Method of Madness: post-hoc reasoning and confirmation bias.

There is some stuff here in your post that one could really get their claws into. Tell me to sod off if I'm scratching too deep.Jar wrote: So I could subsititute pretty pink pixies for God as the target of my prayers and expect the exact same outcome?How does one distinguish this sort of entity from the normal laws that govern the universe? or, Would our experience in the universe be any different if this God you describe, did not exist? I'm sorry but, from the outside looking in, it really doesn't seem to work at all.Case in point: my nephew (brought up in an evangelical Christian church since birth) tragically contracted insulin dependent diabetes at the age of 11.I know he prayed for healing. I know his family prayed for his healing. The answer was a lifetime condemned to dicing with death, managing his own health on a daily basis (with life threatening consequences), seriously reduced quality of life, shortened life span, accelerated aging, and blindness. Intolerably heavy stuff for an 11 year old.I'm sure he didn't pray for that.I'm sure the church would have fed him the usual bullshit: it's God's challenge for him, he will get greater rewards in heaven and, I dread to think, telling him that his faith was inadequate or his sin too great.So tell me about a scenario, imaginary if you will, where it could be demonstrated that God did not respond to a prayer... in anyway, shape or form?

In your opinion, would reality appear to operate differently from how you perceive it to operate now, if God and Satan didn't exist and didn't interact with the world: if everything was merely compliant with the natural laws of the universe?

The atheists deny the existence of the "all Good God" that Christians claim exist, because of the following logic: God is all Good, God is omnipresent and omnipotent, God created evil and continues to let it exist, and an all Good God cannot therefore exist.Christians attempt to respond with something like: but we don't know the bigger picture, in the larger scheme of things (of which we are ignorant until after death) it all makes sense, is good and is in perfect harmony with the Christian God's nature.One example, which I like (Strobel's Case for Faith, if I'm not mistaken) is the scenario of a veterinarian tranquilizing a wild African lion in order to perform some procedure on the animal in order to save it's life. The lion is terrified, very distressed, derives no conscious benefit from the harrowing procedure that it cannot possibly comprehend. Of course the lion could not know, and it would not be possible to explain to the lion that the procedure that seemed very evil to the lion was actually very good.I have no profound rebuttal or come back for this scenario, which I quite like. Except...1. God could try a lot harder to explain things to us what the heck all this suffering is about, instead of just given us cryptic religious nonsense.
2. It is still valid to claim that, to the best of our ability to tell, the Christian God is nevertheless still not good.Why no. 2?We can only assess God in human terms. In human terms, what God is doing to us: creating us, knowing that we would fall, knowing the misery the world cause so many of us, knowing that only a hand full of humans would every score eternal life, and then condemning the rest to eternal damnation is incomprehensibly bad, even evil. Additionally the God of the Bible OT is a very reprehensible character that, in human terms, would not be considered good.But Christians claim a very different God. they claim that God is good, God is love.On what basis do Christians, then make this claim? Surely the tranquilized lion scenario is an admittance that, in human terms God does not look good? What basis do Christians have for claiming that we don't see the bigger picture?One basis is the own personal testimony about the personal experience of God in their lives. This is the topic of this thread: such testimony stands on confirmation bias and post-hoc reasoning. No Christian in this thread has yet been able to explain how their personal testimony is anything else, or how their lives are anything different from the Buddhist, Shintoist, or atheist that are all subject the randomness and fickleness of the laws of the universe.The second basis is the Bible. While, as I stated the Bible paints a bad picture of God also, the Bible also underscores Christian claims for the "good" nature of this deity.So the only basis we have for believing God is good, is not the evidence of the world, not the evidence from the personal experience of Christians, who suffer misfortune and fortune along with the rest of us (they merely rationalise it in a different way): the only evidence is the Bible. And Hangdawg13, you have made multiple reference to the importance of the Bible in underscoring your knowledge.So the argument is: despite the nature of God's world, and the nature of God as portrayed in some parts of the Bible, God is good because other parts say so.Which leads us to the basis of another topic, not relevant to this thread. The veracity of the Bible....

Hello Hangdawg13, You know what.... You've inspired me to start up my positive karma invocation journal up again. Until now I only wrote about positive karmic invocation when the pretty pink pixies answered big prayers (and there have been plenty in addition to my personal examples of karmic healing that I described at the top of this thread). But to prevent me from indulging in post-hoc reasoning and confirmation bias, I am going to start writing down all of my karmic requests every night and their answers. A year from now I'll let you know how it turns out...... assuming that I haven't become disillusioned with theists (sorry I do have a social life: the pretty pink pixies are good at providing in that regard).Tell you what, to save us waiting a year, why don't you read to us from your previous journal. I'll read to you from my positive karma journal. A lot of really good things have happened in my life, which I can easily attribute to those pretty pink pixies and positve karma. Sure, some crap things have happened to, but those pretty pink pixies move in mysterious ways.Let's trade journal stories!I'll start: In response to a recent positive karma invocation the pretty pink pixies helped me get a $45k per annum raise in my present job for doing nothing different and I'm not particularly good at my job (all true!). Praise those pretty pink pixies!Your turn.