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Believers advise me that if I require evidence for God, I must first trust in God by accepting his words entirely on faith. Once that trust is honestly extended, God will show me the evidence, and I will know the truth. Strangely, after this supposed enlightenment, I will still not be able to share that God-given data with anyone else. The evidence is in the spirit of God, which is unlike anything I've ever known before. The fact that I am not one step closer to providing evidence for God's existence shouldn't bother me because my soul is saved. I ask the theist, can you not clearly see how you have tricked yourself into believing? Why would your God require self-deception as a requirement for salvation? The response is always the same as if it were designed to reinforce adherence to the faith. "I know God through personal revelation." They dodge the question that sets them free, and I walk away feeling as if religion has taken from these people all rationality.

paul1967 8 May 11
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42 comments

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1

At one time when I was a believer, but was finding evidence that it wasn't true, I prayed many times to god to show me something that would convince me. I even said to god change my thoughts if I'm going down the wrong path. The only answer I got was nothing at all.
You really have to try hard to be convinced by no evidence that there's something there that you just can't see or touch.

Believers are blind to such facts.

I think the point is that there is, at least for many, the perception of something. About 90% of the answers I get to the question, what convinced you, was "my personal experience." When asked what that experience was, the answers are often a feeling (love, acceptance, relief), all very powerful influencers to a primate mind. I believe religion is a virus-like thing that a small percentage of people are born immune to, and the cure is a resolutely secular community.

9

OK, I have a house in Florida, it is worth $1,000,000 dollars, and I will sell it to you for $100,000, but you must accept it on faith first, and pay me, then I will show it to you. Tell them that, and don't hold your breath to see the money come rolling in.

Of course you have to promise that if they don't have enpugh faith they can't see the house. They just have to pretend its there! If they don't see it it is them at fault!

8

I tried it. Nothing happened. No filling of my heart with joy. No enlightenment. And no love. The m'er effing Baptists I was talking to were still slimy MLMers.

Christianity is a mindf%cking lobotomy. It is the losing proposition to Pascal's Wager. You give up your integrity and commit yourself to a lifetime of stupidity and hate. What a great bargain. What a great god! (Not)

The theistic reply is you did it wrong. My reply is, it's a strange imaginary God you believe in. More vile than your imaginary devil.

@paul1967 Exactly. What sort of God offers a promise and then maybe says yes or maybe says no. No, either the god is God, or it's BS to manipulate.

But the Christian god in particular is revealed to be fiction because of evolution. Evolution disproves the Creation fantasy and thus the Christian dogma of human sacrifice. As if human sacrifice would be relevant to: THE God! Of course, the whole of cosmology disproves the Creation myth as well, but perfectly agrees with evolution. What a coincidence.

7

When asked, "What would it take for you to become a believer"? A good retort is "I don't know, but if there is a god, then He/She would know EXACTLY what it would take. And as of yet never has shown squat". God wouldn't make it a puzzle if it were important that I believe. Just my .02 cents.

7

God answered my prayers when I was a Christian at about the same rate as they are being answered now that I’m not. In fact, I think more are answered because I’m not waiting on someone else to do it

Whenever there's a disaster, and I hear people say, "I'll pray for them." I reply, "try doing for them instead of praying for them. You can feel good about doing something instead of feeling good about doing nothing."

@paul1967 That was one of my biggest questions when i was a christian. God is supposed to control everything so why did he allow the tragedy to happen just so people could pray that he would fix it. Why didn't god stop it from happening in the first place and why does god have to put us through pain so that we will come worship him

@abyers1970 If there is a “Creator” he doesn’t interact with me in any detectable way. If the Bible is his attempt at communicating with me, it’s reassuring message of love is lost on me. The Bible’s failure to match scientific observations and testable theories only fuels my doubt of his existence. The Bible speaks of a vengeful angry God who is more vile than any dictator in human history. These facts seems to be ignored by those who worship him and I can’t for the life of me understand why.

@paul1967 The God of the Bible will kill a couple for lying about selling a piece of land and kill women and children of opposing tribes that did not harm the Jewish people but yet he calls a man that slept with another mans wife and had her husband killed in a battler the "Apple of his eye?

@abyers1970 None of what you said seems to matter to a Christian. I hear, yeah but that’s the Old Testament as if it was a completely different God. Or they will say, you don’t know the mind of God so you can’t judge his actions. My favorite is when they blame the victims. I don’t know how they close themselves off so fully from reality.

@paul1967 Here's the funny part of it all and i never realized this until i left christianity. Jesus said that you don't change one tittle of the law. A tittle is the little squiggly lines in Aramaic. So whatever the law is in the Old Testament Jesus said don't change it. However Paul comes along and says that the law is no longer good and we don't live by the law anymore. So who do you choose? Jesus or Paul. Most christians seems to choose Pauls interpretations instead of Jesus. One of the many contradictions in the bible.

@abyers1970 I’ve debated that point with a fair number of Christians. If you like quality Christian documentaries, this is an excellent description of how Paul took over the Christian religion.

@paul1967 I'll check it out. I may have watched it before. This is the video that made me open up my eyes about Christianity

Jesus never said he was God. His disciples said that. I believe that Jesus lived and he probrably performed what could be considered Metaphysical miracles. I know hypnosis and i can tell you some things i've learned to do could be considered miracles in their times but it's all mental.

@abyers1970 I watched the entire video. It was very interesting.

I don’t know if Jesus was a real person or a legend, but if I had to come down on one side or the other I would say he was probably a real person. As far as metaphysical miracles, All I can say is people see and believe what they want to see and believe.

7

"I know God through personal revelation."

My reply: I believe in the heart of every person is melted cheese. It was a personal revelation. Believe anything you want. Doesn't make it true.

6

I feel the Street Epistemologists have the best refutation of this sort of self-delusional thinking: How reliable can faith be as a method of obtaining truth if the Muslim, Jew, Hindu, Christian, etc., are all convinced of the truth of their faiths?

6

I say where was your good when an innocent journalist had his head cut off by a saw? The guy that did the chopping believed just as much as you. Your God's a dick.

5

Self delusion is a powerful force and ultimately self destructive.

Agreed...People choose to lie to themselves because this way it makes sense to them ... LOL...filling that void... LOL

4

Delusional thinking

bobwjr Level 10 May 12, 2020
4

I've got a bridge you can buy, but you can't se it till I get the money.

It's even more nefarious than that because I'm still alive, and I can tell others that you're a fraud. Christianity avoids that bad press by silencing you, so they can keep selling more and more bridges. "I have a magical bridge I'm selling that will allow you passage over all your evil sins and straight into your new glorious afterlife. It will be there for you when you need it. Only one left so, don't miss out."

4

It reminds me of the bag of chips that promises a price and says: “no purchase required... details inside”.

4

I don't think any of them actually read the whole bible, they just memorize the parts that their preachers told them and recite them back. That does not require any critical thinking skills or logic. Some are incapable of thinking for themselves. The Muslims are told how to recite the Quran, what time of day to recite it, and how to read it. They are not allowed to understand it. Christianity and Islam and Judaism are the same part of a three sided coin. They supposedly worship the same invisible imaginary God, but they believe that only their side of the coin is the right way, and each kills the other sides in the name of that god. There is no logic in that way of thinking. How about the Hindus and their multiple unseen imaginary gods. Does any of it make sense. You will never get any logical and intelligent answer from any of them. Blind faith is the only answer that they will give you.

Over the years I have asked more than one xian if they believed in a talking snake and a talking donkey -- and in each occasion, they had NO idea what I was talking about. I could kinda let the donkey thing slide, because it is perhaps a little less known (by most xians) but......the snake! It is central to the "Fall of mankind", yet, they could not relate. Go figure. 🙂 Larry in western Kentucky

I was raised Catholic. The entire time I went to Catholic church we were discourage from reading the Bible, telling us that they will teach us all we needed to know.

I had never picked up a Bible until I was a teenager and started going to a Baptist church with my best friend. It made no sense then, and it makes no sense now.

4

"Do you hear God's voice speaking to you?" Minister..."At times of need"...Christian followers..."He is a Holy man".

Lawyer..."Why did you kill that man?"...Accused..."The Lord spoke to me"...Christian Jury..."Guilty by reason of insanity"...guess you can't have your cake and eat it too.

Well, that's an improvement of a sort. There was a time the accused would have been called a profit instead of insane. So secularism is making the faithful more aware.

4

Self serving bs.

4

We in the UK and much of our old Commonwealth have a wonder word to reply to this...
BOLLOCKS! You use a little more force with this, by simply extending the pronunciation of the word, or for greater impact 'You're talking utter BOLLOCKS mate'.

Ah one of my favourite words and so useful when listning to stupiidity weather religious or not.

4

Just to play devil’s advocate for a minute, there might be a plausible scientific explanation. For starters, maybe it’s not data. Maybe it’s experience. Just as you or I would have a hard time transferring the experience of a sunset to a blind person, a shift in insight, say, might be impossible to transfer directly to another person, but that wouldn’t mean such a shift is necessarily impossible to achieve.

Human psychology is way more complex than we currently understand scientifically. Certainly two thousand years ago people would not have had scientific nomenclature for psychological phenomena. They would very likely have described non-standard cognitive states in poetic or mythological terms. There is really nothing about salvation stories, nirvana, etc., that couldn’t possibly be natural phenomena.

skado Level 9 May 11, 2020

I appreciate your excellent reply. If I followed the advice of my theistic friends and somehow convinced myself on faith that the word of God was real and let's say I have this overwhelming personal experience, can I now conclude that was God? Stepping back for a moment to examine the rules set forth to save my soul from eternal damnation, is it more likely that I made contact with a God? Or is it more likely I trick myself into a euphoric delusion of salvation by alleviating my guilt for all the bad things I have done in my life? All I ask of them is to acknowledge that the rules for freedom mirror a path to self-deception. And why would a God set a system for salvation that would mirror self-deception?

Being sighted confers demonstrable abilities. Communicating with God does not.

@paul1967 why do we have to think that god or a god or any god is some being that sits up above and judges us? I think that's the first issue and it originates from this incredibly stupid attempt by some faiths to stick to literal interpretations of their mythos. You can trace all this back to some real myopic dumbasses back in the first centuries AD who were over-relying on tying some general belief sets together as a means to unite diverse communities. Constantine showed this to be their conquer and unite method. The eastern influences didnt suffer from this same delusion. Their mythos was much more malleable and able to evolve. The Chinese beliefs ranged from natural order philosophies such as Taoism to societal order beliefs such as Confucianism. And that culture was co-evolving with the aryan influence through the Hindustan region creating the vedic traditions such as Buddhism and Jainism as well as impacting the Zoroastrians of the middle east. Until the strict Islamic influence crept in post 600 AD that whole area was a diverse and ever-changing group of civilizations with a major synthesis of community and beliefs that grew together.

Where that "bible" says god just say "consciousness" and read it all as fables like koans. Then you can include secular philosophies and the dissonance disappears. Now you can get back to figuring out the true nature of man and universe by SCIENCE and PHYSICS. This is where our minds should lie.

@Allamanda why convince them? if we're all inevitably going the same direction and their choice makes them happy then why bother them?

@paul1967
Fair question. I'd say our friends who are theists are often not consciously aware of the authentic processes at work in their own professed worldview. I suspect that many, if not most of them, have indeed fooled themselves just as you describe. I can say a couple of things about that. One is... that, evolutionarily speaking, if fooling oneself confers reproductive fitness, then to that degree, maybe it's not entirely a bad thing. Most thinking people find self-deception unacceptable though, as do I. So I have tried to become aware of the psychologically functional elements of the mythology in order to make use of them without fooling myself with a literal interpretation of what was surely "intended" as allegory.

Of course the science is far from "settled" as to whether religion is adaptive, exaptive, a random spandrel, or as Dawkins would have it, a pernicious viral meme. There is a lot of evidence to suggest that it confers some adaptive advantage, either directly as a fitness enhancer, or indirectly as a counterbalance to evolutionary mismatch. In any case, some studies show a correlation, at least, between religious practice and levels of self-reported happiness.

I agree with JeffMesser in that God need not be taken as a literal person, but is best understood as a personification of some greater principle. For him it is consciousness; for me it is reality, or nature. So for me, the study of science is, ironically, the study of God, metaphorically speaking. So any scientific evidence in nature is, itself, evidence of God. I believe the next survival hurdle our species faces is to find a way to keep the fitness-enhancing "baby" instead of throwing it out with the corrupted "bathwater" of religious literalism, which does, indeed, desperately need to be thrown out.

I think there are two identifiable levels (no doubt more than two) at which religious experience can work to some advantage. The first level does involve a particular type of self-deception, albeit a somewhat evolutionarily sanctioned deception. The other is a much less common, but pretty clearly evidenced, esoteric practice which can induce in the individual practitioner a cognitive state of psychological liberation which could easily be portrayed metaphorically as "salvation".

I think there is a place for "faith" in this latter, esoteric practice, but it is not faith in a literal God personage, but simply faith that such a liberation is possible - for the very reason that it is not transferable as data, and can be known only by having the experience. And achieving that experience can be obtained, usually, only by years of practice, during which, one can only have "faith" that what they are working for actually exists.

In this metaphorical context, the word "eternal" has a somewhat different meaning than the way we ordinarily use that word, and is well expressed by the Wittgenstein quote: “If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.”

3

Let it go.✨ Live while you have time, you don't have to prove any thing. Live your life lead by example. Let them be them. Enjoy yourself. There is old story about wrestling a pig. Don't get dirty with them.

In a general sense, I agree with your advice, but I can't let them off unchecked. Too many of them push anti-science on innocent children and some of those children grow up to be politicians and judges. That Impacts my life.

@paul1967 I wasted 20 years trying and nothing. I feel better and happier when I just walked away.

@jdubose I respect you and appreciate your 20 years of service. I don't think it was all a waste because logic and reason can take time to take hold, and the more people inforcing logic and reason, the harder it is to ignore.

@paul1967 When I say walked away I don't mean give up. I mean refuse to engage.

3

Believers advise me...
There's the issue.

1of5 Level 8 May 12, 2020
3

Hmmm. This is all like putting a Cadillac converter on your car. It's wishful thinking. Unless you had a Cadillac to start with it just isn't going to fly.

3

Ohferpetessake, you are spending your precious one & only life on this nonsense????????

I truly do have admiration for the attitude frequently encountered in some members of this site who are very dismissive of the propositions of religion, scoff at it as obvious nonsense, and feel no need to justify their lack of belief to anyone. Though by nature I am more inclined to mull over the most persuasive counters to such arguments, and think that by doing so I can provide something of value to others in the clutches of doubt, I feel that your approach provides something of value to the problem as well (just from a different angle, which is a good thing).

How people think and arrive at conclusions is important. These people are politicians, doctors, and teachers, and their influence has far-reaching consequences. I don't feel like it is a waste of my life, to investigate how indoctrinated minds work. I have no delusions of grandeur. I will probably never change any minds, but I enjoy learning. To each his/her own. What I find interesting, you might call a waste of life.

3

From my perspective you are way over-thinking this. Religious belief is just that, belief, based on faith. It is not about logic, science, evidence, etc. While I get the struggle, I wouldn't find such a conversation to be a productive use of my time.

It's never me coming to them, it's them coming to me "to see the light" and when they engage me I feel obligated to invest a few minutes trying to get them "to see the light" of their own self-inflicted deception. I've never had a theist admit publically that they get my point, but I have had a few call me the devil, which to me means they understood, but they're too scared of the consequences of that revelation.

3

I love how once you have accepted God through blind faith, you still have no physical proof to show others. And even if you did have physical proof, you are forbidden to show others. Yould think if God wanted as many believers as he could get, he'd be more forthcoming with His/Her existence.

I can't remember who this quote is attributed to but it went something like this: if God gave me the ability to reason, why then would I have to forgo it's use to come to know him?

3

Ah, the good old logical fallacy of circular reasoning! Such people are enamoured of logical fallacies.

2

While I've not had that experience, I can see exactly how it must work. One think I'd like to know from anyone who might be able to answer this question is just how do Christians know they have a soul, and why does it have to be saved? If anyone would ask me, I'd say the "creator" did a piss poor job of creation, given the ills that the human body is heir to, not to mention parasites, diseases, and other natural problems.

Christians know they have a soul in the same way they know God is real, faith. Unfortunately, faith is a useless tool for knowledge.
Biology only makes sense in the light of evolution and that's why our bodies fail us so easily. If a God created our bodies then he's unbelievably incompetent.

@paul1967 You're preaching to the choir on that last comment on my comment on your post!

2

God will provide proof of himself through personal revelation so long as you demonstrate your faith in him first. So if you believe in him he'll make you feel that he's real.

We have a word for a sales pitch like this -- we call it bullshit.

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