My Beliefs- GDR

You deal with it by admitting you have no answer, then repeating your beliefs about something else. Basically, you're saying that suffering and evil don't fit with your personal knowledge of Tom so you call it a mystery and go on hoping for the best. But it's a profound and difficult problem for you and your beliefs; not a by-the-by thing that can be put aside whilst you go on believing the nice things that you prefer.All these things are additive - the errancy of the bible, the human need to find agency and comfort, the corruption and terrible history of our religious establishments, our inability over thousands of years to detect or even conclusively deduce any kind of God. Which, when combined with our increasing knowledge of ourselves, our world and our universe which has never, ever, found any evidence of a single supernatural event but instead has confounded religious belief systems at ever turn, simply requires the conclusion that no kind of Tom exists.Thi knowledge should accumulate to that obvious conclusion, but because of a belief - a very flexible belief in your case - it doesn't.

You accept that your beliefs are subjective, non-scientific and not backed by any tangible evidence.Every argument you present is of the 'you can't prove it doesn't' type'You can't prove that Tom doesn't exist'
'You can't prove that Tom didn't create human concsiousness'
'You can't prove that Tom didn't create morality'
'You can't prove that Tom isn't intervening in our lives to make them better'And when presented with natural processes that give explanations of how morality evolves, or how human social structures such as democracy, education and economics you tell us that we can't prove it wasn't all part of god's plan.When science hasn't yet got an answer for a isssue, such as how life started or how the universe came into existence, you place Tom in the gap.When a new scientific idea emerges, you immediately try to jemmy God into it. So Tom lives in another dimension somehow using quantum entanglement to influence us - all without a shred of evidence.When confronted by the facts that the book that is the reason for your particular strain of belief contains errors and contradictions and that science has proven the major claims of the creation plain wrong, you adapt your beliefs to suit.Surely you must accept that this is an extremely weak logical position to hold?Edited by Tangle, : No reason given.

And yet you have a morass of evidence that tells you that if Tom exists he's anything but good and just.In order to believe he's good and just you have to reject the Old Testament - His opinion of himself as an angry and jealous God - the history of Christianity as a violent, hellfire preaching and power loving organisation and the world around you which is full of pain and injustice and has been for billions of years.You just NEED it to be different.

And again to leave the problem of suffering unanswered.It's problmatic to those who are forced to reject the OT position on the grounds that, like you, 'would have trouble worshipping a deity that sanctioned stonings and genocide' but having done so, have had also to reject the concept of The Fall by default.This is too big a problem to just put aside, surely your beloved apologist C S Lewis has been able to rationalise it for you?

There are many way to look at it and they've all failed as as explanations - as you know.And against all those simple stories and apologetics we have the plain and uncontested facts of what we actually know about our world. We know that for several billion years all animal life on earth has had to feed off other life. We also know that it is designed to die when it's sole purpose is fullfilled - to make more copies of itself.That is a world which is unbelievably cruel if it was built by design by your Tom.H. sapiens itself, lived as primitive hunter gatherers with short and painful lives just like other animals for hundreds of thousands of years.Now modern man comes along and ignores the millions of years of pain and suffering of his ancestors and all the precursor organisms that got him to this point in time and says, in his egotistical way, well it was all about me after all!Because of perceived improvements in some parts of his world - every single one of them being man, not god, made - we're supposed ignore the huge amounts of suffering and find it proof of a merciful Tom?Really?

But your favourite bit of sciency sounding woo, QM, is real a exampe of stuff happening without causation. Hawking uses this property to describe how the universe can be self creating.The page you were looking for doesn't exist (404) And 2000 years ago, your Christian thinkers had earth as the centre of a tiny universe, with God sat on a cloud, tantalising just out of reach. I'm amazed that you can't see that your thinking and theirs are exactly the same and equally wrong.

Way beyond my pay grade - and yours - I'm only reporting what science says about it. At the moment, science says QM is acausal. I don't believe anything, least of all the existence of the metaphysical. Science tests reality, if stuff can poof itself into existence then that's reality. Well jolly good for you! The editor of Nature is on the edge of his seat ;-) But that is EXACTLY the point I was trying to make. Christian 'thinkers' where making stuff up then, based on what they knew then. Which is exactly what you are doing now - simply making sciency stuff up to fit into a private little model in your head. All that does is make religious beliefs seem slightly less ridiculous to its believers - eventually there will be no place to hide your god.

Theology hasn't had a single new idea for thousands of years. All it's done is to try to think its way out of its problems. That's useless because people are very inventive and they are perfectly capable of imagining all sorts of stuff. What religion has uniquely failed to do is provide a single shred of supporting evidence for its ideas whilst science has proved the ideas of believers to be wrong over and over again.Theology can't advance using science, all it can do is retreat further and further away from its original beliefs. That's ridiculous in itself - the emotion I feel over and over isn't satisfaction it's intense, repetitive frustration. Frustration that you can't think in a straight line and are constantly searching to rationalise your beliefs using barely understood science.If you just accepted that you believe because you believe I'd just shrug and shake my head but at least you're not insulting science with it.

Ah, you mean exactly like what is described in the bible? Now there's a coincidence, I wonder how anyone would arrive at that idea ;-)

Nope. Atheism require nothing but a disbelief in god.Personally I saw through the god thing well before I knew anything about evolution.

So how come you keep getting it wrong? Atheism is not hard to understand, it's simply a lack of belief in god. It has nothing to do with evolution or QM or string theory or any other scientific discovery. There were atheists before any of that stuff was known about. You need to think carefully about why that got to you. My statement that..... ....is absolutely factually correct. I was sat in church one day and I suddenly realised that what the priest was telling me was utter tripe. So I never went back. It wasn't a conclusion reached after years of careful study, it was a revelation of the Road to Damascus sort. It was suddenly ver obvious to me that the whole thing was made up, made no sense and was totally irrational.Have a think why that statement offended you so much, I didn't accuse you of being an idiot for believing what you belief, I simply said that I saw through those beliefs as a child.You took that as an implied insult - and I can see why you did and pretty much all real believers have a hard time accepting that most atheists think their belief are silly and childish - that's just a fact and I for one am not going to protect you from that fact.All believers take offense when their beliefs are confronted full on - from time to time, I lurk around the evolution fairy story forum - just to see how long it takes an atheist there to get banned - usually a few days or weeks is enough, no matter how carefully they tread.But most of us also separate the belief from the believer - to use another religious trope, we blame the sin not the sinner (usually). Trust me, we get just as frustrated and annoyed by the stuff that we're subjected to from them.You need to develop a thicker skin. You're one of the more reasonable believers here, if we actually thought you were an idiot we wouldn't be still discussing this stuff with you month after month.But you should be clear, I DO think that your beliefs are daft and I do think that the logic you use to support them is flawed so you're going to continue to get criticised fairly sharply for it - particularly when you fail to get simple stuff like what an atheist is wrong.

Please don't back-peddle, your response was to feel insulted because you thought I had implied that you are an imbecile. When I had actually said this: I don't think that you're an imbecile but I do think you've been duped. CS Lewis has a lot to answer for.(Just as a by-the-by, it doesn't matter how many supposedly clever people believe something - if it's wrong, it's wrong. History is full of wrong clever people. And please don't assume that just because I understood that the god thing was an error before I'd spent an age studying science and philosophy that I haven't since done so.) You won't find anything in what I've said that could possibly be seen as a slanging match and if you examine the mote in your own eye you'll find that in your last post you called me egotistical and think that my hubris is breathtaking. Am I bothered? Nope - because my hubris is breathtaking. I simply use more direct and less flowery language.I will continue to call the dafter of your beliefs daft, simply because they are, but I do not mean to infer that you are an imbecile. People seem to be able to believe the weirdest things, but I think that your heart is in the right place.

1. Because the world's religions have let themselves down so badly that they have shown themselves to be debased and corrupt and are so obviously man made to the extent that thoughtful and sane believers like you have had to abandon pretty much every traditional belief in order to continue to have any belief at all.2. Because, as has been said over and over here - there is absolutely no evidence FOR a god. That's NONE. Simply saying that because we're conscious there must be a god, or that some clever people think that there is a god, or because we can't prove that there is no god, or because we can't understand how what you call 'mindless' processes could create a universe or any other such stuff is simply not evidence for a God.3. Because of much more that has been cycled and recycled on these forums and others like it for years.

A religion IS its followers (and leaders). Remove them and there's nothing left exept empty buildings and a bookshelf full of whatever scribbles they have made.Religions of all sorts across the world have been shown to be parochial, power grabbing, self interested, corrupt institutions for generations. Popes had empires and armies. Christian kill Muslim, Sh'ia Muslim kills Sunni Muslim. Jews kill Muslims. Whole countries are segregated along religious devisions. New religions are invented to exploit the gullible. Sects are subdivided in smaller sects. Preists abuse children and evangelists extort from those can least afford it.You could write several books on the failure of organised religions. Please don't just shrug all this off as human failing - of course it's human failing - it's human failing because organised religion are human inventions. I find that hard to believe. If you accept that all the major institutions that preach and teach the ways of God are errant and corrupt why would that not lead to a conclusion that the deity that they do it all for is either non-existant, corrupt itself or could give damn?Three things can happens to those that discover their religion is a lie or that it doesn't believe the things they want to believe:1. They shrug and carry on, going through the motions for apearances sake
2. They abandon it
3. They change their religion or create a new one.3. Is why there are gazillions of religions and even more divisions within them. Basically they have to keep making up new stuff in order to continue believing in anything.I chose 2. Henry VIII chose 3. Its not my term; it's what evidence actually IS.[Q]However, as we can’t prove that there is a god or that there is no god we can if we like just ignore the whole question. [/Qs]But if there is no evidence for a god - which there isn't, not a scrap - then of course we can ignore it, we have to ignore it because there's no reason to consider it beyond minor philosophical speculation in accademia. We can safely ignore it until there IS evidence. And after you start, where do you go next? You have no evidence that can take you anywhere so the likes of CS Lewis and thousands of others churn out works of imaginative fiction instead and have done for thousands of years, without making any progress at all.

You don't know which things that you believe are right or wrong because you have no evidence for any of them except what you personally feel. You can't search for 'truth' without evidence. What you've done is real all the apoligetica that you can find and agree with it. Philosophy, logic and literary criticism can't solve the problem of whether Tom exists or not - it's been trying for thousands of years and it's failed. It not a common thread of religion, it's a common thread of mankind. Religions merely grasp it for their own. We've given you explanations for this that does not require a Tom. It's been considered for thousands of years by billions of people and no answers have been found. None. there's a reason for that and the reason is that you can't just think out an answer to it. Everything we actually know about anything comes from testing reality - you can't test the idea of a god all you can do is make stuff up about him from your 'heart' and try to get others to agree with you. I do. But I didn't mean that society hasn't made progress, it's made prgress through its secular institutions - education, medicine, law, science and so on - as soon as societies throw away superstitions and organise themselves, they make progress. When I said that religious thinkers aren't making progress, I mean that they are no closer now to demonstrating the existence of a Tom than they were 4,000 years ago. Meanwhile, secular man just gets on with improving our lives for the short time that he has avialable to him.