Is it not strange that all religions are all parochial in the beginning. An omnipotent god would surely have spoken inside the head of every extant sapiens simultaneously….such an event, if proven would be hard to argue against…
“Impossible for humans to grasp even a fraction” is an understatement. A caterpillar would have a better idea what’s up with the new prime minister, inasmuch as a caterpillar and a prime minister are both material organisms with similar basic imperatives.
Religions have moved away from the anthropomorphic gods – Greek, Norse etc. – and generally to the lord of the universe model, one that doesn’t have a beard, or a fixed residence somewhere in the sky. That’s good for them because it isn’t as laughable, but it kind of subtracts from the meaning. What does it mean to have a lord of the universe, how would you know the difference? You certainly can’t define any expectations from first principles, like God would naturally have something to say to a certain species on one of the planets.
I had a massive argument with my mrs over solstice. My 7yo Grandson asked me why I didn’t believe in Jesus (he goes to a catholic school) so I explained that if he wanted to be a scientist (he says he wants to study robotics at university) then he must compare the bible with historical and archeological books. And also compare the bible with fictional books like Harry Potter. Then decide whether Jebus is fictional or factual? The mrs tore a strip off me for brain washing him into being an atheist and that science cannot explain metaphysical mysteries (she see’s mediums from time to time)…hey ho c’est la vie…
Not the first people to struggle with this aspect of child rearing, if there’s such a thing as giving them a chance to make up their own minds, whether to take this preposterous bullshit on faith or not.
I don’t think either side has much chance to win the day with argument or pedagogy, but if I were looking for a strategy I think I might go to Comparative Religions. March Jesus, April Mohammed, May Krishna, June Buddha. Then July is atheist vacation, and by then, they’ll be really happy to be atheists.
M27, I, too, have been severely castigated for planting atheistic thoughts into my grandchildren. Relax. There is such a thing as critical thinking. You will be remembered well for your despicable advice by those who have learned something through it.
@M27Holts try the Wikipedia cognitive bias article for your grandson. If you’re feeling especially brave suggest your wife look at the Wikipedia God of the gaps article.
Tell the missus: what I’m saying isn’t atheism, it’s agnosticism. The first is a religious position, the second is philosophical. Not, there is no god: more like, no-one knows a thing about god.
The difference between an agnostic and a mystic is that a mystic is a believer who does not believe, and an agnostic is an unbeliever who does believe.
In my case, I believe that two plus two equals four. Not five, not even if you bribe me, nor three, not even if you threaten me. Two plus two is four, anywhere, everywhere, forever and ever, amen. That’s the truth, and the truth hurts, but then it sets you free.
I mean, I agree that there’s an unanswerable question here, but to the extent that it’s practically unaskable. Without any tangible characterization of the proposed God, I can’t tell what I’m supposed to be believing, and at this point the question vanishes.
The proposers of God existence normally have a specific characterization, and one can read up about Yahweh, Vishnu et al., and possibly end up drawing a conclusion about them. If the conclusion is negative, are you then a Abrahamic/Hindu-atheist, but Jain-agnostic because you didn’t get around to studying that branch?
No. If you don’t have any faith in any religion’s propositions, then you are atheist – you don’t have any belief in God (or whatever, Buddhism might not have a creator deity but there’s faith involved.) Agnostics are atheists with a distaste for plain speaking.
To put it another way, “do you happen to know, is there a God?” is phony question. People who believe in that stuff don’t know there is a God any more than we do, in the sense that we know things. They accept it on faith, and they believe. If you “don’t know”, then you don’t believe.
It does seem to me that saying “I don’t know if there is a god” is in fact logically distinct from saying “I know there is no god”. Neither statement requires any specific characterization of god beyond what would be universally accepted, i.e., “powerful supernatural being”. (You can make a broader statement by substituting “the supernatural” for “god”, but the logic works out the same — “not knowing” is different from “knowing there is not”).
My Mrs likes to cling to the delusion that your consciousness somehow exists after the brain is dead….thus, people who claim to be able to comunicate with the “spirits” just feed her delusion…oh well…
Sure, “I don’t know if there is a god” is different from “I know there is no god”, but they have in common that they’re logically vacuous. There’s no telling how many people utter one or the other of these assertions at one time or another, but they haven’t really said anything.
In either case, there’s no basis for “what is a god.” Without an acceptable definition of “god”, one of them says there isn’t anything that anyone could define as god, which seems rather rash. The other, to put a charitable interpretation on it, says that without having defined it, it’s hard to know whether it exists or not. Which is true, but not very interesting.
This is why I’m saying we don’t “know”, we either believe or don’t believe. If you “don’t know”, you obviously don’t believe, like any other atheist.
Now, if you believe in a soul or something of that nature, that’s a fairly definite matter that is likewise subject to faith belief, but a person can reasonably say, yes/no/don’t know – and as far as I know, it’s a feature of every religion. Buddhism is I think pretty vague on God, and Jainism manages without a creator, but they have souls (Buddhists say no, but obviously it’s a fine point, something gets reincarnated.)
I thought I did supply an acceptable definition of god: “powerful supernatural being”. I don’t believe any such thing exists, but I see no logical reason why one couldn’t exist. It’s just a question of evidence. Depending on one’s opinion of the evidence one might be a believer, or an atheist, or an agnostic. All three are logically tenable positions.
What is “supernatural being”? That is completely open ended.
And from there, what “powerful” means is also open ended. How does Supernatural Being exercise this power? Can power meaningfully exist, in the absence of something opposing it I mean, opposing in any sense, like inertia of a bullet opposing the power of a exploding gunpowder, etc. Is supernatural power the same, or is this also an open ended idea?
Suppose I’m convinced by the English translations of Lao Tsu etc., and there’s a tao natural order that I can find and adhere to, to my great benefit. It’s origin is … unknown. It’s power … well, there’s really no escape from it. Is that order, itself, a Powerful Supernatural Being? But here I am basically just saying, who knows how this all started, but the universe is deterministic, with whatever random factors mixed in in such a way as to be irrelevant, and now apparently I believe in Powerful Supernatural Being?
The Abrahamic god is clearly a man made fictional character, aling with Thor, Zeus, all those animal gods and the flying spaghetti monster…The star, sol is the creator of life on planet earth, thus sun worship is far more valid IMO…
I see Trump has played his Trump card that the God the stupid moronic American no- nowts think exists to protect the land of the free, saved him for a purpose….the stupid septics feserve sll they get for voting in thebprange one…
I’m somewhat into sun worship myself. I’m not sure life on other planets elsewhere in the univorse would have the same reverence for our sun, but who cares?
Franklin Graham, son of Billy—one of those classic, homegrown examples of slight decline from one American generation to the next; his dad could sometimes be a bigot, but at least the man could preach—kowtowed to Trump, directing his prayer more to the man than to God. “The last four years, there were times I’m sure you thought it was pretty dark,” he said. “But look what God has done.”
Donn Cave — I tried to parse your objections, but they don’t make much sense to me. I think you are being willfully obtuse. I think the intuitive idea of a “powerful supernatural being” is perfectly obvious and coherent. Stepping down from the level of an omnipotent creator God, I can still come up with many examples, for example the stereotypical wish-granting genie who, at your request, can do impossible things like raising mountains or bringing dead people back to life. I know you think such a being is impossible — so do I! But if it turned out we were wrong, and if you were to encounter such a being, how would you characterize it? Would “powerful” and “supernatural” really seem like inappropriate adjectives?
Oh, sure, you can come up with an idea of something you don’t believe in. You can come up with examples, but what we’re talking about, I believe, is a categorical statement, “I don’t know if there is anything that may be reasonably defined as God”, and there’s the open end.
The other side of this is the notion that, if you’re an atheist, you’re say that after discounting your handful of imaginary deities, you’ve concluded that for all reasonable ideas of what God may be, none of them exist. That’s subject to the same absurd categorical statement about an undefinable category. Atheists don’t need to know that, they just don’t believe, in the religious sense.
The lady of the house noticed me writing about this and kind of trapped me into discussing it, which was awkward because she has taken after her father who professed agnosticism. Because there’s mystery, whereof we cannot know.
If you’re an atheist, no mystery, right? Nonsense. But his brother if I remember right was tangled up with Madeline Murray O’Hair, who … well, anyone is welcome to be an atheist, but she wasn’t necessarily the ideal representative, and maybe from that scene, Dad had a picture of atheism quite like that. Reject all mystery, faith based materialism all the way. People like that give atheism a bad name.
I still don’t understand your objection. I can come up with a lot of ideas I don’t believe in, but the fact I don’t believe in them doesn’t mean those ideas don’t make sense. It doesn’t even mean that some of those ideas might not be true, despite my disbelief. I don’t believe in God, but since I am not infallible myself I have to acknowledge the possibility that I might be wrong. I think the probability that I’m wrong is quite low — that’s what makes me an atheist rather than an agnostic — but I can’t rule it out entirely. Can you? If you can, then you are as closed-minded as one of those Christian fundamentalist who say they wouldn’t doubt a word of scripture even if Jesus himself appeared and told them to. (Sorry, can’t find the quote, but it did go something crazy like that).
Just like quantum physics, which is based on probabilities, any idea can be tested for probability. The idea that an anthropomorphic god chooses to communicate to people, by talking in their heads is so preposterous, its probability is vanishingly low…end of
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The humans did such a lousy job
Is it not strange that all religions are all parochial in the beginning. An omnipotent god would surely have spoken inside the head of every extant sapiens simultaneously….such an event, if proven would be hard to argue against…
What would God do, if there were one? Absurd.
“Impossible for humans to grasp even a fraction” is an understatement. A caterpillar would have a better idea what’s up with the new prime minister, inasmuch as a caterpillar and a prime minister are both material organisms with similar basic imperatives.
Religions have moved away from the anthropomorphic gods – Greek, Norse etc. – and generally to the lord of the universe model, one that doesn’t have a beard, or a fixed residence somewhere in the sky. That’s good for them because it isn’t as laughable, but it kind of subtracts from the meaning. What does it mean to have a lord of the universe, how would you know the difference? You certainly can’t define any expectations from first principles, like God would naturally have something to say to a certain species on one of the planets.
I had a massive argument with my mrs over solstice. My 7yo Grandson asked me why I didn’t believe in Jesus (he goes to a catholic school) so I explained that if he wanted to be a scientist (he says he wants to study robotics at university) then he must compare the bible with historical and archeological books. And also compare the bible with fictional books like Harry Potter. Then decide whether Jebus is fictional or factual? The mrs tore a strip off me for brain washing him into being an atheist and that science cannot explain metaphysical mysteries (she see’s mediums from time to time)…hey ho c’est la vie…
Not the first people to struggle with this aspect of child rearing, if there’s such a thing as giving them a chance to make up their own minds, whether to take this preposterous bullshit on faith or not.
I don’t think either side has much chance to win the day with argument or pedagogy, but if I were looking for a strategy I think I might go to Comparative Religions. March Jesus, April Mohammed, May Krishna, June Buddha. Then July is atheist vacation, and by then, they’ll be really happy to be atheists.
M27, I, too, have been severely castigated for planting atheistic thoughts into my grandchildren. Relax. There is such a thing as critical thinking. You will be remembered well for your despicable advice by those who have learned something through it.
Oooh Castigation….painful…🤣
@M27Holts try the Wikipedia cognitive bias article for your grandson. If you’re feeling especially brave suggest your wife look at the Wikipedia God of the gaps article.
M27Holtz:
Tell the missus: what I’m saying isn’t atheism, it’s agnosticism. The first is a religious position, the second is philosophical. Not, there is no god: more like, no-one knows a thing about god.
The difference between an agnostic and a mystic is that a mystic is a believer who does not believe, and an agnostic is an unbeliever who does believe.
In my case, I believe that two plus two equals four. Not five, not even if you bribe me, nor three, not even if you threaten me. Two plus two is four, anywhere, everywhere, forever and ever, amen. That’s the truth, and the truth hurts, but then it sets you free.
Agnosticism is a dodge.
I mean, I agree that there’s an unanswerable question here, but to the extent that it’s practically unaskable. Without any tangible characterization of the proposed God, I can’t tell what I’m supposed to be believing, and at this point the question vanishes.
The proposers of God existence normally have a specific characterization, and one can read up about Yahweh, Vishnu et al., and possibly end up drawing a conclusion about them. If the conclusion is negative, are you then a Abrahamic/Hindu-atheist, but Jain-agnostic because you didn’t get around to studying that branch?
No. If you don’t have any faith in any religion’s propositions, then you are atheist – you don’t have any belief in God (or whatever, Buddhism might not have a creator deity but there’s faith involved.) Agnostics are atheists with a distaste for plain speaking.
To put it another way, “do you happen to know, is there a God?” is phony question. People who believe in that stuff don’t know there is a God any more than we do, in the sense that we know things. They accept it on faith, and they believe. If you “don’t know”, then you don’t believe.
It does seem to me that saying “I don’t know if there is a god” is in fact logically distinct from saying “I know there is no god”. Neither statement requires any specific characterization of god beyond what would be universally accepted, i.e., “powerful supernatural being”. (You can make a broader statement by substituting “the supernatural” for “god”, but the logic works out the same — “not knowing” is different from “knowing there is not”).
My Mrs likes to cling to the delusion that your consciousness somehow exists after the brain is dead….thus, people who claim to be able to comunicate with the “spirits” just feed her delusion…oh well…
Sure, “I don’t know if there is a god” is different from “I know there is no god”, but they have in common that they’re logically vacuous. There’s no telling how many people utter one or the other of these assertions at one time or another, but they haven’t really said anything.
In either case, there’s no basis for “what is a god.” Without an acceptable definition of “god”, one of them says there isn’t anything that anyone could define as god, which seems rather rash. The other, to put a charitable interpretation on it, says that without having defined it, it’s hard to know whether it exists or not. Which is true, but not very interesting.
This is why I’m saying we don’t “know”, we either believe or don’t believe. If you “don’t know”, you obviously don’t believe, like any other atheist.
Now, if you believe in a soul or something of that nature, that’s a fairly definite matter that is likewise subject to faith belief, but a person can reasonably say, yes/no/don’t know – and as far as I know, it’s a feature of every religion. Buddhism is I think pretty vague on God, and Jainism manages without a creator, but they have souls (Buddhists say no, but obviously it’s a fine point, something gets reincarnated.)
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I thought I did supply an acceptable definition of god: “powerful supernatural being”. I don’t believe any such thing exists, but I see no logical reason why one couldn’t exist. It’s just a question of evidence. Depending on one’s opinion of the evidence one might be a believer, or an atheist, or an agnostic. All three are logically tenable positions.
What is “supernatural being”? That is completely open ended.
And from there, what “powerful” means is also open ended. How does Supernatural Being exercise this power? Can power meaningfully exist, in the absence of something opposing it I mean, opposing in any sense, like inertia of a bullet opposing the power of a exploding gunpowder, etc. Is supernatural power the same, or is this also an open ended idea?
Suppose I’m convinced by the English translations of Lao Tsu etc., and there’s a tao natural order that I can find and adhere to, to my great benefit. It’s origin is … unknown. It’s power … well, there’s really no escape from it. Is that order, itself, a Powerful Supernatural Being? But here I am basically just saying, who knows how this all started, but the universe is deterministic, with whatever random factors mixed in in such a way as to be irrelevant, and now apparently I believe in Powerful Supernatural Being?
The Abrahamic god is clearly a man made fictional character, aling with Thor, Zeus, all those animal gods and the flying spaghetti monster…The star, sol is the creator of life on planet earth, thus sun worship is far more valid IMO…
I see Trump has played his Trump card that the God the stupid moronic American no- nowts think exists to protect the land of the free, saved him for a purpose….the stupid septics feserve sll they get for voting in thebprange one…
I’m somewhat into sun worship myself. I’m not sure life on other planets elsewhere in the univorse would have the same reverence for our sun, but who cares?
Franklin Graham, son of Billy—one of those classic, homegrown examples of slight decline from one American generation to the next; his dad could sometimes be a bigot, but at least the man could preach—kowtowed to Trump, directing his prayer more to the man than to God. “The last four years, there were times I’m sure you thought it was pretty dark,” he said. “But look what God has done.”
Donn Cave — I tried to parse your objections, but they don’t make much sense to me. I think you are being willfully obtuse. I think the intuitive idea of a “powerful supernatural being” is perfectly obvious and coherent. Stepping down from the level of an omnipotent creator God, I can still come up with many examples, for example the stereotypical wish-granting genie who, at your request, can do impossible things like raising mountains or bringing dead people back to life. I know you think such a being is impossible — so do I! But if it turned out we were wrong, and if you were to encounter such a being, how would you characterize it? Would “powerful” and “supernatural” really seem like inappropriate adjectives?
Oh, sure, you can come up with an idea of something you don’t believe in. You can come up with examples, but what we’re talking about, I believe, is a categorical statement, “I don’t know if there is anything that may be reasonably defined as God”, and there’s the open end.
The other side of this is the notion that, if you’re an atheist, you’re say that after discounting your handful of imaginary deities, you’ve concluded that for all reasonable ideas of what God may be, none of them exist. That’s subject to the same absurd categorical statement about an undefinable category. Atheists don’t need to know that, they just don’t believe, in the religious sense.
The lady of the house noticed me writing about this and kind of trapped me into discussing it, which was awkward because she has taken after her father who professed agnosticism. Because there’s mystery, whereof we cannot know.
If you’re an atheist, no mystery, right? Nonsense. But his brother if I remember right was tangled up with Madeline Murray O’Hair, who … well, anyone is welcome to be an atheist, but she wasn’t necessarily the ideal representative, and maybe from that scene, Dad had a picture of atheism quite like that. Reject all mystery, faith based materialism all the way. People like that give atheism a bad name.
I still don’t understand your objection. I can come up with a lot of ideas I don’t believe in, but the fact I don’t believe in them doesn’t mean those ideas don’t make sense. It doesn’t even mean that some of those ideas might not be true, despite my disbelief. I don’t believe in God, but since I am not infallible myself I have to acknowledge the possibility that I might be wrong. I think the probability that I’m wrong is quite low — that’s what makes me an atheist rather than an agnostic — but I can’t rule it out entirely. Can you? If you can, then you are as closed-minded as one of those Christian fundamentalist who say they wouldn’t doubt a word of scripture even if Jesus himself appeared and told them to. (Sorry, can’t find the quote, but it did go something crazy like that).
Just like quantum physics, which is based on probabilities, any idea can be tested for probability. The idea that an anthropomorphic god chooses to communicate to people, by talking in their heads is so preposterous, its probability is vanishingly low…end of
The real problem is fighting for all religious beliefs to be classified as psychosis…