It was a great conversation but this was the argument that ground everything to a halt, because, though he refused to admit defeat, he was unable to produce a reasonable explanation.
Ultimately he said "Well you have to have faith that God has always been, and will always be."
Nope. I certainly do not.
And, you know, I have no issues with people having their beliefs. If you choose to believe in God, or Allah, or Pink Unicorns**, then whatever.
ReplyDeleteJust keep it to yourself. Don't try and enforce your views into law. Don't "vote your conscience," and thereby "get around" the fact that religion can't be the basis for laws. Stop constantly preaching and telling others how they "need" your personal view of things. And do your jobs; stop claiming that your personal beliefs make you special and you should be allowed to not sell X drug, or not do X medical procedure, or not marry X kind of person...Be a responsible adult, like you expect the rest of us to be.
Keep your beliefs in your life. Recognize, and respect, that not everyone believes as you do, and we have the right to do that. And come to grips with what "freedom of religion" truly means, not what the Right tries to portray it as.
If everyone would just keep their religion in their own lives, the country would be a vastly better place. And no, Christianity is not the sole exemption to this statement.
**Everyone knows that Rarity is truly best Pony. And Rarity is not pink.
it's not even about keeping it to yourself, just about lucidly admitting to yourself and everyone else that you tell about it, that it is an irrational belief, without evidence. that, psychologically, you are like an opium addict, or a child needing that Teddy bear to sleep.
DeleteTHAT is the truth about religious belief.
Faith = invitation to be scammed
DeleteAll you have to do is ask 'them' (the religious zealots) to 'prove it'. They can't. But these same religious God-believing zealots want proof, absolute proof of evolution. No missing link? Well, then evolution is false!
ReplyDeleteThere isn't and has never been proof of God or an afterlife. These people that claim they had near-death experiences and came back? Well, scientists can duplicate that experience exactly. It's the brain's way of shutting down, letting go.
You know what? It isn't worth arguing about with these Bible-thumping zealots. It's just a waste of time.
Exactly. I will never understand why so many people can't understand that faith is not the same as cold, hard, provable fact. We are free to believe anything we want to believe but the strength of our beliefs, without proof, will never turn them into facts.
ReplyDeleteWhenever the religious are backed into a corner and have no more arguments or solid proof they always fall back on the old "you have to have faith..." argument. I have faith that there is no solid proof for anything except that there is a beginning and an end. That is why I am agnostic. My definition - an agnostic is an atheists who hedges their bets.
ReplyDelete"an agnostic is an atheists who hedges their bets."
DeletePerfect! I love it.
There are atheist by conviction and atheists by performance. most atheists are agnostic by belief - there is no proof, but we behave as if no god exists until there is evidence otherwise.
DeleteAnd really, all religious believers are atheists - to the god(s) of other religions.
But maybe, Gryphen, it boils down to what the word God means. To some it means a guy who sits up in heaven and judges and sends cataclysms to express his dismay. To me, it means the force/love that has always been here, of which we are all a part, and it's entirely possible that we ourselves, being also therefore always here in some form, thought up this whole idea, and that we are all one, that we are all God, the creators, of a sort of neverending fractal existence. So when I am asked do I believe in God, and I say yes, I mean something entirely different than someone else.
ReplyDeleteI do know that WE are God to each other, and that is truly what I think Jesus was trying to say!
I agree. For me, God has always been the life that is in everything, not an old white bearded man sitting in the clouds.
DeleteI brought up this same argument in Sunday school class, in the second grade. I asked the Teacher "Who created God". We went round and round for a bit, but basically she just said, "no one created God"....end of discussion.
ReplyDeleteMy dad was the Minister of the church :)
I agree with Anon 6:25- And, I believe that we are evolving creatures, and God to me, means Love. And we are the expression of that, we are also "God"s children, and have the same ability to create. Therefore, we have inventions of all sorts, from internet, airplanes, etc. The universal intelligence that we can tap into. But, those that don't express love, create destructive things. No, I don't attend services or belong to any religious organization. But, neither did the "masters", like Buddha and Jesus.
ReplyDeleteJesus was a practicing Jew.
Delete(the two times recorded in the Bible, when Jesus went to the synagogue, he threw things around in righteous anger. he taught in the fields, and in the streets. he was a "rebel" :-)
DeleteSorry, that argument doesn't work either. All it does is move the discussion back a step so that "chaos" becomes the field of creation, rather than "god." No matter how you slice it, there is always "Something" there in the beginning -- be it "god" or be it "chaos."
ReplyDeleteChaos, by its nature, does not create. The "Act of Creation" is whatever sparks the chaos into organization. Then Chaos becomes Cosmos.
So what's that spark? Who knows? Native Americans called it "The Great Mystery," and that's good enough for me.
Ahhh yes. Little minds can't grasp that the universe could just "happen. It had to have a creator.
ReplyDeleteBut they can believe that a being with the power to create the universe could just "happen".
That's one more miracle than I'm willing to believe.
My little mind can only grasp things with an end point. Time and infinite space are beyond me. Couldn't the same question you ask about god also apply to the 'big bang'? How does 'nothing' create chaos?
ReplyDeleteI think the problem with the quote is that it implies causality must exist beyond physical laws--which there is no evidence for or against whether it does. If there is a force that transcends physical laws (call it "God") then it is moot to discuss methods to prove its existence through empirical data. Basically, "God" is not part of the physical world and no one said he/it is, so why look for proof of God or lack thereof through examinations of physical data? Seems a fools errand either way.
ReplyDelete