Choosing a faith

Well at least some of it came through. Yes, I attack belief, faith. The kind that insists on its right to dictate to society, like ... any religion.I attack religion, faith, belief for the evil it allows and forces people to do. I do not blame your god since it does not exist. I personify your gods as manipulated influences, GDR's god memes, controlled by the church bureaucracy.Blame the influence the very idea of gods has had on humanity for allowing zealots and fanatics to lead the church and entice violent followers. The millennia of evils religions have caused in human history has not ended. Your gods, as pernicious persistent memes in people, continue to entice whole societies to war against the heretical them.Religion is poison to humanity and needs to end.

Again, please, "loving sacrificially", what is that?And "giving heart assent to loving sacrificially" means to do what?And I don't follow the doctrine part. If one agrees with whatever this "heart assent" line means, is that not assenting intellectually to a very specific position?That whole sentence seems at odds with the usual pronouncements of the priests who insist faith is to make the deity the center of action and worship. You seem to take that away.Salvation by faith or works? Are you starting your own cult?

Since your god is not real, realize that these crimes against the people are perpetrated by your church; by your acolytes led by your priests. Now can you begin to recognize the evil involved?

Dwise1, I think GDR is talking about the strange characters he copied into some past posts. The ones Percy was asking about. He wasn't saying anything about god.

No, the question is not unanswerable. You just don’t want to accept the answers the actual world provides.The evidence we have provides reproductive advantage as the answer to your ‘why’ questions.Do you understand how reproductive advantage drives evolution? Survival of the fittest, in its various and often erroneous interpretations, is but one aspect. Society, looking out for each other, no matter how small a touch of altruism, may, as the theories go, have had significant impact on the reproductive success across the greater population. Those “altruism” chemicals/pathways become more prominent and more powerful with each generation.A couple hundred generations later and altruism becomes settled in the human species as a benefit just like muscle strength. In all of this, nowhere is some emotionally conjured cosmic intelligence evident or necessary. We understand how, and the why, these processes work, and everything we see in evolution, including emotions, can be directly attributed to generations of incrementally improving reproductive success for its development and appearance in the human species.No cosmic ghosts are needed. So why invent them?

Morality is relative. Relative to the circumstance and to the society.We the people determine what is moral. For many millennia the churches, various, competing, inconsistent, tried to own the right to make those determinations. They failed the species miserably so we are now in the process of throwing off the church and relying on secular society, through the rule of law, to make those decisions.So, yes, we have a way to determine our moral values in a very materialistic mindless chemical sort of way. No ghosts necessary.

So you just pulled this out your butt.Yes, you have the right and blah, blah, believe but why? What is wrong with reality that you need to find solace in fantasy?

Why would it have to preclude/include/declude anything? This is the observation as I stated. There is nothing else there.What outside input? What first cause? Your flavor of a god? Why are you making this stuff up?Regardless, your emotions cannot alter the result of our knowledge and experience. You cannot alter the reality of our science.In determining social morality, altruism, emotion and every other human trait and condition we find evolution as the only necessary and sufficient venue. No ghosts are present or needed or wanted.I fail to see the utility of your beliefs.More better in keeping with the theme of your thread:Why did you choose this specific fantasy as your faith?

My critical thinking lets me do this. But I have to use much smaller dishes.

I would love to taste about 400 servings of your lasagna. With just a touch of romano if allowed.

Like Tangle said take your time. My stuff can be ignored. It's mostly repeats of others anyway.Just don't burn out! That would not be good. You're the brightest spark these haunts have seen since ... well, since when jar went missing and we had to call out a national manhunt.Has anyone said welcome back?

Edited by AZPaul3, .

I said I'd let you alone. I lied. Sorry. Uhm, no, not sorry. Then what is it like? If not scientific answers then what kind? Purely emotional?Your initial exposure to the woo, of course, came from your youthful acculturation, family, priests.What has changed your views? Experience, knowledge, yes, but what kinds of experience? What kinds of knowledge could possibly lead your mind so deep into this fantasy?You accept at least some science. Why not all? Failure to prove a negative is not a winning argument. It's a logical absurdity. No one can do such a thing and asking is considered bad form. Very bad form. Is there some other form of evidence? The evidence we're talking about is recording facts about our observations. What other kind of evidence is there?

If it's unprovable how do you assess its truth value?

That second one is a subset of the first. Both come down to cerebral meanderings with no reality to support them. They have no reason, other than hubris, to exist.Observational though, that is scientific. That is physical. Observational evidence is what is required to propose an idea that something exists in this universe.What observational evidence leads you to your god?Absent this I see only the hubris; your wishful thinking that your gods are real. “And the scales lifted from my eyes and I became one with the lord!” David Koresh prior to burning at Waco.The scope of your internal vision has limits, traps and is subject to manipulation. It is a poor compass to point the way to reality. So there is the basis of your beliefs about the world. The catechism resonates with you. Gives you the warm and fuzzies.Sorry.God is intellectually acceptable because the idea is comforting to your psyche.No, I was right … warm and fuzzies. The insults just come too easy. I’ll say it anyway.For a weak minded religious weenie steeped in fantasy you are unusually well informed and it shows.Unfortunately you seem to have missed the points of the two scholars you mentioned. - you can’t prove a negative so don’t ask
- evidence has to be physical, not philosophical or ephemeral.
- people's deep religious beliefs are not evidence no matter how many there are
- if it has effects in this universe it will leave lots of marks that we can see
- a lack of evidence can indeed be evidence... for just a few science concepts you seem to have issues with. Sorry for the repeat.Your philosophical evidence is internal emotional argument subject to the human condition. The answer may well depend on how many burritos you had for lunch. You have great faith in your stomach. Humans evolved our morality over tens of thousands of years of intellectual and social evolution. Over all that time we would teach our moral memes to our children, we gossip and argue about them at church, we brawl over them at the pub, even go to war over them. There are many instances of great moral advances and great moral clashes throughout human history. Not everyone is on the same page.Moralities around the world, despite a few commonalities one would expect of a social species, are so different as to preclude any common universal overlord’s dictates. No, not everyone is operating by the same set of absolute universal moral truths which means they weren’t ever absolute universal moral truths to begin with.Our morals are the different views of the different segments of society acting on different sets of moral codes and moral values that when adopted were not absolute or universal or truths. One can even question whether they were moral. Various relative moralities are, however, the way this world’s societies have learned to exist.

Edited by AZPaul3, .

Edited by AZPaul3, .

You take your religion, morality, world view from the conjures of your own mind.That seems a bit shaky a scaffolding on which to build a life ‘s world view. We know how fragile and prone to error even the best minds, like yours and mine, can be. We know our thoughts can be rather easily altered just by the daily chemistry that flows within us.Adopting, or more in your case, developing a religious world view seems would be a longer-term decision than could be affected by the chemistry of one lunch. Even an especially fine lunch. So I posit your fragile young mind was subject to some strong woo that connected synapses inappropriately tipping your mind into a forever proclivity for fantasy religious influences. Neural plasticity can firmly peg entire emotional suites early in development if the mind is so exposed or is unusually prone to such suggestion. I would suggest you caught the religious fantasy bug early and it burned your brain.Now with materialism and science we have the strongest facts available in all the universe upon which to build our view of this world. From big bang to standard model our world view is demonstrably real. And this knowledge of reality has improved the lives of billions in place of religions degradations.Religious knowledge seems centered on falsehoods, differences and fomenting strife between populations. Our science has made us as wizards able to tell the future and to manipulate the foundations of reality. How can any thinking man accept the evil of the former over the power of the latter?