Reasons not to believe in God

You have no faith (which is a lie) to back you up towards an all powerful ancestor to us all, I have the Imagination.

 

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I'd say you have the Imaginary, not Imagination. A proper imagination would be able to conceive of many more ways for meaning to exist in this universe other than an allpowerful father figure existing in some supernatural dimension of his own.

 

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my perspective is that i am keeping you from continuing on an unnecessary tangent, with you talking about religious people who almost invariably do not exist. if you would keep to a description of real world religious people, as opposed to using fringies to create an argument, i would have had no opportunity to discuss this. I guess i assume too much when i expect that we would have to have a reasonable discussion of "reasons" not to be believe in God, i.e. that the center would have to be addressed more than the fringe.

 

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You're still missing it ColeGrey, it seems to have gone over your head and that's not an insult- things go over everyones head time to time.

 

i made a point about a particular idea that came up in response to something specific you said. Just because i chose to focus on one aspect of your ideas that sticks out as unusable doesn't mean it is going over my head. I am simply requesting you state your idea without any false points, such as your idea back there about praying people not doing anything, or praying people lying down and waiting for things to happen, because that is unsupported, and false points i suppose do go over, under, and otherwise around my head. If you are saying your ideas don't require this point, then that is good. If you want to say praying and doing nothing else is ineffective, i don't think anybody, even around here, is going to argue that. If you want to say prayer adds nothing to the equation, you would do far better to talk about people that add prayer to the same actions that other non-praying people also do, and use that context. Don't waste time talking about people who pray and don't go to the doctor, because those people are not part of a reasonable discussion, unless they have additional reasons not to go besides a trust in God to constantly do magic.

 

It is not false- ColeGrey. That is what you are missing. I pointed out that prayer will have no effect.
I pointed out that the western medical practice is secular (You can disagree with that til you're blue in the face) and that surgery is effective.
sec·u·lar/ˈsekyələr/
Adjective:
Denoting attitudes, activities, or other things that have no religious or spiritual basis: "secular buildings".
The western Medical Practice IS Secular.

 

so you were simply bringing in secular effective techniques as opposed to nothing? No, here is what you said -

i am merely pointing out that both the religious and secular stance include "finding a working solution to the problem", and the religious solution simply adds an additional action - the assertion otherwise is false and unsupported, unless you want to focus on the fringes of the discussion. the fact remains that religious people most often use all the secular tools they can find, in addition to prayer.

 

Ok, noted. This was a bit more valid- but I still disagree.
Here's why- The religious stance often is to only pray about a problem. When it comes to the example I gave, the average believer will still do both, as you said.
Maybe my analogy was flawed.
But change that analogy to a 5 legged kid in Africa, now the American will only pray for him. And he will be stuck with his condition.

 

Wynn's points here are crystalline examples of the disconnect between God-apologists and the rest of us. We point to logical evidences against design--birth defects, extinction, etc.--and they say we're only looking at one particular conception of God. But if you explore the content of Wynn's posts, her own conception of God is monotheistic. Notice she says "God" as opposed to "gods," and how she often talks of personal revelation and relationships with this being, which again is a very monotheistic concept. People on my side of this argument can readily admit that the "God" concept we refer to when we debunk it is the one that is presented to us by theists: a caring, loving, infallible God that did all of this with us in mind, and that "all of this" is a medium that allows for cosmic justice or similar concepts. We readily admit this. You want to ask where space comes from, the question is irrelevant because no one is claiming that a form of prime mover is impossible. We simply say that the God concept as is presented to us is false.

 

To be fair, I do make the claim that there is no prime mover.
While I cannot prove that there isn't one, it comes down to if you have seen no evidence on every observable scale if there being one, making the concession that one distant outside prime mover may still be involved just pushes the decency of sanity.

 

I agree with you. I personally believe there's enough evidence to say with some certainty that the very concept of godhood is itself a human invention, no different than superheroes or dragons. It's a class of being that simply does not exist. However, what I said was that no one is claiming it isn't possible. I think we'd all concede that there's no way to say either way definitively.

This doesn't mean that I believe prayer heals, or that personal revelation is possible. I don't. But then, that doesn't really fall within the purview of a prime mover.

 

i still say you have to show what the non-religious person does that is any different than that. The average non-religious person will do nothing, the average religious person will do nothing except say a little prayer. You still have yet to contrast secular behavior with religious behavior, you can only show that religious people are the same as other people, except that they have what you consider the vestigial and useless quality of praying. I am just trying to make that clear, because that is the reality here.

 

Cole grey, drop the statistics for a moment and take a good look around.
There are religious people that will Only Pray about it.
A family in Oklahoma is refusing to cooperate with police to help bring the rapist of their 13 year old daughter to justice because they believe they need to pray about it.
A family in California that refused their child medical treatment, instead, calling in a catholic exorcist. The child died.

What I was pointing out was that prayer is one thing- religious- but surgery was a different thing - secular- (Which at first, you argued that surgery was not secular) and that one is effective and one is not. Just because a bunch of people that pray ALSO use the secular and effective method of surgery does not detract from the lack of usefulness of prayer one bit. Religion does not say to do surgery, it says 'by your faith you are healed." Religion does not promote scientific surgery or secular surgery or whatever.

This side argument has been a distraction from the rest of the thread and the side argument is pure semantics and useless. Maybe the problem is that I'm not being clear. But frankly, I think it's that your nitpicking at a triviality and detracting from discussion at this point.

 

those are sad stories, and there is a reason that stuff is on the news, it is because it is aberrant behavior. It isn't like they are using those stories at the end of the news report like a surfing dog story or whatever, it is real news, not a neighborhood fluff piece, because it is not normal.

i was pointing out that activity used by religious and secular people is not distinguished as anything but just "things all people do". If i wear a red hat and you wear a red hat, for the purpose of keeping our heads warm, you can't call wearing a red hat a "you" activity just because i also like to put a little flag pin on my red hat.

i was saying that if you want to establish the ineffectiveness of prayer you would use hundreds of people doing the same thing, and have some of them praying and see what you got. You can't say, "these people prayed and didn't do anything else, and so were ineffective." The ineffectiveness of sitting around doing nothing is obvious to anyone not on the fringe. If people want to have prayer groups and spend an hour a week sitting around talking to God, that is immaterial because the 99.9% of the week they are living life, pushing things around and doing material world, cause-and-effect activity. They may just be "prayerfully" cutting off fifth limbs, effectively doing the same activities as everyone else.

i am pointing out a specific mistaken idea on your part, which has popped up in the thread multiple times, i.e. an incorrect insistence that prayer is for religious people a substitute for normal life, an idea which is only true for the fringe. I would consider a discussion on evolution a triviality at this juncture in scientific history, much more trivial than asking for a reasonable framing of what faith is, minus straw men, to see if there are reasonable reasons not to believe in God. I don't understand why religious people don't just say, "fine evolution is real but god was in charge of it", instead of worrying about it. Who cares? Only people trying to use the bible as ascience book need to worry about it.

 

And the only way you see this "lack of God's presence" is by focusing on your particular desires about what the world would have to be like if God existed or were involved.

IOW, you are externalizing / projecting your own personal preferences to the point that you view them as objective criteria outside, as opposed to being your own personal preferences.

 

See, this is exactly why I 'rudely' called your post Bullshit before. You said, nice to be appreciated. No, I don't appreciate the way you stir the pot and then ignore when you've been refuted and go right back to claiming the bogus thing I refuted here.
You're still full of it Wynn.

 

See, this is exactly why I 'rudely' called your post Bullshit before. You said, nice to be appreciated. No, I don't appreciate the way you stir the pot and then ignore when you've been refuted and go right back to claiming the bogus thing I refuted here.
You're still full of it Wynn.

 

See, this is exactly why I 'rudely' called your post Bullshit before. You said, nice to be appreciated. No, I don't appreciate the way you stir the pot and then ignore when you've been refuted and go right back to claiming the bogus load that I already refuted here.
You're still full of it Wynn.

There may end up being three of these posts. It's because I got fed up waiting on the stupid Mod Queue that I've been hitting constantly lately.

 

But they are objective outside criteria. We're talking about a conception of God that is accepted by most of the theists in the world, the personal God that answers prayers and values our lives and created the world with us in mind. You act as if "God" really is just some generic term that doesn't imply Yahweh, but that simply isn't true. If you're talking about some other idea, then you're going to have to clarify, and we'll discuss that concept.

 

And that conception of God doesn't say that God will answer all your prayers to your liking; He might say No, or give an answer that you didn't expect;
there is also the condition that you have to ask for things in faith (in Jesus), and then you'll get them - so if you don't get them, check if you had placed your faith in Jesus;
given that the Sun shines, plants produce breathable air for humans etc. etc., the world apparently is created with humans in mind.


Nowhere in the mainstream conception of God is it stated that God is basically a miraculous vending machine for humans, to satisfy every desire, every whim that any human might have.