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What actually do JREF religious believers believe?

RoseMontague said:
I think we are discussing What actually do JREF religious believers believe?.

Several of the JREF believers have addressed the OP here.
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I was compelled to say this just as you said it. Yes, we are discussing what JREF religious believers BELIEVE and shouldn't put them on trial. :) You are telling us what you believe. The questions being asked of you are difficult ones, but they sometimes are asking for proof, which can be beyond the scope of what you believe.

Still, if you can answer even some of those, I think we are gaining insight into how a believer thinks and, even perhaps, why.
 
Minarvia said:
I was compelled to say this just as you said it. Yes, we are discussing what JREF religious believers BELIEVE and shouldn't put them on trial. :) You are telling us what you believe. The questions being asked of you are difficult ones, but they sometimes are asking for proof, which can be beyond the scope of what you believe.

Still, if you can answer even some of those, I think we are gaining insight into how a believer thinks and, even perhaps, why.
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I am gaining insight on the other position as well.
 
DreamingNaiad said:
There's evidence for Santa or the Tooth Fairy!?
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As a matter of fact, yes.

Parent says to child: put your tooth under the pillow, and while you are asleep the Tooth Fairy will replace it with a sixpence. Child does so, goes to sleep, and in the morning – hey, there's a sixpence! From the child's point of view, that's powerful evidence; and what makes it even more impressive is that it's repeatable. Another tooth, another sixpence.

Just in case anyone wondered: no, I don't believe in the Tooth Fairy. But I think it's quite a good analogy for religious belief. The child hasn't yet learned to apply sceptical criticism to what its parents say, and the same applies to religious believers and their teachers.

Another point of similarity is that it's quite nice to look forward to getting sixpence, and it's quite nice to look forward to going to heaven, I suppose. And perhaps as the child gets older it may begin to suspect that if it is heard to express doubt, there may be no more sixpences, which would be a pity.
 
Soapy Sam said:
Not sure how serious your question is- but there is a possibility that if universes do start when a black hole is created in another universe, followed by Guth-style inflation, then it may actually be rather easy to create universes, given something a few orders of magnitude more powerful than the LHC to manufacture quantum black holes.
The word would then probably be the local equivalent of "On!"
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That may indeed be, but as you pretty much lay it out yourself, I don't think many theists want to take that route.

For a start, as you say, that would put an event horizon between us and the creator. Then not only said creator wouldn't possibly know that you even exist inside that black hole, but even when you die, there's no information from or about you that can go OUT the event horizon to the creator.

Not to mention, that being able to make a black hole wouldn't mean he can also make a non-corporeal universe for you to live in forever. In fact, in any case, he'd be thoroughly unable to suspend the normal laws of physics for you, either before or after you die. Just because he can somehow dump a bunch of energy in one place doesn't mean he can also suspend the laws of physics every time you pray really nice, or indeed at all, ever.

Plus that brings us back to those questions of mine about whether a creator would actually care about you. I'm pretty sure that if the guys at the LHC sometime create a super-giant black hole, they'd have at most a theoretical interest in whether life can exist inside it, if the singularity in the middle goes unstable. They wouldn't feel deeply hurt that humanoid Xnorg in their black hole wanks in the shower, nor intervene if one humanoid girl in their black hole there is about to get raped. Again, they wouldn't even know it.

Even allowing for some kind of wormhole isn't really doing much, because that still wouldn't mean they have a view into every bedroom and dark alley and cave where someone got trapped by a cave-in. They'd have some viewport somewhere on the grand scale universe there, but that's about it.

What you'd get there is a deity which is the polar opposite of omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient and omnibenevolent. You'd have a creator with zero power, knowledge or even the faintest intent to hold your hand and see to it that everything turns right for you.

Would many people want a god like that? I seriously doubt it.
 
Mark

The article you cited doesn't say remotely what you said in your posts.

You can take a person who believes that the death penalty is fine and dandy for some crimes, and with the use of magnets have him suddenly no longer believe it's acceptable, then change him back again.
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versus

The researchers believe that TMS interfered with subjects’ ability to interpret others’ intentions, forcing them to rely more on outcomes to make their judgments. “It doesn’t completely reverse people’s moral judgments,” Saxe says. “It just biases them.”
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punshhh said:
*I like to visualise spirit as behind a surface like the surface of water. Imagine a water surface vertical like a wall in your room. You can blow and the surface ripples. You can imagine a realm or an artefact the other side of the surface just a few centimeters from your face which has come from an infinite potential of forms, infinitely far away in time in space, or vastly different from what is on your side of the surface. Push your face against the surface and see the other realm. Perhaps we live in the interface between these two realms.
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Is that a quote from a bad Sword And Sorcery novel?
 
punshhh said:
That first insight experienced by a stone age person, has been watered down and exploited over the years.
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Since we have absolutely no way of knowing anything about that 'insight', how can we conclude that it has been 'watered down' rather than concentrated?
 
punshhh said:
....
With this hindsight humanity is in a position to improve the lot of life or diminish it. To improve it is a gift and religions are systems of teaching this gift.
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No offense but, this is intolerable fantasy.

I can see now why Rose hasn't had disrespectful replies. She's just telling us how her god beliefs apply to her personally.

Punshhh in his post, on the other hand, is making an unsupportable claim about how he believes gods improve the world. It's hard not to react to that lie, especially when the world is in a round of excessive turmoil fueled by god believers who want their countries' laws and governments to follow the believers' religious beliefs and they are willing to kill anyone who opposes that goal.

I'm going to guess Punshhh believes his god beliefs are essentially different from the god beliefs of those in the Middle East that are currently fueling civil wars. I'm guessing he also believes, for some reason I'm sure he'll tell us, that the Christians in the Ugandan government are also 'different', when after encouragement from American Evangelicals that homosexuality is a sin, passed a law making homosexual acts a death penalty offense.


The 'gift' you speak of, Punshhh, reminds me of one of those gifts with the evil catch in the stories about entities that grant wishes and no matter how the human words the request some, the entity finds a way to add some horrible thing in with the wish. Religions are teaching the gift? Riight.:rolleyes:
 
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RoseMontague said:
This is where we disagree. I think science will eventually prove there is a God. The wiki article on Hawking radiation is a good one and efforts to prove it are getting close. My personal opinion is that the more we find out about the universe the closer we get to finding God.
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That would be the death of faith.

God is somehow imbedded in the universe?
 
Mashuna said:
On occasion? I see the net contribution of religion as very much in debit.



So the high point of religion was in the stone age, and it's all been downhill since then?
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The discovery of fire led to decadence so we lost that originally pure insight into the unknown.

Mankind was not meant to eat cooked food and sleep warm, we gave up the divine for three hots and a cot.
 
punshhh said:
Your dry wit, like a Margarita with plenty of salt on the rim.


Really what does science say about spirit? other than that is is not required in the explanations of physics or biology.
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The scientific evidence says "spirits" are human invented fiction.
 
tsig said:
He saw fairies in the foliage beyond the event horizon of the formless.
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They must have been around when the stone age man had the first insight and they have tipped punshhh a mystic wink.
 
punshhh said:
None, there is nothing to say either way. It depends on what one is observing, science may be looking in the wrong place.



These poets do allude to subjective freedoms, a subjective interpretation of the experience of life is dull and mundane when reduced to biology. Like one's feet are set in concrete.
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You're tossing out science because you think biology is dull and mundane?
 
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