God & the Fairy Tree

Your going to have a hard time getting theists to accept this premise.If you change it to:

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P: It is absurd to believe in something without objective any evidence for it.

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Then I can accept it.But then we can include subjective evidence and perhaps even the argumentum ad populum as some evidence. That way, god has more evidence than the fairies and then you have your difference.

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But instead of immediately obeying your desire to compare them with God - check the composition of each belief and what it involves.

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But they are both supernatural beliefs.The reasons someone chooses to maintain a belief in any supernatural thing are many and varied, but usually take the form of some kind of easing of discomfort (fear) about the unknown, or the delight and stimulation it provides in thinking that magic really does exist. In short, it is a comfort.

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Why would an adult believe in God?

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Because they were taught to, and it is socially acceptable, and in many places it is fully expected of them. Further, in many places, to not believe in God is to suffer social stigma.

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Why would adults generally not believe in fairies?

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They were taught that belief in fairies is childish and not socially acceptable in an adult. Society's reaction to an adult who believes in fairies is to believe the person crazy or at least odd.To an unbeliever however, the nature of the belief in God and the belief in fairies are the same.

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1. Do adults care about feeding the poor? Clothing them? visiting the sick, loving their fellow man, preaching hope to those with nothing, etc..etc..?

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2. Tell me, do fairies involve such matters, or are they mind-candy for babas?

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So, what you seem to be saying is that when adults grow up and have grown-up concerns like feeding the poor and dealing with pain and despair, the fairies they believed in when they were children change to a big, important, serious father-figure God.All you have described is changing the type of mind-candy from kid sweets to grown up sweets. The purpose and effect is the same. Edited by nator, : No reason given.

In 2007 in the industrialized world, yes. 2200 years ago in Britain it's quite possible that nearly all of the intellectually mature people were fairy-ists. Bunches of God-ists today view the half-billion Hindus in India as fairy-ists of some stripe. And all those folks had/have the same amount of evidence for their fairies as Christians do for their uber-fairy.

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I'm saying that being intellectually mature and having the belief allows it to be taken seriously, not that being taken seriousy makes it intellectually mature.

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But what I'm saying is that believing in things like fairies or gods or anything supernatural isn't intellectually mature.

Again, that's in 2007. In Celtic Britain, there was plenty of evidence for fairies and none for YHWH. Cows dried up due to mischievious fairies. Old folks suffered "elf-stroke," now known as just "a stroke." The little buggers were everywhere!

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But then we can include subjective evidence and perhaps even the argumentum ad populum as some evidence. That way, god has more evidence than the fairies and then you have your difference.

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Of course, if you want to go this route, astrology has more evidence than god.

What I am after is why I should believe the following argument:"If you don't feel the presence of God in your life, it's probably because you don't believe hard enough."That's a bogus argument. Believing something harder doesn't make it more likely or true.When this type of argument is used in jest, as with the Fairy Tree story, we all know how to judge it: it's a bit of a joke we play on our children.But when the same type of argument is used in earnest, as with the God story, then all of a sudden we must respect it. But it's the same bogus argument! How can intelligent, mature people not see this? No, it doesn't, because I introduced the term 'intellectually immature' myself in this thread, and I get to define what it means for the sake of it. If you believe in God, because you buy certain irrational arguments, then in my view you are by definition intellectually immature. (This is not an ad hoc definition that I introduce here, it's right there in the opening post, although I have not explicitly stated it as a 'definition' there.)

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"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science." - Charles Darwin.

In this day and age, we are quite assured that there is no such thing as magic. The terms, supernatural and magic fall into pointless descriptions bound from an earlier time.Here is a quote from a very intelligent man(knock on wood), who raised an interesting point on our own limited perception of what is, and isn't natural.

Objective evidence is evidence that is not dependent on anyone's internal perceptions or feelings. It should be verifiable and reproducible by anyone.

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"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science." - Charles Darwin.

Right, and if the sign was seen in Celtic Britain, then it wouldn't have been obvious that it was a joke.

Under this definition, we are assured of nothing on anything regarding the origin of life. Good point! people should think before they speak. I for one have never supported blind beliefs. Sadly, we seem bound and plagued with such problems. Luckily for us, we grow and earn the right of passage to independent thought.While it is true that believing something harder may not make it more true, a deeper evaluation will always improve the accuracy of the conclusion thus adding or removing value in truth. With enough scrutiny, it is possible to reach highly reliable conclusions regarding God and the origin of life.

You shouldn't. Its bullshit I see that its the same arguement.I'd hafta agree with you that the people who use that argument are not intellectually mature. But that other, intellectually mature, people believe in god, gives some weight to the idea that god could exists. Nobody believes in fairies anymore so they are an obvious joke. Ok, but I don't believe in god because of some rational argument for its existance.The fact that some people believe in god for intellectuall mature reasons should show you the difference in why the sign was an obvious joke and theism is not.But still, the argument:"If you don't feel the presence of God in your life, it's probably because you don't believe hard enough."is, itself, intellectually immature, I agree.There's still that difference with the fairies that makes it an obvious joke, though.

That's not neccessarily true.There are intellectually mature reasons for believing in god, depending on what your defining as mature. I don't think that belief in astrology is neccessarily intellectually immature either.

I wouldn't think so, because there isn't any such argument. I know exactly why you believe in God: because you were taught to. If you'd been raised in India, you'd have believed in Shiva & Co. And you'd have been just as sure of your belief as you are now. Rationality has no part in it.

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"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science." - Charles Darwin.

No, it does have a part in it. Nope, my belief in god is of its own accord.