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

[Mobyseven]

Exactly.

To illustrate.. and aping the OP question:

Can anyone provide me 'evidence' to support their belief that black people deserve equal rights to those afforded to white people?

What is there, about any evidence you can offer, which empirically demonstrates that the beliefs of a white-supremacist, in this regard, are false?

Black people and white people (and, surprisingly, a number of other races) are both people. Both are well established to be conscious beings, and thus deserve to be afforded the same rights. Any argument on the basis of differentiating features is likely to fail due to the existence of marginal cases in both the black and white races.

 

[Mobyseven]

There is the Torah, the Koran and the Bible and to my knowledge they all have different versions of the Old Testament. So perhaps you could say Christian Old Testament was redundant since the three use different names for their texts, but the Christians did not throw out the Old Testament when they formed their religion.

[nitpick]What is generally regarded as the Old Testament is the Jewish Tanakh - Torah (Five books of Moses), Nevi'im (Prophets), and Kethuvi'im (Writings). Pardon the poor English representation of the Hebrew words.[/nitpick]

 

[Herzblut]

Black people and white people (and, surprisingly, a number of other races) are both people. Both are well established to be conscious beings, and thus deserve to be afforded the same rights.

What a naive is-ought fallacy!

So, you arbritarily make up "consciousness" to assign rights to people? What about those with limited/non-existing consciousness due to physical damage?

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

A scenario of your own, invented in order to easily dismiss.

I'm sorry, but that's a complete sidestep on your behalf.
All you've done is propose a (questionable) theory (in fact, more a belief) on how you reckon morality originates and develops.
It doesn't address the central question which is what is it about your system of morality that makes you believe it is superior or inferior to the moral system of someone else.
I'm sure you're a decent person, you sound like one. Therefore I have no doubt that your moral system is far superior to that of, say, a eugenicist who proposes that society should exterminate the mentally handicapped.
The question is, why are your moral beliefs better than those of the eugenicist? Can you provide any evidence other than your inner experience, that your beliefs should be adopted by society, rather than his?

It's going to be hard to help you here, pj. Are you telling me I am dismissing the magical method by which morals are determined by making up an unlikely and unproven biological means for moral preferences?

Tell me, are the crows that gather in the thousands in the trees at night near here before flying off to their nightly roosting making moral judgments when they cooperate as a group? I don't see a lot of fighting over who gets which tree branch and it gets pretty crowded.

How does that elephant matriarch raise nice boys? Did you know that when elephants are orphaned by poaching and sometimes culling the boys become extremely rowdy and mean. After figuring out the problem, the naturalists have actually hooked the bad boys up with some mature males and the bad behavior got a lot better. How can elephants know right from wrong? How can they behave poorly when raised without parental influences?

An Elephant Crackup?

Do they have magical morals too?

I'll have to take on the rest of your post later, I'm getting sleepy.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

[nitpick]What is generally regarded as the Old Testament is the Jewish Tanakh - Torah (Five books of Moses), Nevi'im (Prophets), and Kethuvi'im (Writings). Pardon the poor English representation of the Hebrew words.[/nitpick]

Thanks for the info. I know less about the Jewish texts. I should take the time to see how they compare to the Bible one day.

 

[Belz...]

There is external progress and internal progress. Science and technology are wonderful tools for external progress. Spiritual practice is a wonderful tool for internal progress.

Aw, not this crap again.

In a completely evidence-based world view we'd be compelled to treat some people as 'more equal than others'.

More ability does not mean more rights.

The fact that we don't (or try not to) is basically spiritual.

That's funny, considering how some religions treat women, people with disease or disability, etc.

 

[Belz...]

All the Christian bibles I know of, contain both the old and new testaments, with varying amount of content ..

Actually, I've seen at least one edition with only the "new" testament.

 

[Belz...]

You might not notice that it's there until you see what happens when powerful and concerted attempts are made to try to remove this spiritual view of life from society.
Then you get the Soviet Union, Pol Pot, Mao's China.. and yes, folks, Hitler's Germany (in which attempts were made to classify the value of a person on empirical grounds, such as eye colour, shape of head, genetic heritage etc etc..

Godwined. Why am I not surprised, Plum ?

You DO know that Hitler was a Christian, yes ?

 

[plumjam]

It's going to be hard to help you here, pj. Are you telling me I am dismissing the magical method by which morals are determined by making up an unlikely and unproven biological means for moral preferences?

I'm not sure exactly what you're getting at when you say 'magical method'. I'm talking about inner experiences that you, I, and my Auntie Jean have all day long. They're often described as conscience, or intuition, or pity, or empathy, or compassion..etc.. Surely you're familiar with those, so there's nothing magical involved.

Tell me, are the crows that gather in the thousands in the trees at night near here before flying off to their nightly roosting making moral judgments when they cooperate as a group? I don't see a lot of fighting over who gets which tree branch and it gets pretty crowded.
How does that elephant matriarch raise nice boys? Did you know that when elephants are orphaned by poaching and sometimes culling the boys become extremely rowdy and mean. After figuring out the problem, the naturalists have actually hooked the bad boys up with some mature males and the bad behavior got a lot better. How can elephants know right from wrong? How can they behave poorly when raised without parental influences?

An Elephant Crackup?

Do they have magical morals too?

Again you're avoiding the question here. The OP question you posed was aimed at human beings, not crows or elephants. I'm directing the question back at you, a human being, but applying it to beliefs about morality rather than beliefs about God.

Incidentally, I wouldn't be surprised if some of the higher forms of animals do have inner experiences similar to our experiences of conscience, empathy, intuition etc..
But it's pointless discussing it, because to get anywhere you and I would both have to be elephants or dolphins to know for sure the quality of our own experiences.
As humans we both already know that we feel conscience, compassion, empathy etc..
But then of course, you might actually have to try to answer the question.

Enjoy your nap

 

[plumjam]

More ability does not mean more rights.

No? Why shouldn't it?

 

[plumjam]

Godwined. Why am I not surprised, Plum ?

You DO know that Hitler was a Christian, yes ?

You can start your own thread with that one if you like. I'll pop in on it sometime in the 2040s to see how it's going.

 

[ImaginalDisc]

Yeah. Right.


You might want to check. Why not using

http://www.gallup.com/poll/7336/Religion-Gender-Congregation-Divided.aspx

or so as a starting point? Please don't expect me investing further work on it. I already mentioned that with the horse and the water, didn't I?

You do recall that American slaves were encouraged to be Christian because their masters thought it would make them meek if they could anticipate a heavenly reward for being good slave on Earth.

The parallel is obvious.

 

[A Christian Sceptic]

Then why are women more religious than men?

This is off-topic, but I always found it interesting that in cultures where they arrange the marriages, it appears it is often the mothers who do the arranging. Just something I learned in some Anthropology class along the way. Now back to the discussion at hand.

 

[A Christian Sceptic]

There is the Torah, the Koran and the Bible and to my knowledge they all have different versions of the Old Testament. So perhaps you could say Christian Old Testament was redundant since the three use different names for their texts, but the Christians did not throw out the Old Testament when they formed their religion.

Right. I just think it's odd that in many of my discussions with non-christians and Athiests the first place they often go with discussions about Christianity is to the Old Testament. But that's a topic for another thread.

 

[Skeptical Greg]

Actually, I've seen at least one edition with only the "new" testament.

Then it was not a complete copy of the Christian " Holy Bible ", it is was a copy of " The New Testament "..

 

[A Christian Sceptic]

Then you are being profoundly unskeptical.

Wrong, Mobyseven. I'm being profoundly honest.

The question was can I think of any evidence that would lead me to not believe. And I can't think of anything. Might there be some evidence out there to lead me to not believe? - yes. But I can't think of any. If you have some please share it with me - I'd like to know what it is.

 

[A Christian Sceptic]

Godwined. Why am I not surprised, Plum ?

You DO know that Hitler was a Christian, yes ?

Never mind, decided not to go down this direction ....

If you're content with the "Hitler was a Christian" and he's a great example of a Christian, that's fine. Doesn't seem that sceptical to me, though.

 

[Beth]

Right. You seem to have missed the 12 pages that followed the OP.

No. I've read them all. That's what formed my opinion of this thread.

But then, why should I expect you or DR to actually discuss the issues in any thread when you both have a personal dislike of me for unrelated discussions in other threads? DR doesn't like my politics and you don't like my professional medical opinion on vaccinations.

I don't have time to respond to your entire post. Its long and I'm busy with holiday preparations. But I don't dislike you. In general, I don't dislike people for disagreeing with me. I tend to seek them out to converse with. People I dislike I put on ignore. You're not on my ignore list

I do think you are biased with regard to vaccinations; which is not unwarranted given your profession. Due to that bias, I think you are less skeptical of evidence in support of your bias than you are of evidence that contradicts your bias.

That makes your opinion here uninteresting.

And now that we've established that I don't dislike you, does that make my opinion more interesting?

Sorry to clip so much of your response, but I really don't have much time and this thread is moving so quickly I'll never find this post again.

That is plumjam's position. To have that position you have to totally distort the world's religions in order to make those religions represent a belief in the same god. I think that's a stretch very few theologians would agree is possible. It's wishful thinking.

I disagree. The few theologians I know would too, though I likely have a biased sample to go on there. It's pretty well established that Christians and Muslims are both branches off the Jewish religion. Hinduism, as was pointed out earlier in this thread, have no problem with accepting Jesus and the Abrahamic God as representations of god. It really dosn't seem much of a stretch to me at all. Nor, apparently, is it a problem for any of the theists who are posting here. Apparently, it's only a 'stretch' for the god beliefs of the athiests who are posting here. Hmmm. That's interesting. I wonder why.

You ask for evidence why their god beliefs are true and other god beliefs are false, the response you have gotten over and over again is that they don't believe that all other god beliefs are false. Then you insist that they must consider some god beliefs false. And they do. My reading of the responses you've recieved is that god beliefs that conflict with empirical evidence can be considered false. Beliefs that do not conflict with empirical evidence (generally due to unfalsifiability) are not necessarily considered false. It seems to me a pretty clear demarkation of why they consider their beliefs as true and some of the other god beliefs false.

 

[Darth Rotor]

*head asplode*

agnosticism != magical middle ground between theism and atheism

Atheism is the opposite of theism.

Agnosticism is the opposite of gnosticism.

This is not a freaking hard concept to grasp, people.

While that is a useful observation, it does not matter to the question, and assumption, that I was responding to in art's comment.

@arthwollipot: it occurs to me that ready availability, within a given cultural setting, influences which path one chooses, or may be more likely to choose from among available options. I think that was part of one of the points you were making.

@skeptigirl:

I looked back at posts 1-18, and I was unfair to lump all of the collected sentiment expressed in those posts into your position. That embodiment of groupthink influenced how I responsed to you, and I ended up making you the focus, as you were the thread's originator, for more input than solely your own. That was not entirely fair to you, and the input that was only yours. I accept the responsibility for being unfair to you.

The collective sentiment expressed in the opening interchanges was that a few someones wanted a "theist" to come and play. To more clearly answer to you why I bothered to participate at all: someone wanted a game.

So I chimed in, and the game was on.

This seemed to encourage a few others to participate. The complaint about people not playing by the script you may have expected is rooted in the OP, as noted previously by others, and me.

To misquote Evita, from the musical:

The actress hasn't learned the lines you'd like to hear.

Wow, only anger and non-god believers.

You may wish to bait the hook with more care, as you don't always catch the fish you think will bite on a given worm.

The choice is yours.

DR

 

[V23]

I cant believe this thread has lasted this long . . .