Choosing a faith

This doesn't answer the question. Why do you think the number of people who believe something is evidence? My earlier example was that most of the western world believed the world flat a few hundred years ago. Presumably you agree those great numbers were not evidence of a flat world, so why do you think the number of people who believe the Bible true is evidence, however weak, that the Bible is true.The cause of many of your baseless claims is your belief that there are other ways of knowing than through observations of the natural world. You are wrong. No such "other ways of knowing" exist in any real-world way. If you want to believe they exist as a matter of faith then that's fine. If you think there is evidence for these other ways of knowing then present it.About eyewitnesses, as the constant flow of freed former felons convicted on eyewitness testimony illustrates, eyewitnesses are horribly unreliable anyway. A hundred Popes swearing on a Bible that they've witnessed God (not together but as individual personal experiences) is zero evidence. What label should we give someone who once informed they are wrong fails to discuss it and keeps repeating the error? Religious books are notoriously unreliable when it comes to the foundational stories of their religious beliefs. Sure, the Bible is evidence, but not of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, Noah, Abraham or Jesus. It certainly contains historical information of kings like Sennacherib and Hezekiah and of places and regions like Jerusalem and Galilee, but other parts of the Bible completely abandon any connection to real world observational evidence, such as in the story of Job or the Book of Revelation. You keep repeating this but never get specific. Name an observation using one or more of the five senses that is recorded in the Bible and that can be shown reliable. Why can't your belief be based upon faith? Why does your faith require evidence?--Percy

What evidence leads you to believe there is anything "behind those chemical reactions in the brain"? Is your speculation about an "external intelligence" based upon evidence? If so, what is it?Arguing that the presence of good and evil and of our ability to choose between them is evidence of an "external intelligence" has a big hole because the conclusion doesn't seem to follow. Evil is even relative. A man fires his gun and kills an innocent person. That is evil. A man fires his gun and kills an enemy soldier. That is good. So much for "Thou shalt not kill."--Percy

You're making arguments that have self-evident answers. If whether a weed is ugly depends upon who is looking at it, then whether a flower is beautiful also depends upon who is looking at it. You must have realized this already. I don't understand why you made an argument containing an obvious fallacy.Hopefully you're not arguing that everything is beautiful and nothing is ugly, so I'll ignore that possibility.If both beauty and ugliness exist in the world, just as good and evil exist in the world, then if one is evidence of God, isn't its opposite evidence of the opposite of God, or at lease evidence of something other than God? If not then your argument reduces to, "That there is something rather than nothing is evidence of God."Your argument that the ability to choose between beauty and ugliness or between good and evil is evidence of God has not made sense to anyone. To everyone but you you seem to be claiming a deductive relationship between two unrelated things.--Percy

If I implied it was irrational at any point that was unintended. I have no objections to belief in anything as an article of faith.
​ Again, no objection to anyone accepting this as an article of faith.--Percy

I didn't phrase that well. What I was trying to say is that their abstractive qualities makes it problematic for them to serve as evidence. A Ferrari is cool, but how is its coolness evidence? And if the Ferrari is dismantled into its component parts, where does the coolness go? This is pretty obvious. When the patient awakens they'll have all the memories, emotions and behaviors of whosever brain it was. It would be more accurate to say that the brain had a body transplant.And if the patient doesn't make it, where do the memories, intelligence and emotions go? A coroner could conduct a brain autopsy for years and never come across any of these things.Saying that intelligence and emotions are actual things that exist independent of the brain is like saying the settings on your phone exist independent of the phone. They don't. Destroy the phone and there's no settings. It's similar with the brain. Destroy the brain and there's no intelligence, memories or emotions.If you're truly married to having evidence for what you believe on faith then success seems unlikely. Your building of worship is evidence that there's a church at that location, but evidence of any connection to God and Jesus is absent. You can take the building apart brick by brick and board by board, but you'll never find any evidence of God or Jesus. Where are they?Things that exist in the real-world leave real-world evidence behind. You think there's a non-material world that somehow leaves real-world evidence behind. How does that even happen, and if it does then where's that evidence? Your main strategy seems to be to try to get us to lower the bar on what's considered evidence. "Hey, Polycarp said so, must be true."They key question is why you think you need evidence for things you accept on faith. No one presented real-world evidence to convince you of these things that you accept on faith, so why do you think evidence exists? And this is faith, after all. Why is evidence even relevant?--Percy

Oh, that is so sad. They could have made the story so much better, so much more uplifting so that it could serve as a message of inspiration and hope for generations afterward.For example, the story could have continued by this man being resurrected on the third day before ascending to heaven to sit at the right hand of God, having promised a second coming before the present generation passed away where all the good would ascend to heaven.But you didn't mention anything like that, so I guess you're right, just a depressing story.Seriously, your post is an example of how the Bible stories are manipulated to send whatever message is desired at the time.--Percy

I'll take a stab at this. You became hung up on the word "necessary" when it was only a word Tangle happened to choose in the moment. There are literally dozens of different ways to phrase the question. "Why is worshipping something important to you?" "If there is a higher power in the universe, why should it be worshipped?" "What need would a perfect immortal omnipotent being have for worship by us?" "Isn't a need for being worshipped a form of psychosis, schizophrenia being one example?" "Aren't we anthropomorphizing God when we conclude he's someone to be worshipped?" "How is our need to worship a higher being any different from primitive tribes that worship the land or animals or the water and sun gods and who often include hallucinogens as part of worship?"--Percy

Both have a total lack of evidence. How is it that you're able to to compare their evidence.However, in its favor an "advanced alien civilization" postulates no violations of the laws of nature. Ah, yes, we-cannot-know-the-ways-of-Godism. Someone sins against God but goes on to lead a successful and happy life, then God must have forgiven him, who knows why. But someone else who sins against God, let's say the exact same sin, dies a gruesome death from a terrible disease, then God must have meted out justice, who knows why. A someone else lives a Mother-Teresa-good kind of life and dies of the same disease, who knows why? Babies and children die for no apparent reason (recalling images of bald children appropriate here). God just works in mysterious ways. It's all just part of his wonderful plan.How is all this any different from whatever happens happens, who knows why? Doesn't adding a God to the mix just multiply the rationalizations and ad hoc explanations that must be employed enormously? Some Nazis escaped to Argentina and lived long, happy lives. Other's were dealt with by the Mossad, one even kidnapped, brought back to Israel for trial, found guilty, and hanged. All in a day's work for God, and if you want to know why, just ask any believer.--Percy

But there are only stories claiming eyewitnesses. Possibly as many as billions of people believe these stories true. If millions of people believing the world flat had no influence on the shape of the world, why would billions of people believing the Bible stories have any influence on their truth? There is an unwritten and sort of natural-law contract between the religious and secular aspects of the western world. The secular agrees to be respectful of all people's faiths and of their right to worship as they see fit, while the religious agree to observe restraint in their interactions with the secular. Claiming outside the house of worship that your religion is the one, right and true religion because the facts support it, and to jump with both feet into the political arena in matters concerning health, abortion, sex education, and LBGTQ matters, fractures that contract into little shards. And during WWII the Japanese had loyalty to the Emperor and the Germans had loyalty to Hitler and the Russians had love of motherland, while today we have racism and narcissism and xenophobia and misogyny, not to mention an apparent failure of education in democracy on a massive scale. Everything you can place on one side of the scales is easily overbalanced by things that belong on the other side. Russian missiles just struck civilian apartment buildings in Zaporizhzhia with 12 known dead at this time. If God exists, that's on him, too. He's got some 'splainin' to do.The argument, "Things would be worse without God," fails spectacularly. The countries faring the best are the most secular. There's something about a religious streak that hardens mens hearts into thinking, "We have to solve this problem like real men, with guns and bayonets." When it comes to which eyewitness to believe you may as well flip a coin, a coin with three sides where the third side says, "Neither!" The only reliable witness is evidence. What someone thinks they saw should carry very little weight.I was a witness in an assault years ago. The prosecutor presented me a photo lineup. I gave him percentages on the accuracy of my identifications. I graded my accuracy at around 10% for two of the perpetrators, and 90% for the other. By the time of the trial a couple months later I had begun to forget details, like the order in which events happened. I was called for the defense, interestingly enough. I think the prosecutor wanted people who could be certain in their identifications. His photo lineup also had flaws, which if he'd deigned to cross-examine me I would have noted. The perpetrator photos were obviously new, the other photos obviously old and used many times, cues which I refused to follow.By the way, the truth did will out. They were able to identify all the perpetrators without eyewitness identification and all went to jail, serving a year or two each. The victim suffered back pain for years. A selective reading of the Bible is definitely the right call, but it must be based upon evidence, not which parts you like and which parts you don't. Expanding the question a bit, why do I believe Socrates fictional and Plato real?But first let's deal with your question about which of my five senses I used to reach my conclusions. Did you already forget when I said history doesn't work that way? Did you think I believe we can only accept historical accounts as long as the eyewitnesses are alive and available to testify?No, of course not. What we know of history depends upon contemporary chroniclers, documentation and physical evidence. You know what history says of Solomon and David? That there's absolutely no sign of them during the period the Bible says they lived. No contemporary writings, no clay tablets or scrolls, no contemporary inscriptions, no sign of their great constructions.Socrates comes down to us as a convenient foil for the ironic stories Plato liked to tell, but there are also contemporaneous chroniclers who mention him, so many that it would be reasonable to consider him real if so many of the details about him weren't inconsistent and/or contradictory. I'm not a historian and can't pretend the ability to unravel it all, but it makes me doubt Socrates was real. Or perhaps he was a composite of several people.Plato, on the other hand, actually wrote books, and contemporaries wrote about him and his books. He ran a school. One of his students was Aristotle, for whom we also have a large cache of contemporary evidence.--Percy

You keep making the same mistake. You keep choosing all the "sweetness and light" qualities, and you do it in the face of people calling your attention, over and over, to the negative qualities, like retardation, brain damage, dementia, death, selfishness, narcissism, mercilessness, vengefulness, greed, hate, etc. You've got a blind spot as barren and large as the Atacama Desert. Why are you saying this yet again? You seem very intelligent. Why are you stuck on repeating your basic points and not moving the discussion forward?I contend that an invisible spaghetti monster is a much more reasonable answer. Let us compare the evidence for each. You first. You've said this exact same thing before and the answer hasn't changed. Your "life experiences and my observations" are evidence, meaning that you are wrong to characterize you conclusions as unevidenced. And when asked what your evidence is you talk of "consciousness, altruism," etc., while forgetting "death, selfishness," etc., which I already covered above, but which I had to cover again because you keep saying the same thing in different ways. Using different words to say the same thing does not turn an old point into a new point.At some point you have to jump off your self inflicted merry-go-round and start considering all the points people are raising. Ignoring them will only make people angry and frustrated, which I'm sure I would be right now were I not so busy and limited to about a post a day.--Percy

I won't quote anything from your Message 883, just ask how that nothing burger addresses anything I said?I'm not asking that you go back and try again. I'm way behind and probably have other messages from you to catch up on. But not today. Today this is all I have time for.--Percy

Why, in the context of religion, are you distinguishing between faith and belief? Is it because you see faith as unevidenced while belief can have evidence? Yes, we know you feel that way. Now you have to go off and gather evidence that will convince other people that there's something beyond chemical reactions going on in our brains that we haven't detected yet.There's already massive evidence against you. For example, emotions like grief can be caused by sticking a probe in the corresponding part of your brain.--Percy

And so you told half the story, the depressing first half, when the full story has an incredibly uplifting conclusion. Breaking down your next sentence reveals the manipulation:
​ This is the first part of the story you told, the "crisis" portion in typical short story parlance, in order to rebut Ringo's "sunshine and lollipops" charge. And this is the conclusion of the story that you left out.It's as if you described a particular RomCom as a depressing story because the two lovebirds have a falling out (usually about 3/4 of the way through), failing to mention that the whole thing is resolved in the end and they live happily ever after.You hold Christian beliefs because you were raised in a culture steeped in Christianity. The reason the Bible seems so much more credible to you than the Quran is because you've been repeatedly exposed to all the stories and accompanying apologetics. But the same exact situation is true of Muslim cultures. They can quote chapter and verse of the Quran and tailor it to address any situation, just as you can do with the Bible. The Mormons can do the same with the Book of Mormon.You don't believe as you do because there's something unique about Christianity. Christians try to make Christianity the measuring rod by which all other religions must be measured ("Islam doesn't have a savior who was sacrificed, resurrected, ascended to heaven and forgives sins, therefore it isn't a valid religion"), but Muslims and Mormons do the same. Does Christianity have golden plates inscribed by a great prophet? No? Then isn't Christianity, at a minimum, incomplete, and at worst invalid?You believe as you do because you were raised in a Christian culture. But Christianity makes no sense, something that is true of most religions. And in trying to make sense of it you're just inventing a lot more nonsense.--Percy

So here on Earth while we're alive God behaves like a perfect prick, and yet you believe in an afterlife of perfect and ultimate justice meted out by the same prick God.How can you be right about things for which you have zero evidence? The history of baseless guesses is extraordinarily poor.In your seeking of answers you have skipped a step: the seeking of evidence. Pointing at something like the Bible and calling it evidence doesn't make it so. All that does is start a debate about your criteria for evidence. That you're finding no evidence should be part of any answers you arrive at.Real evidence doesn't depend upon what religion you are. Cations, cats and clouds are things that everyone of all religions and no religion agree about because of the evidence. If you had real evidence then the Buddhists and Muslims and Jews and Hindus of the world would all be Christian.The best that you can do is the same as the best that anyone can do: believe in what works for you. You'll never achieve truth in any objective sense about things for which there is no evidence. Calling it "the most difficult argument" is a severe understatement. Suffering completely undermines your entire position. Here are three recently dead women of Bucha, Ukraine, your God at work (a public servant, an animal lover and a grandmother, you can read about their lives and deaths here): If it works for you, great. Just realize you didn't reach this point of view through evidence and a chain of reasoning. When what is seen depends upon the person seeing it, that is essentially the definition of subjective. Again, you're saying it works for you, and that's great. That's your truth. It isn't anyone else's. If you're here hoping to find agreement that you've achieved a rational conclusion based upon evidence, that won't happen because you're the only one who thinks you're being rational and basing your thinking upon evidence. Who's judging God? I would no more waste time judging God than I would any fictional entity. I don't waste time judging Santa Claus or the tooth fairy, either. Again, you're talking about passing judgment on an entity that doesn't have any evidence he exists. People forming aid groups is not evidence of God.--Percy

I don't think anyone objects to you believing that being a good person is a form of worship. It works for you and that's fine.But if you're trying to convince other people that you have evidence showing that when they do good they're worshipping God then you have a long ways to go.--Percy