Evidence For Belief

Had you been born in Bombay to Hindu parents you would not form the same subjective opinion of the bible. You would now be telling us of the objective truth contained within the Vendas and the importance of dharma and karma.Your 'evidence' is therefore not merely subjective it's also temporal and spacial. Your current beliefs are very modern and very liberal. You simply could not have held them 300 years ago - there was no church to support them. What GDR is likely to believe is what is in front of him at his birth and what that will be will depends on when and where he is born. What does that say about this belief?To me it says that the belief is cultural - a learned tradition. It also says that if it is evidence of anything at all, it is only evidence of the power of conditioning and of a need within people in general to believe that they are special, not just another species that will live and die without further consequencies.Edited by Tangle, : No reason given.

You do understand that that conclusion has no evidential support and is therefore irrational don't you? It's just a belief. Just the opposite of Percy's. The bit I reject totally - on the evidence - is the god of religion. Including yours. I think you'll find that all the unbelievers here have that trait in common. The only way you can relax is to take your faith for granted or give it up. This constant gnawing at it is getting you nowhere. Why don't you do what most people do here in the UK, just imagine a nice god that doesn't require anything more of you than to lead a good life? Turn up at church to have a good sing every now and then a chat nicely to your Lord when you feel the need.

Oh but it does. It tells us that without further information, it's 50:50 whether your Christian or the Hindu belief is the 'truth'. And of course as there are many more claims to belief the odds worsen as we add them.As it's obvious that humans have had an almost unlimitted number of beliefs it's clear that none of them are correct. As you say later, your views are Anglican, middle of the road CofE. They're the norm here in the UK. But the wide spread idea that non-Christians and even atheists - can also enter heaven is very modern amongst Christians. Religious ideas evolve, it's quite normal, if they didn't evolve to suit the culures they inhabit, they'd die. We can see that happening now with Catholicism in the developed world and with the extremist forms like Faith's and ICANT's that are nearing the end of their lives. The fact that the culture changes the belief should tell us something don't you think. Special, as in different from all the rest of 'god's' creations.
You keep ignoring the trillions of creatures that this god of yours has killed and the trillions more that will die in the future. Including billions of humans and pre-humans. You have yet to reconcile your loving god with these facts of our lives.You balk at the thought of your god commanding murder, so much so that you - correctly in my view - dismiss those events in the OT as myth. But you accept the fact of evolution.That should be an enormous problem for you but it seems not. I don't think you fully understand the enormity of that. Evolution - in the eyes of a moral person - is the ultimate evil. Forget Hitler's genocides, forget ethnic cleansing, forget mass murder of an entire generation of all species by flood.Evolution is the process for the total extermination of repeated generations of all living things AFTER they've been able to provide a new generation of organisms so that it can kill those too.This means that your creator created organisms so that he could torture and kill them indefinitely. Additionally, he created a system where each organism must fight with all others just to stay alive long enough to be tortured and die. Most must kill others in order to stay alive long enough to strugglefor life and eventually die themselves.In the meantime - before dying, usually in pain - while they live, they must also suffer from disease, famine, injury and more pain.This is the proces you accept that has - you say - agency. And that agent is a loving god. Well you could have fooled me.I think I'd rather see the truth - there's no god here. The alernative is that if there is a god that designed all this, he's the epitome of evil.

Realy? So the resurrection is no longer important for your belief? How can it be subjective? If there are an unlimited number of beliefs the probability of any one being correct is reduced. Additionally, the fact that there ARE so many beliefs strongly suggests that beliefs are not founded on anything substantive. And the lack of any evidence supporting any of the beliefs clinches the matter beyond reasonable doubt. Your 'progressive revelation' is a reaction to societal changes and nothing more. You have no further knowledge of god. This god of yours has made no further announcements. All you think you know of your god is in your book and that remains the same. In fact you have had to reject large chunks of your book because they no longer fit with our advancing civilisation. Yes, if you believe in an evil god, the way we have been created is easily explained.And similarly, if you believe in no god at all, the brutal processes of evolution are easily explained. That is not an explanation. There's no requirement to obliterate every generation of organism on the earth every few years simply to have a few creatures that care for each other despite the death and destruction all around them. That's plain silly. Here we go, ICANTIsh pseudo-scientific bullshit. He's god, he didn't need to create things in this fashion. And it shouldn't be enough for you either.It's not a small difficulty that can be shrugged off like that - it's fundamental and enormous. You've already dismissed the genocides and murders in the bible as not something a loving god would do. But put alongside the total annihilation of everything on earth every generation and the pain and suffering all organisms feel when they are alive, those genocides are nothing.What's more, these atrocities are not just stories in a book, they're very, very real. You witness them personally everyday. Yet somehow that real knowledge is not enough to overturn a totally unevidenced beleif in an impossible resurrection 2,000 years ago on which everything you believe hangs. Don't you see the difficulty? There's nothing Christ-like about it - it's simple pragmatism, everyone wants things to be better.

So much for freewill eh?It's because we have a conscious brain. We understand that there is a future and we have memory of a past and we understand the idea of agency - that we and others have an influence in our environment and on us.Because of this brain we are always looking for reasons that things happen so that we can avoid the bad things happening. In the process we invent all sorts of superstitions and spurious explanations and mythologies for things we don't understand.So our history is littered with thousands of dead gods, hob goblins. witches, fairies and dragons. Do you walk under ladders? Is the number 7 lucky? Can you dowse for water? Can the shaman heal my daughter's cough? Is your dead father looking down on you? Do you have an angel on your right shoulder? Is that bow wave the Loch Ness monster? If you steal a lock of my hair can you use it to put a curse on me? Can a snake talk?Can I live after death? I really don't want to die.The primitive world was stuffed full of such nonsense and much of it is still around. Your elaborate religion of bells, smells and pointy hats, of men able to change wine into blood and forgive sins on behalf of a demon that controls life after death - eternal happiness or eternal torture - is just one formalisation of these superstitions.Luckily our brain has also given us reason and ways of checking and controlling our fantastical explanations of events so that we can separate superstition from fact. And that is why most of these superstitions are in retreat across the developed world.

According to the Quran, the prophet Muhammad took a night trip to heaven aboard a winged horse called Buraq. Only by those that support the superstition Chuck. Those that believe something else assume their mythologies are correct and yours are wrong. Just as you do theirs. You haven't seen a man walk on water have you?You've been told by your priest when you were a child that a man walked on water and he told you this because someone told him. And so on. Your evidence that it actually happened is in a book that was written by bronze age nomads from stories passed around a campfire in the desert.The authors are anonymous, they did not witness the alleged events themselves and they were written many decades after they were supposed to have happened.They were then edited for political reasons by a king of a foreign nation attempting to adopt a new territory.It's not terribly believable is it?But suppose you did see someone walk on water today. Would you believe what you were seeing? What evidence would you like to see before you accepted it?

Which is, of course, both wrong and irrelevant. Plus, the accepted theology of the Roman Catholic church - your church - agrees with the ToE. Are you saying that it's wrong? Threads can be added... How?

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