on discussing god and religion

Of course God does not change, but ideas of what God is like have evolved. We have come a long way from believing in the tribal God who zaps our enemies. Of the “many different” concepts of what God is like, which would you say that most reasonable people will believe? I can say that God is the teleological driver of memes and genes. Would reasonable people believe that?
What humans desire is pursuit of happiness without suffering. I just opine that the stakes are a lot higher than the selfish notion of reward and punishment. They involve the future of life on this planet.

Ecological morality is not just an idea for personal consolation. As it pertains to the future of mankind and can include either theist or atheist it is a belief system that specifically can predict what happens after a person dies. The world will go on for better or for worse.
For many Buddhists heaven and hell form a dualistic belief which has no place in religious philosophies of wholes.
And, once again a god who excludes one soul from the kingdom is a loser.

Ierrellus wrote:

How can we possibly know this - since we cannot actually KNOW about God.
This is what you would call a sentiment.

Prove to me, Ierrellus, that this God does not change.

I describe God as the teleological driver behind evolving genes and memes. That does nor change. Human beliefs do as a matter of evolution.

Human beings say all kinds of things about God purely on the basis of what they think or believe is true
No one in the entire history of civilisation however has actually demonstrated the existence of this God
And so the goalposts start moving very quickly when you ask anyone for evidence of this apparent deity
The only place that he or she or it definitely resides is in the minds of believers but not any where else

Genes and memes can function perfectly well without God and evolution does not need teleology either
You are simply providing yourself with a reason for God to make sense to you in relation to the Universe

Do you believe in God and love this God, Ierrellus?

Ah, a man after my own heart. :stuck_out_tongue:

Don’t worry. I’m kidding. I agree with you though.
But being agnostic I am not capable of saying but not anywhere else but I do in a sense agree even with that as I do not intuit there there is an actual place where this their God resides.
Bottom line, we haven’t even began a little scratch on the surface of how it all began or where it began.

But as I believe it was Kant who said it, we cannot live in a vacuum so faith has to enter in to fill that gap. (paraphrasing).

That may have been true in his day but it is perfectly possible not to have a belief in anything at all nowadays
As my own mind will simply not entertain the notion of anything at all existing without some type of evidence
God has precisely none so I refuse to contemplate his existence as that would for me be very irrational indeed

To be more precise … some people think that the existence of God has been adequately demonstrated and some people think that the existence of God has not been adequately demonstrated.

You are in the latter category.

More to the point [mine] it is hard to determine if wanting to is actually within the reach of autonomous minds. It becomes somewhat surreal when you consider the fact that, when neuroscientists investigate this, they may well only ever be able to investigate it in precisely the manner in which they have to.

And certainly one possible explanation for this is that God willed it. But what does that then mean for all practical purposes with respect to human autonomy? What is “beyond” God’s will there?

To my mind, a “general description” of this sort can precipitate a frame of mind that seems “anchored”. But anchored to what when the beam is focused instead on particular human interactions that come into conflict? That part of most interest to me with respect to God and religion. And with respect to the moral narratives of mere mortals who, instead, embrace deontological reason or political ideology or narratives regarding nature.

By and large I tend to agree. But that just tugs me back to this: With so much at stake – immortality, salvation, divine justice – would not a “loving just and merciful” God [as most construe Him] be considerably more explicit regarding a “righteous path” on this side of the grave?

It is one thing for God to demand that we “struggle” with this, another thing altogether when, however much we do struggle, there is seemingly no definitive way in which to measure our success. I suspect that is why folks like Ierrellus take a leap instead to a God that, in the end, welcomes all into His Kingdom. Otherwise how “on earth” are we to continue that seemingly futile struggle given a belief in Judgment Day.

From my frame of mind, this is basically just a general description of a general description. What interest me is in how such thinking unfolds in a particular mind in a particular context. In other words, in a set of circumstances in which a man or a woman comes to choose a behavior that others deem to be wrong. Either with or without God and religion.

Once we acknowledge that narratives change historically, culturally and experientially, we are back to square one: Judgment Day. The part where, from the perspective of most believers, we go up or we go down.

Or the part where “I” disintegrates into nothing at all.

And that is also the part where I am most intrigued by the manner in which I construe the meaning of dasein and conflicting goods. We chose particular behaviors because we were existentially predisposed to given a particular confluence of personal experiences, relationships and sources of information/knowledge.

In fact it is here that the moral objectivists will invariably draw their lines. Then it is just a matter of whether they choose God or Reason or Ideology or Nature as their default.

This part:

“Common agreement” and “intuition” are basically no less existential contraptions to me. They are no less embodied in dasein, conflicting goods and political economy. The tricky part here though is that “intuition” is often a complex intertwining of what we can know objectively and how we react subjunctively in particular contexts. The part where reason and emotion and psychology and instinct become entangled in genes/memes; and then a clear demarcation between “true for all of us” and “true for me” is hard to come by. The part where “I” become entangled in my dilemma above. And with no God to comfort and console me.

“For all practical purposes” this may well be the only sensible approach to take if one is drawn to God through a leap of faith, rather than through an adamant belief that He does in fact exist. And that He has provided us with a Scripture, enabling us to properly differentiate between right and wrong behaviors.

I am less trusting in it myself however because my dilemma tends to fracture and to fragment “I” such that I am ever tugged in different directions.

In other words, my own “existential contraption” is considerably more existential than others.

What should the atheist say about God? Really nothing unless he is bound by events in his past that still demand interpretation so as to appease a hurt ego. Thus this thread is a straw man, stuffed with stereotypical straw.
I am dismayed by the same old, same old responses to the question of God’s existence. They tread on my personal beliefs, of which I am entitled. I do not need to prove God’s existence; my life and experiences have already done that. If my testimony falls on deaf ears, so be it.

The “leap of faith” was Kierkegaard’s idea.

Double Post …

For me, the investigation only involves comparing the data and merely asking whether it speaks more for a determined universe, or a mechanistic one – or “don’t know” - or something else.

I disagree, because the enquiring mind isn’t so much “anchored” as limited to past experience in his ability to compare data. We can very often only imagine something that we have imagery for. That is why religion has almost always used metaphors to give an inkling of what it has envisioned and why then followers were “anchored” to that metaphor. If believers could agree that their imagery is borrowed and not exactly what the ancient mystics/prophets actually envisioned, we would get along with each other better.

It was quite tragic that the Christians that conquered other peoples, especially those who worshiped nature in some form, called those people antediluvian (an image from their own tradition). It was just a variation of imagery that they encountered, and probably in some ways a more experiential imagery than the imagery of Christianity at that time.

Yes, the leap is in the end all a believer has and it would be helpful to have more explicit instructions, but that is why I see the Bible, for example, as an anthology of religious experience put into stories, rather than historical record. We have to accept that we are story-tellers. It is far easier for us to wrap experience in a story in order to pass that experience on, than to explain it. Judgement Day is in some ways the wish that justice will rule and people will get their dues. However, how that will be ascertained and what “sin” actually would be is as yet only a human projection – and to some degrees a projection of people who lived experientially in another world.

This is where I must ask whether this knowledge is accessible without a widespread study with a great number and great variation of test persons. To try to fulfill such a quest on a discussion board seems to me to be futile. We just haven’t got the numbers, the variations and your questions don’t enable those partaking to give you the data you would need to come to a conclusion.

I think you have to take responsibility for the answers you get, because your questions in the environment you are asking them influence the answers you get. Also the test persons are not under the impression that you’re trying to achieve anything like a clinical test. This is more of a place where people test their views on subjects that they have studied or just picked up, or where they come to pick a fight. Not very helpful for someone looking for answers that require such an in depth enquiry.

But this is what I have pointed to above. In your search for objectivity, you can’t put the responsibility on the test persons. You have to create an environment that favours objectivity and lead people with your questions to objectivity. This thread has been going on for so long that I believe that we will never get to where you want to go.

That may be the case and if this is your conclusion, you may possibly have to concede that there isn’t going to be more of a result.

I wish you all the best!

Ierrellus,

There is a difference between a leap of faith, where faith already is and is responsible for some action.
Kierkegaard spoke in terms of a “leap To faith” which is more in line with what Kant was saying.
A leap TO faith is filling the gap between what cannot be proven by reason but what must be believed in order to reconcile ourselves to those unanswered questions.

Kant’s way of thinking was that it was impossible to have the answers to particular questions; for instance, the God question, because these questions cannot really be answered by human reason.

This is the way that I feel. But people have a need to know - they cannot live without questions being answered. They cannot live with just their musings and in negative capability so their emotions take over because of what they do see and experience, and so they must believe - they must fill that vacuum. This is what faith does. It fills a vacuum.

We don’t even take the time to consider “How Can We Know”. Is believing Knowing?
But I suppose that there is really nothing wrong with belief as long as it is a rational belief and it has been examined.

Belief based on an actual God experience is reasonable and has no need for a leap of faith. That such an experience does and has happened is based on the testimonies of millions of rational people who have not only had such an experience but can articulate it in ways that other rational people can comprehend. If this were not so, all folk accounts of the experience would not be admissible evidence of its veracity. Such stories can often contain facts which plodding reason is too often too absorbed in its mechanical theories to understand.

The problem with this however is that, in one way or another, all of this would seem to be intertwined in the explanation – the explanation – for why something exist rather than nothing at all. And why this something and not another something instead.

To imagine that somehow we can extricate “practical truth” from “ontological truth” seems absurd to me.

And, when God and religion become intertwined in speculations of this sort, that brings us to the possibility of a “teleological truth” in turn.

In fact it might be reasonably argued that the invention of religion itself revolves in large part around a “self-conscious” species of animal able to wonder how day to day existence is intertwined in existence itself is intertwined in the meaning of it all.

But: what are the odds that what you or I think we know about all of this here and now, can in fact be demonstrated to reflect that which all rational men and women are obligated to think in turn?

And then the part where some argue that morality is sync with rationality.

Again: What on earth does this pertain to? How on earth would you go about demonstrating that this is a legitimate view of God? Why on earth would those who insist that they are rational accept it as true?

Until you can reconfigure this into something substantive, something that goes beyond a “frame of mind”, you are asking others to simply believe that it is true because “in your head” here and now you believe that it is.

I merely suggest that you believe that this is true because in part it comforts and consoles you [psychologically] to believe that it is true.

In other words, religion as a defense mechanism.

But, admittedly, I am not myself able to demonstrate that this is the case. Then it all comes down to the part where it is incumbent upon those who believe in God to bring this God down to earth such that all reasonable men and women are in fact obligated to believe in a God, the God, my God in turn.

Really, what else is there but faith?

What else is there but faith? There is direct experience.

That’s a problem for him since he seems to be so invested in words.

He hasn’t had a direct experience and nobody can adequately convert their own direct experiences into words that he could consume.

So he has a dilemma.

Is he trying to solve it by asking for more inadequate words?

Does he see the futility of that effort and is he only talking about the dilemma to pass the time?

Or is he an evangelist for dasein and nihilism? Is he Illuminating the reality of our existence?