Choosing a faith

I'd like to go back to using the Dawkins' meme proposal. Joe is trying to merge into a long line of traffic and Frank in another car lets him in. Joe is thankful and impressed, and as a result let's Nancy into the traffic a couple of blocks later.A meme being a social replicator was planted in Joe's brain, leading to him letting Nancy in later.Now presumably you would say that you would be able to detect on a scan the feeling of gratitude towards Frank by Joe, and for the decision by Joe to allow Nancy into traffic. However, the scan wouldn't be able to show the effect of the meme planted by Frank's action that resulted in Joe's kindness to Nancy, connecting the two events.

I simply used the emotions that came to mind. Like I said, I could have, if I thought about it, used negative emotions just as easily to make the point.

No, GDR.If you wish to cite her stuff in support of your position then you need to bring her evidence and analysis here in a post. If not then no issue.

The concepts are called "Pass it on" and "Pay it forward". They are well known human actions that I'm sure a psychologist could explain better than I. Not at present but, as with everything else in this universe, any action (like the mental formation of a meme) leaves its mark on the universe (in this case your brain). If we had the tech we could very well follow the physical paths in the minds of all three of your friends.A few more decades might do it.

We've been over your point many times. Why can't we move on?MY point is that you have not distinguished YOUR faith from any other faith. In a topic titled Choosing a faith, shouldn't we be comparing faiths instead of just making assertions about one faith?
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There's that science of the gaps again. It's all belief.

My pint in that was that I noticed a thread about which god do you choose from the numerous candidates. My point was simply that it isn't which god you choose but the nature of the god that you choose, and the application for your life that flows from that.The point that I was discussing was just that the Bible is evidence without discussing whether it is good bad or otherwise.The problem with going the route that you talk about will mean going off into so many side rows that it gets bogged down and there are about 8 or more of you that want to debate every single point and keeping up is a full time job and I actually do have a life.The only reading that I have been able to do since I started this thread is to get about 2/3 of the book by Tony/Bart Campolo that nwr suggested I read.

Yes, unlike you, the rest of us have no lives and nothing to do but hang around here waiting for you to reply. (FYI, I'm discussing several different topics at once.)As Percy has been trying to tell you, rehashing the same points over and over is pointless. What this topic needs is exploration of a few rabbit holes.

Oh, ye of little faith.

​Ok, I'd really like to understand this but I'm a way off. I had to go back miles to get to where you first brought it up. To which you replied. When I asked why you choose lovely positive emotions and not the negative ones of hate and anger etc as (non-scientific!) evidence of
god you said that those would do just as easily.So I'm asking both why the existence of any emotion is evidence of god and in particular, why the ugly ones are equally good examples? - although you never use them; you generally find god in a baby's smile or the beauty of a flower. How do you find god as easily in homophobic hate?

If by "known authors of any part of the Bible" you mean Paul and I guess John (of Patmos, not the gospel guy), they tell us almost nothing of the events of Jesus's ministry. Jesus has as much evidence as unicorns.--Percy

Assuming that by "non-physical" you mean "not of the material world," if we look outside EvC Forum you're not in the minority at all. But believers are all in the same boat not possessing any evidence of this non-material world. How could there ever be material evidence of something non-material anyway? We know you're not alone in your view, I just said as much, but until you bring Tutor Dirckx's arguments into this thread you haven't actually said anything to persuade us of this view. From the Forum Guidelines:

5. Bare links with no supporting discussion should be avoided. Make the argument in your own words and use links as supporting references.

--Percy

It is not our job to seek out your evidence and/or arguments for you, or to carry out reading/viewing assignments from you. Threads are intended to be self-contained and not require a bunch of footnotes to references to off-site sources that contain your actual evidence and arguments. Please follow the Forum Guidelines:

5. Bare links with no supporting discussion should be avoided. Make the argument in your own words and use links as supporting references.

The rule has been around a long, long time. The emptiness of argument via link was noticed at EvC's very outset.A side note: Relativity, quantum uncertainty, evolution and NFT's can all be summarized with just a sentence or two each. If her argument can't be briefly summarized then that can only be because it requires many suspect arguments of controversial claims.--Percy

These complaints make no sense. Counterarguments are not attacks. You claim that, "It was not a statement commenting on their reliability," but when you said "Many people gave them so much credence that they dedicated their lives to following them," that was absolutely "a statement commenting on their reliability." It's also the "Fifty million Frenchmen can't be wrong" fallacy.An author's intent to be accurate and believed is not evidence that he was. Scam artists have very similar intent, for what they say to be believed that it is true. But an author's work must be assessed to see if the author achieved his goals.Stating it another way, you don't accept that a work is accurate because the author said so. You assess the work to see how well the author achieved his goals of accuracy.This is all obvious and very basic stuff. This kind of reasoning is how we all live our lives. Nobody here goes around believing every Tom, Dick and Harry who says, "You can trust me." Why are you trying to carve out exceptions for religion?--Percy

This isn't relevant to the discussion but about that last thing you said, the cause of floods doesn't have to be heavy rainfall. As we were again shown just this week with Hurricane Ian, storm surges can cause floods. Busted dams can cause floods, too, something that happened in our tiny town about 20 years ago. Spring snow melt can cause floods.But you're missing the point. Mine was an absurd rhetorical question, and it was roughly equivalent to your own question about whether brain signals cause emotions or do emotions cause brain signals.But emotions are not tangible things that have a material existence that can cause things like brain signals. It's just the label we use for mental states caused by what's going on chemically and neurologically within the brain.I think I see things pretty much the same way as AZPaul3. In my own words and using happiness as an example, it can come from something external, maybe your favorite team winning a ballgame, or from something internal, perhaps thinking about the fun time you had on vacation, or maybe something chemical and experienced internally because it's injected and delivered to the brain via the bloodstream, like morphine. But there's no actual material thing called "emotion" that somehow enters the brain or exists within the brain that can cause brain signals to occur.--Percy