjam or Darth Rotor could clarify it for me.

It might just be that there are no theists here who are apt to (as the atheists would seem to prefer us to do) dogmatically argue the absolute mutual exclusivity of their own particular notional formulations about God.
Like I said earlier, that kind of understanding of religions is a pretty innacurate straw man.

This is not my experience with religion. OK, my experience is limited to a couple of years in a Pentacostal Christian church, but while I was there I was bombarded with warnings about "false religions" and "The One True God". I was very much given the impression that Pentacostal Christianity was the right religion and all the others were wrong.

I admit, this is limited experience, but it certainly coloured my opinions, and was one of the reasons I rejected Christianity.

Let's quit the childishness. Just tell us why you reject all the other Gods and embrace whichever flavour of theism it is you subscribe to, and we can all have an adult discussion.

(bolded by me)

I respect DR too, and know he's more than capable of defending himself.
I just thought I'd point out that quote. The part in bold, is, I think, why DR feels it a waste of time to get involved in this. Earlier he pointed out the embedded assumption in the OP question, and he was dead right. You're exhibiting the same assumption of automatic mutual exclusivity as does the OP.
The exclusivity is not there to the degree most atheists here seem to prefer it would be.

Why not? Does a Christian not reject the Hindu gods? If not, why does the Christian not worship the Hindu gods?

It's right there at the top of the Commandments: "Thou shalt have no gods before me". The first commandment (of the common set) is telling Christians explicitly to reject other Gods! Or so it seems to me.

Hypothetical:

Say there is a pagan god whose worshippers claim will seek out and kill all those who don't believe in him. As a Christian, you reject that god, because you don't believe that he will seek you out and kill you.

But if you stick to the claim that Christians don't reject other gods, why aren't you terrified that you will be sought out and killed?

So here it is. It appears to me that Christians do reject other gods, plumjam and DR notwithstanding. Automatic exclusivity is built into religion, especially Christianity with its First Commandment. Apparently I have it wrong. Can anyone enlighten me?

 

[arthwollipot]

deleted because - well I think I'll move on to other topics.

Oh, please don't. As a Christian Skeptic, you are in a perfect position to answer my above question. Please?

 

[A Christian Sceptic]

Oh, please don't. As a Christian Skeptic, you are in a perfect position to answer my above question. Please?

Hi,

I think what the Thiests are saying on this board (and this is at least how I feel) is that we don't want to argue exclusivity of our religions with each other regardless of how we feel of each others religion. And we especially don't want to do it in the present context with Athiests who won't understand the whys and hows because, for one, the OP is wanting to use "scientific evidence" as the measuring stick.

I don't really know how to go on, because on one hand, I want you to understand some things about how I view Christianity, but in an internet forum - especially one with Athiests who have bible verses in hand waiting to pounce on you to tell you that you are not being a real Christian because this verse says that - it just doesn't seem right.

But yes, in general, your observations are correct. Because I'm a Christian I have not accepted other religious views on God. (But that does not mean I can't get some glimpses of him through studying what they believe. And I might argue, I view it more as a progression of my beliefs more than a simple rejection of other beliefs) And when I come across a new religion or even a new Christian idea or view I measure it against what I currently believe and use my reasons (which are largely not scientific but probably more philosphical or theological) and make a decision.

If you have a more specific question on something (it sounds like you have a pretty good familiarity of Christianity) you can Private Message me. I might not give you an answer though - but probably some questions to ask yourself.

Anyway - I understand where you are coming from I think.

 

[arthwollipot]

Yes. Thank you for replying.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

The exact same criteria that you use to define whether you like a chabli vs. a chardonay. The diffrence is, it didn't take me 2 seconds to figure it out though, it took me my entire life.

Your taste buds on your tongue is how you decided which god beliefs to believe and which not to believe?

And that is what you Atheists keep missing. My opinions are going to be varied from yours because we come from completly two diffrent points of view. (Genetics+Enviorment, aka [Nature+Nuture] = Point of View)

And my Point of View creates my opinions. Everything I am and everything i have learned is completly diffrent than yours. Because of that, what is relative to me, may not be relative to you. What I see, feel, and experience is going to be vastly diffrent than yours. It is not something where we experience the same things, because we dont. And if you had been in my position, to exeprience the same things, you probally would have experienced them diffrently because you are just a diffrent person.

And that is the point. It is not the same across the board. The data I recieved is diffrent than the data you did, thus we came to two completly diffrerent conclusions. You cant recreate my results because you havent experienced my life. Feelings and real world wisdom do play a part in this regarless of how much the stone cold atheists want to drag our beliefs into a lab and start looking for comparable data. Guess what, there is none.

I don't think the atheists are missing this part of people's god belief systems. We, or at least I, get this part.

Now you have articulated it was the taste receptors on your tongue which determined your preference for one god belief over another. That tells me you don't get my question.

 

[Ron_Tomkins]

I think that the reasons why people choose to believe are as infinite as the number of minds there are on the planet. I have to agree in general lines with what Darth Rotor has said. It does have a lot to do with how you frame the question. Not everybody sees life as an evidence=fact interaction. Not everyone feels the need to question God. To some people, God is as real as the air we all breathe. Some people interpretate that God is everything that cannot be explained, which of course means that we're assuming that not everything can be explained. Some people interpretate the God operates in the realm of what isn't real, which of course means that we're assuming that no everything is real.

I look at some of the discussions here in other forums: The one at the "Department of Out of Body Possibilities" with Tim. The one at the "Are the real psychics hidden from us?" thread with Maatorc. Take a look at those if you haven't. Look at how many pages are generated. Go through them. What do you see? The same basic question rephrased in a hundred million different combinations, and the subject "evading" it. It's a neverending loop. But perhaps he's not evading it. Perhaps it just escapes his vision of reality. You look at the posts and you get the feeling (at least I do) that it comes to a point where you can almost predict what the person is going to respond to the "question" (which to me is nothing but the "new variation of the old question"). You know that his mind operates in a framework that doesn't accept that other language: The language of proof and evidence.


To some people, God can be real without having to prove him. In fact, having to prove them is already considered a misunderstanding of the essence of God. Some of these people do not claim that he exists, but that they have found them. They will tell you that if you want to see him, you have to find him yourself. And who knows? perhaps it's true. The important thing is that sometimes it really isn't necessary to postulate the question. Believing is something we all do at some point. We will always keep doing it. The true problem is finding the balance between free belief and dangerous superstition.

 

[Dunstan]

I don't really know how to go on, because on one hand, I want you to understand some things about how I view Christianity, but in an internet forum - especially one with Athiests who have bible verses in hand waiting to pounce on you to tell you that you are not being a real Christian because this verse says that - it just doesn't seem right.

Can I ask you this? Without getting into what is a "real Christian" in the sense of disparaging others' beliefs (or their labels for their beliefs), what do you personally consider to be the essential characteristics of Christianity? I gather from your posts in this thread that it's definitely not a literal belief in the Bible, and probably not a belief in all of the Nicene Creed. But if someone thinks that Jesus never really existed, but the philosophy attributed to him is insightful or good moral advice, does that fit your notion of Christianity? (In other words, is being a Christian no different than being a Chomskyite or a Randian, etc.?) Does it mean believing that Jesus was divine and/or rose from the dead?

I'm not asking as a prelude to some "gotcha" question, and I'm willing to put aside for the moment the issue of why you choose to believe whatever it is you believe. I'm just trying to get terminology straight. Sometimes I wonder whether modern, moderate (for lack of better terms) Christians are really espousing anything different from, say, secular humanists.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

It is not faith at all. It's a shame that that idea is so widespread.. but that ain't your fault.
Genuine spiritual knowledge comes from inner experience, not from faith.

I believe most people find no distinction between faith and inner experience. You seem to be splitting the word faith into its components.

Faith can be a necessary prior component to attaining spiritual knowledge. It's reasonable to expect that if someone is going to expend their time and effort in some endeavour they'll need some initial degree of faith that there'll be a meaningful result at the end of it.
That is true with all human endeavour; including things like science.
Even Buddhists, who don't talk much about God, need to have faith that their spiritual practices will produce some meaningful results.

Religion has to do with the spirit/consciousness. The spirit/consciousness is internal. It is not, as yet, intersubjectively observable via any scientific instrument, and may never be.
Methodological naturalism is predicated on the assumption that the subject matter of its investigations will be intersubjectively observable. Therefore to apply this methodology to spirituality is not appropriate.

Your original OP question is whether there is evidence that certain God beliefs are true while others are false. Then in your post you disallow the evidence derived from internal states.
By doing that you have precluded any progress in answering your own question.

No, you are still just talking about all this spiritualism yadda yadda yadda. And you dismiss my question about specific god beliefs as if your spiritualism has no god belief component.

I am not disallowing any evidence, you just don't want to address the specific focus of the question. I want to know about your decision making process which led you to decide certain god beliefs were true and other god beliefs were false. If you have a spiritual argument that your god beliefs are special and god beliefs of another nature are subject to skeptical inquiry, then at least get to the point instead of all these attacks on the question itself and assumptions about the thread topic which really just serve to rationalize why you cannot easily articulate an answer.

I'm just wondering what kind of 'evidence' would really count to you, regarding God beliefs. Presumably something intersubjective, like religious visions shared simultaneously by more than one person.
These have happened in the past, and are predictably derided by the 'skeptical' community. Maybe you wouldn't deride them, I don't know.
If you did then you would have kind of painted yourself into an invulnerable position - not accepting subjective evidence, and not accepting intersubjective evidence.
So it all becomes a discussional dead end really.

The point of my question is what are you using to decide.

It is true, I have yet to see any evidence that one should treat any specific god beliefs as special. They are all god beliefs. It seems rather obvious to me. Yet theists in the thread, including yourself, apparently, don't seem to want to even look at the fact you have 'special' god beliefs and 'regular' god beliefs. All you have addressed so far are your 'special' god beliefs. I have yet to see a theist here even discuss their 'regular' god beliefs, let alone discuss why beliefs in Pele and Zeus are readily dismissed as myths while Jesus or whoever, is believed to not be a myth. (Though I have 3-4 pages to catch up on today's posts in this thread, so maybe someone did address the god beliefs they don't treat as special.)

As to people getting angry with you, well ideally that would never happen. Not being a proponent of Jref orthodoxy I get slated regularly. I can assure you that the vast majority of it here travels in the direction away from you. So every cloud has a silver lining

You haven't been in political threads with me I take it.

I don't take any of the anger in this thread very personal, the anger seems to me to be because someone dared to ask the question. DR doesn't like my politics and that affected his replies in the thread, but I still think the anger is defensive and is about daring to challenge one's beliefs.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

What I was getting at is that if something like falling in love happened only to a small minority in society it would be just as easy for the majority to dismiss it, as with your Napoleon example, as just another batty idea.
The only reason falling in love is accepted as a real and meaningful phenomenon is because it happens to most people.
No other reason.

Likewise, if most people experienced genuine spiritual experience, the phenomenon and its meaningfulness would not be routinely dismissed as it is now.
So it's a kind of mob rule, if you like.

I'm all for poetry. I don't quite get you on that one.

To use this analogy, which I agree actually does have merit, when those pheromones and hormones cause a reaction and an attraction occurs, we fall in love with the person in our vicinity which we react to. Lots of things make or break the relationship, but the idea there is only one person for you in the world, if true, would indeed make love very rare. And love isn't rare. (And there's that whole parent love thing as well, no need to complicate the post.)

Belief in gods also depends on the proximity of the religions you are then exposed to because of where you were born or live or the culture surrounding you. That seems to me to be evidence the god belief components of that religious experience are arbitrary. Maybe the religion needs certain elements in order for you to fall in love with it and maintain the relationship, but the god beliefs themselves do not come from real gods existing in the Universe. If they did, then where you were born would not matter. When you had that inner experience, it shouldn't depend on the religion you are exposed to, yet it is.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

Christ...I was waiting for the 'love' analogy to raise its ugly head. How many strawmen can we fit into one thread?...Athon

I took this more as an analogy to something one may not believe if not experienced but for the person experiencing it, the evidence was there. But with this interpretation, there is evidence for love, while the evidence doesn't support Cupid's existence for example.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

....
And science does contradict it's self. Often.....

You are confusing the scientific process, which is a means of discovery; with the evidence, what you discover; and the subsequent interpretation, which may be multiple.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

Lol, sorry Athon. Your last post was, well, a bit long.. and I felt it was talking at cross-purposes to my point


I don't think so. Muslims Christians and Jews might call it/him/her Allah, God, or Yaweh or whatever, but they agree they're talking about the same God. Hindus have many deities but it is recognised that these are various manifestations of the same Unitary God. Sikhs believe in one God. Buddhists talk less of God, though some strands such as Tibetan have various Gods and Goddesses, seen as real phenomenal entities. Buddhism nevertheless talks about the universal Buddha Nature, which exists as the supreme unitary consciousness behind all phenomena.. very similar to Hinduism's description of Divinity as Sat-Cit-Ananda (Being, Consciousness, Bliss).....

Your views here take great liberties with those actual religions. I think this is wishful thinking on your part. Pele the volcano god and the gods of Greek mythology and Ra the Sun god and coyote who stole fire from heaven are not all essentially the same. You are stretching facts here to fit what you want to see.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

...This is, in fact, pretty much what the modern materialist secular world has done: changed the currently socially acceptable definition of reality along the lines of majority rule.
So it hasn't been me who has been doing the voting.
...

This is quite a distortion of the facts. No one is looking at any majority opinion. Sheesh if we were we'd all be theists, now wouldn't we?

First, the connotation of materialist is BS. That's the lie that only theists are moral or altruistic or kind to others or not greedy. I don't need to be afraid of the wrath of gods to actually be a decent person, thank you. And if you think religion makes you not a material boy, you need to take a closer look at the right wing evangelical political party in this country!

So, the modern naturalist secular world, looks at the evidence and continually follows the evidence rather than relying on religious dogma.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

Yes I am a Christian. But I don't believe in "an invisible man who lives in the sky who rules over the universe and casts down sinners and infidels into a fiery pit of endless torment forever "

Care to tell us about that "Christ" part of your god beliefs?

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

Funny, you consistently are wrong about me. Maybe we ought to get married. (That was a jest.)

The difference is if you clarify your position, I don't call you a liar.

....
My core objection to "Loose Change" is the slander against certain persons about whom I care, and the general willful ignorance in pursuit of that slander....

....
I share some of your frustration with that, but not being in the field, I suspect your frustration is more profound than mine.

Interesting cover story.

Again, implying I'm a liar.

I can see why a pilot would be annoyed at the 911 CT. It's similar to my being annoyed at the implication I must be in on the Big Pharma CT.

But there is an overall theme to these woo beliefs and that is lack of critical thinking. Why attack the pieces when you can attack the root cause instead? It's more effective. So I do have an investment in promoting critical thinking. And there is nothing personal involved in anyone's individual beliefs because I choose to address critical thinking issues.

(BTW, what do you mean by that "you" in your references to the 911 CT? I don't believe that crap. Are you mixing me up with someone else?)

I see that your attempt at equivalence between philosophy and medicine arrives on schedule.

Again, the theists (if you are one, I don't recall) ignore the part of their philosophical mind set which includes god beliefs. This isn't about philosophy. That is the wrapping theists put god beliefs in so they can avoid that cognitive dissonance. Spirituality does not take away from the fact theists have god beliefs they put in a special category and god beliefs they have no trouble dismissing as myths. If someone believes Pe'le makes volcanoes erupt, it isn't spirituality, it's a god belief. If someone believes Jesus and the Biblical God walked on the Earth, that isn't spirituality, that is a god belief.

Note: if three billion people die tomorrow, all at once, it would not matter in the greater scheme of things. In the short term, there would be much suckage, and much sorrow, and doubtless much fear.

There would still be three billion people, and a bit more, on the Earth, who could pick themselves up, dust themselves off, and keep on keeping on.

DR

I don't get the point of this unless you are just reminding us you don't care. I don't think anyone cares that you don't care, DR.