Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by urizen9 on October 4, 2009 at 4:46am

Just to add something equally puzzling, the Catholic Church and the average European (exclude Poles, Irish and maybe Italians where it is mixed with nationalism -another problem).
This average then neither believes nor questions the idiotic stories the Vatican disseminates.
They seem to be treating this religious whodonit as a scar that neither heals nor gets worse and in any case should not be scratched.
We're talking about 80% of the French and the others about as high. The average Catholic does not believe 60% of what their church teaches.
"How do you balance your spiritual books?" I sometimes ask them.
It does not seem that they do.

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Permalink Reply by Jim DePaulo on October 6, 2009 at 11:10pm

a great deal in this world is extremely poorly "designed".
I had an anatomy prof that said that the human body is something designed by a D student in Mechanical Engineering.

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Permalink Reply by Bill Sheehan on October 4, 2009 at 9:00am

The single most effective argument for the existence of God is the Argument from Who the Hell Do You Think You Are?

a. Your mother believes in God. Your father believes in God. Your grandparents believe in God. Your entire family going back several generations has always believed in God.

b. Who the hell do you think you are?

c. Therefore, God exists.

See also "You're killing your mother" and "What will the neighbors think."

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Permalink Reply by urizen9 on October 4, 2009 at 9:56am

I think the continuity of this "belief" seriously broke down 200 or so years ago.
The tribal chief image has been going ever since.

The US is a special madhouse in this together with the Mohammedans.

The future holds less human, less well defined, less personal and more scientific higher powers I think. The peasants will continue to beat their breasts "mea culpa" for a while yet.

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Permalink Reply by Langston on October 10, 2009 at 3:28pm

I'm not sure why no one else replied to this, I thought it was FUNNY as hell....I don't use LOL on the Internet, but I can tell you that I had a good chuckle at this one. Good stuff.

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Permalink Reply by Angie Jackson on October 24, 2009 at 3:38pm

Hahahaha

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Permalink Reply by the antithesis on October 4, 2009 at 10:48am

On the wikipedia page for christian apologetics, the one argument that gave me pause was the presuppositional argument.

"Presuppositional Arguments - Arguments that show basic beliefs of theists and nontheists require God as a necessary precondition."

In other words, believing in god is a necessary precondition to be able to see all of the other evidence that may be around. I now understand that this is just bias, but when I first read it I was impressed by it since all of the other arguments are based on appeal to emotion in one form or another. The Presuppositional argument is a different approach and I liked it because of that even if it is unsound.

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Permalink Reply by Rosemary LYNDALL WEMM on October 4, 2009 at 2:10pm

Huh?

I can think of a god.
Therefore it exists?

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Permalink Reply by the antithesis on October 6, 2009 at 9:07am

It's actually a bit more complicated than that. It's based on Kant's concept of "transcendental" which are concepts that simply necessary to experiencing, such as time and space. We cannot experience the world around us without time or space, so these are transcendental concepts.

The presuppositional argument tries to make the existence of god a transcendental concept (not to be confused with the transcendental argument for the existence of god). It fails, obviously since treating the existence of god as a transcendental only helps us to observe the existence of god and not other objects the way time and space do. It is therefore nothing more than bias.

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Permalink Reply by Rosemary LYNDALL WEMM on October 4, 2009 at 5:04pm

Further to this:
Substitute something else instead of the term "god" in this logical equation.

For example:

"If we do not presuppose the existence of leprechauns then we cannot explain how things apparently get done by magic. And since we do not believe in magic it has got to be leprechauns, doesn't it?"

See, it's not logical at all.

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Permalink Reply by Rosemary LYNDALL WEMM on October 4, 2009 at 2:12pm

There are plenty of "strong" emotional arguments. The best may be:

If there is no god (of our type), then when you die that is the end of things. No more you. Period. You are terrified of that, aren't you? So believe, or be terrified!

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Permalink Reply by Jennifer E. on October 4, 2009 at 2:23pm

I would say that's the strongest case as well... it's hard for people to believe that the 70 or 80 or so years they spend on this earth is literally all they have! However, isn't more terrifying to think that if you make a misstep or two in life that you could end up eternally damned? Or that if you've "picked" from the plethora of religions the wrong one, that you'll burn in hell forever even though you had no real way of knowing which religion was "true?" Unless you're Catholic, in which case you just better make sure you confess everything right before you die, and then you'll be all set!

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