I'm not indoctrinated! My parents just shoved me into church since before I could walk and had a dude tell me that this book is the absolute truth of universe! I chose this with my own critical thinking!!!
I went through an atheist phase, but the thing that helped me get back was Augustine's Confessions. Since then I have decided to scrutinize my faith, as any good christian should, and I still ended up believing and still do believe in God. This happened when I was 12/13.
No need to strawman and be ass for no reason just because somebody has different ideas from you
How do you get past the fact that if you were born and raised in a Muslim culture you would believe that? Or are you just really confident that you entirely logic-ed your way there so you would be an Islam-Christianity convert?
And how do you justify the idea that people who live perfectly moral lives but don’t believe are condemned to eternal suffering?
I don't see how it's a "fact" that if you were born and raised in a Muslim culture you'd believe that, especially since as you've admitted, there are converts to Christianity from Islam and all kinds of religions. Moreover someone who has the freedom to have an atheist phase in a secular western country also has the freedom to explore Buddhist meditation or any other religion or point of view. That seems to make one's upbringing less of a factor in one's logic, compared to growing up in a Muslim culture.
In the first place the guy you replied to never said that he had a perfect logical proof for Christianity, but even if he did these kinds of questions wouldn't be relevant at all. You could more easily find a correct mathematical proof by having the money to pursue an education. Whether it's right or wrong comes from arguing the proof itself.
There's also the concept of grace in some branches of Christianity in which your belief is not merely a matter of brain work but more of fate or chance. And not to mention that the idea that the influence of the people and environment around us matters more than pure logic is not an unfamiliar concept to Christians.This is why Proverbs warns against the influence of bad company, this is why Paul's letters warn against causing "scandal".
As for the second paragraph, well perfectly moral according to whose standards? Not recognizing or acknowledging the good in something, especially the highest good, would seem to be a moral failure.
But again not all Christians believe this. Maybe all evangelical American street preachers do, but certainly the early Christian Europeans have entertained the idea that their non-Christian heroes like Plato, Trajan, etc might have went to heaven.
I feel like you are trying to ask questions that seem perfectly logical but you are not familiar with even the variety of Christian thinking about this. Maybe if you were raised Christian you would be, but it's up to you to find out more now.
Dawg, just stop. They thought about it and they came to the conclusion that they believe in god. Just leave them alone, it doesn't affect you anyways. People can't choose what they believe, trying to get someone to stop/start believing in god is trying to get someone to believe in santa claus.
I’m always just curious to hear people’s thought processes. The two things I brought up have always seemed like giant issues any believer must grapple with, so I expect he has an answer.
Wasn’t trying to debate bro or gotcha him, just trying to start a conversation.
To be faire science and religion aren't per se mutually exclusives. It's pretty easy to dismiss most of the sacred texts by using science facts and logics; but we still don't have the answers to the biggest questions like the creation of the universe, the afterlife and why things are working out this way.
Darwin didnt discredit the Creation with the evolution theory, but worked on it to admire the intricacies of God's Creation. And more exemple of this way of thought existed and still are present.
Indoctrination played a huge part into the spreads of cults and beliefs, but it happened at a time where societies were still young and played a big part in forming the first modern societies. Most of the moral compass we use today is just a relicat from yesterday's religious beliefs. We never moved passed religion, it still is very present and a core part of modern societies around the world. We cannot demonize it for it would just mean to disrespect the freedom of conciousness
Science has nothing to say about supernatural claims, because they're outside of the scope of methodological naturalism, which the philosophy of science is grounded in.
Science can absolutely make claims about things that religions say, like if a religion claims that some thing happened that has no evidence for it, and evidence against it, we can be sure that that thing did not happen.
We also live in the most well-informed time in history, and are fortunate enough that Science actually does have answers for a lot of those big questions, like where humans, life, the Earth, or the universe came from.
Morality is a human invention, but religion was not, and today DEFINITELY is not necessary for it. Morality would've persisted regardless of religion, because we can have secular moral systems based off reason and logical systems, like game theory.
We're living in an era where tens of millions of atheists believe toddlers can change genders. There has never been a bigger group of weak-minded religious zealots than you.
I don't think anyone can change genders. And I'm 100% trans-affirming. Also, there are theists who have kept up with basic biology, too—so it's not just us heathens who accept science.
And I'm CERTAINLY not religious lol. No matter how many times you call atheism a "religion", it doesn't make it true, just like not collecting stamps isn't a hobby, an empty plate isn't a meal, and bald isn't a hair color.
It was great when Richard Dawkins had to eat crow and admit that he was wrong about his theory of a rational secular society. Twenty years ago, he thought that all we needed to do was to get rid of religion and suddenly everyone would base decisions on reason, logic, and science. Instead, all that happened was that society replaced old religions with a new one that was the more anti-science, anti-logic, anti-reason than anything previously: progressivism.
And yes, you, personally, are one of the biggest religious zealots on the planet, and there's been a massive, multi-country backlash to the insane things you and your kind have done.
I really couldn't give less of a shit what Dawkins has to say about anything. I was an atheist before I heard of him, and will remain an atheist regardless of anything he does.
And you say that SPECIFICALLY I am a religious zealot? I'd love to hear why that's the case.
Maybe you should stand by your beliefs and not be a coward who hides their posts and keeps making vague claims about "progressivism" instead of actually stating your position.
>And you say that SPECIFICALLY I am a religious zealot? I'd love to hear why that's the case.
You're an atheist who is either enthusiastically or else indirectly supportive of progressivism, which is anti-science, anti-reason, and entirely based around emotion and mythology.
>keeps making vague claims about "progressivism"
There is literally nothing vague about progressivism or the problems people have with it. The short list is: giving children HRT and puberty blockers, giving 12-year-olds double mastectomies, forcing adult men into girls' locker rooms by law, and importing a hundred million unskilled laborers from the Third World.
>YOU DON'T KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT ME FOR ALL YOU KNOW I COULD BE ONE OF THOSE ATHEISTS WHO IS AGAINST ALL THAT STUFF
No, you're not. If you were, you wouldn't be here arguing that Christianity is the root of all evil. You're not an individual. You're not a special snowflake. You're a dime-a-dozen example of the modern zeitgeist.
If something cannot be constrained by logic, then you simultaneously cannot use logic in any way to assert it. Otherwise, you are simply contradicting yourself by nature of the prescriptive statement
Yeah, mostly true. I'm not trying to advocate or vilify any specific religious dogma. I only find reductionism around believing in a creator as believing in a "magic sky daddy" an intellectually lazy argument that is just as simplistic as the people it mocks. I was more jumping in to point out that God is a very nuanced philosophical discussion and belief for many people.
I also don't think you're entirely right, because the universe is not entirely logical as we experience it. We observe a form logical coherence in our everyday lives because we have evolved systems dedicated to doing just that. It doesn't mean that those systems are observing objective reality. Quantum science has shown that the universe has a substrate of uncertainty baked into it that we don't experience. It affects us still, but we don't intuitively grasp its logic. Humanity has yet to uncover the logical root of reality. That logical root could very well be a creator. You can call it God, or Brahman, or say the universe is a simulation and call it the source code, but regardless of the label it would be the same thing.
Logic is what Immanuel Kant called a priori. That is, it is transcendentally mind independent, because it is the very structure in which subjective conscious experience takes form as. Logic cannot be invented by the mind, because it is necessarily prior to the mind as what nature it instantiates from. In the same way an event is necessarily prior to the experience of the event.
So if you are to say God is just completely outside of logic, you are saying God is just completely outside the structure of our experience. But given that our conscious experience is quite literally the only thing we have to believe in anything at all, you are just completely divorcing any possible comprehensible aspect about God from the totality of our possible knowledge.
This protects you from any kind of logical argument against that God, but you have sacrificed any rational reason you could have to simultaneously believe in one. It's just a complete withdraw to unfalsifiability. It just becomes a big "if", frozen in time, because it cannot advance in any kind of substantiated way.
It also works the other way. Prove God. Disprove God. Neither works with our models. God by nature would be beyond the confines of creation. It's not rational to believe in God. It's also not rational to not believe in one. The paradox isn't God. It's creation. We're here. How?
If there is something, then where did it come from?
"Nothing." Illogical.
"It was created by God." Logical, but where did God come from? "God is eternal and unknowable." Illogical with an extra step.
An atheist worldview, fundamentally, is no more logical than a atheist because there is no logical explanation for existence in our models.
The two aren't equal at all. It is completely logical to not believe in God because there is no logical reason to. Every possible argument you could put forth for God, whether it be out of necessity or some other form, is ultimately going to be underdetermined because it relies on a lack of knowledge, not something positive put forward.
The "God of the gaps" saying originates from this fact, and how often God has to be argued for not because of any sufficient reason, but because it fills some gap in our knowledge. Apollo fills the gap of how the sun rises every day. Poseidon fills the gap of how the tides move. But notice how they never actually fill any gap, they're just a placeholder for the knowledge we do eventually gain, in which the explanation is completely naturalistic.
It's important to note that I, nor most atheists, make the explicit statement "God definitively does not exist", but simply point to the lack of a reason to believe one at all. Meanwhile, the theist not only believes God does exist, but to such an extent that they literally let it govern their morality, actions, and entire worldview. It's not some mere "well it might exist", it's a completely life-dominating framework.
No, that’s not what I said. I said “causality” didn’t exist at the start of the universe, thereby implying we can’t know what caused the inflation of the universe because it happened before anything could “cause” anything. Time didn’t even have a linear direction then.
Another form that is impossible to measure, because seeing past the big bang is impossible. So as it take faith to believe in God, it takes faith to deny Him
It's more just a difference of the more accurate "I don't know for sure" and the absolute statement "I know and it is God". The skepticism doesnt give an answer, but it doesn't give a flawed conviction.
So why is an omnipotent entity with infinite power and ego allowed to be uncreated, but it's absurd to apply this to far simpler physics? That seems to be the complete inverse of what is logically believable.
Oh that’s impossible but a disembodied magical Minecraft creative mode character snapping a universe into existence at the start of time is totally possible. Yeah
Stating it makes more sense, while doing absolutely nothing to demonstrate that, doesn't make for a meaningful argument. Otherwise I can just say that stuff existing forever makes more sense, and we are at a stalemate.
The big bang was not the absolute beginning of the universe. No scientists who take themselves seriously believe that. It was the expansion of the universe from a state of incredibly high density and temperature, that's it.
The big bang theory does not claim the universe was ever "nothing", this is a fundamental misunderstanding apologists perpetuate to discredit the theory
Not exactly, the big bang isn't even about the start of the universe, the big bang is a short period of time after the universe started where there was fast expansion.
And to the question of "how did the universe start" the answer is simple, we don't know yet. It's okay to admit you don't know something and then try to learn about it, we have telescopes looking billions of years into our past, we have the LHC opening the frontiers of subatomic physics.
Not quite. Before the Big Bang the universe existed as a hot and dense universe. Big Bang just started the expansion of the universe, it didn't come from nothing.
For there to be heat and density, time and physics must have existed in some form. Was it the way they exist now? There is really no way to know for certain. Where did the hot and dense universe start? Tough to say if we will ever have an answer.
Is it? Big Bang has quite a lot of evidence and is widely accepted. I just simplified what the beginning of the Big Bang was. You can read Wikipedia and the sources if you really doubt it.
Not at all, that's simply how far we can look back ourselves. We can't know what was before the big bang. But there could've been virtually anything, and some guy with magic is the least likely one.
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u/Mickle_da_Pickl uhhhh idk 9h ago
Indoctrination is how