Fox News Goes After Pope

If you pick the option that God is real and choose to believe, you do this with the possibility that he may or may not be real. If he is not real and you fake your belief, no harm done. If he is real and you choose to believe, then what I believe about God is also true, so your faith will grow and you will believe even if you feel like it is impossible now. Many people have come to Christian faith from greater skepticism than you.

afaik Pascal's wager doesn't really take into account the number of faiths, demoninations, or even Gods to choose from, which seems like a pretty serious game theory error when talking about the gains of belief...

What if the true god punishes those who believe without question? That'd be my kinda god, lemme tell ya.

(that's a joke, but I'd probably respect a demiurge like that a lot more than the options the major faiths currently represent)

  On 12/16/2013 at 10:01 PM, sheatheman said:

If you pick the option that God is real and choose to believe, you do this with the possibility that he may or may not be real. If he is not real and you fake your belief, no harm done. If he is real and you choose to believe, then what I believe about God is also true, so your faith will grow and you will believe even if you feel like it is impossible now. Many people have come to Christian faith from greater skepticism than you.

That is some...sad logic lol.

I am currently open to the possibility that God is real--in the way that I am open to unicorns being real--but my stupid brain simply won't believe in something just because I might want something to be true. Unfortunately I am a slave to reason, and if God is gonna punish me for not believing something on bad evidence then he is simply not a just God. If he was a just and loving God that truly wanted to save everyone then he would simply reveal himself, and all would believe (including myself). But he's not a just God and so he will punish me for not believing something I have no reason to believe.

Do you not fear the Islamic hell? Maybe you could be a Christian and a Muslim at the same time since you seem to be able to choose your beliefs willy-nilly.

i would argue that if you fake your belief and god doesn't exist, you've wasted your fucking life on a fairy tale.

i would also argue that you're still lying to god.

i would also also argue that sr4 was 100% correct and you are either trolling or as thick as they come.

hey don't slag Pascal off

neat thinker

and i'm not even religious in any way

my avatar is actually a red flag

and the fact that pretending to believe is effectively believing is a key insight on the way faith actually works

pascal's point is that if you go to church and go through the motions you'll find yourself involved with christianity, which is pretty commonsensical if you ask me, like if you are a barça supporter but you always wear a real madrid shirt and attend all their matches and chant for them you'll be a real madrid supporter for all intents and purposes in spite of what you might think about yourself, and you'll also develop a relationship with real madrid unless something else is happening (you're a spy, or under a very blunt form of coercion, etc.)

then again pascal's strategy was a form of christian theology geared to libertines

which is a clever move we leftists can learn a lot from

you know limpy, you talk about reason but you don't seem very sympathetic to reason, i'm sure it's a wrong impression because we've never met but from this thread i sort of get the feeling you'd bash the rational core of any theological insight into the ground if it helped you slag christianity off

i don't think christianity is stone age at all, particularly catholicism, it's rather fiendishly sophisticated and designed

for evil ends of course, but you've got to give credit where it's due

i mean this thread is like the inner monologue of what's going on in the mind of an angry, traumatised, irish bloke if you know what i mean

dunno, as a communist i'd rather listen to pascal or st. augustine or jesus christ himself than someone like hitchens or dawkins

then i'd burn some churches, i'll agree with you on that

  On 12/16/2013 at 10:16 PM, poblequadrat said:

you know limpy, you talk about reason but you don't seem very sympathetic to reason, i'm sure it's a wrong impression because we've never met but from this thread i sort of get the feeling you'd bash the rational core of any theological insight into the ground if it helped you slag christianity off

[citation needed]

He's got evidence, lol

If you're referring to earlier in this thread when I was very clearly goofing off

and talking about drizzling poop and ripping babies in half like phonebooks

then you got me dead to rights mate

if you're talking about the very obvious point at which I started treating this thread like a proper debate

then citation needed

also please cite an example of a "rational core" of a theology

I just meant he's got over a year of LimpyLoo posts that do not budge on the idea of the God-as-skyman theist child perspective and why it is a fairy tale (and I agree, it is), but you do not entertain any legitimacy in heavier theological concepts, like when poble originally brought up the point of belief in god vs the divine (a very cool argument he made, imo) and rather than try to see it on the level he presented it, you brought it back to "I don't believe in [x literalist gods]. Atheism isn't hard to understand."

just sayin'

I'm gonna drop some Sagan in this post just because.

  Quote

“People are not stupid. They believe things for reasons. The last way for skeptics to get the attention of bright, curious, intelligent people is to belittle or condescend or to show arrogance toward their beliefs.”

― Carl Sagan

  Quote

“The chief deficiency I see in the skeptical movement is its polarization: Us vs. Them — the sense that we have a monopoly on the truth; that those other people who believe in all these stupid doctrines are morons; that if you're sensible, you'll listen to us; and if not, to hell with you. This is nonconstructive. It does not get our message across. It condemns us to permanent minority status.”

― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

not saying he wasn't a neat thinker overall, i just think the wager is his weakest idea ever.

As you very well know, Luke, I have been addressing the tradition Christian concept of God the entire time. You and I bumped into this a couple pages ago when you made it clear that you took the Bible as sheer metaphor.

Now, if someone wants to change the definition of God mid-debate and say "God is love" and then tell me I'm being unreasonable then fucking lol, innit.

But my point has been that, even outside of this conversation, there isn't one "traditional Christian concept of God," as the number of Christian philosophers of the past attest to (and despite what any one individual christian tells you today, denominations fight amongst themselves all the time on issues like the nature of god or "his plan" or whatever)... but yeah, I'd rather just lol the day away with you, and this is of minor consequence I suppose. I just hope you take into consideration that you appear to be dogmatic to some people, and that might be an impression you'd like to avoid.

  On 12/16/2013 at 10:47 PM, luke viia said:

But my point has been that, even outside of this conversation, there isn't one "traditional Christian concept of God," as the number of Christian philosophers of the past attest to... but yeah, I'd rather just lol the day away with you, and this is of minor consequence I suppose. I just hope you take into consideration that you appear to be dogmatic to some people, and that might be an impression you'd like to avoid.

I simply don't take claims on faith or bad evidence. If someone sees that as dogmatic, then I don't know what to say to that person.

Err, that's not at all the point I was making. Poble's argument (the example I used) wasn't about 'bad evidence', it was about distinguishing between types of belief, and you simplified back to a playground level of literalism in your defense of your position, which is why I think he called you out for not being terribly "reasonable" when presented with arguments you don't agree with, as you (based on what I read) did not reason through what he had said, but merely rejected it, sticking to your guns.

Anywho...

(ps - I'm not asking you to go back and reason through every argument in this thread, lol. In fact I probably should have never posted, but I sympathize with poblequadrat's issue of dealing with presumably "rational" people who do not think through issues carefully before rejecting them)

((pps - no doubt I'm guilty of the same behavior I'm speaking of, we all generally are - especially those of us who regularly claim to be reasonable people, or even "slaves to reason")

  On 12/16/2013 at 10:56 PM, luke viia said:

Err, that's not at all the point I was making. Poble's argument (the example I used) wasn't about 'bad evidence', it was about distinguishing between types of belief, and you simplified back to a playground level of literalism in your defense of your position, which is why I think he called you out for not being terribly "reasonable" when presented with arguments you don't agree with, as you (based on what I read) did not reason through what he had said, but merely rejected it, sticking to your guns.

 

Anywho...

You are absolutely correct. I can't keep track of all the different claims and denominations. If someone wants to say that "God is the universe" or "divine just means eternal" then okay, whatever. Sorry I didn't play some vacuous semantics game. But...*sigh* just wake me up when you guys decide where to put the goalposts.

If the claim is somewhere in the ballpark of saying the term "God" is just a metaphor for the universe then okay lol.

I'm not trying to defend my own interpretation, lol. We can forget about it, I was just trying to add a "yeah, no offense Limpy, but you do come off a bit unreasonable" addendum to pob's post, no more no less. I just coated it in big sugary words because I'm a douchebag.

All of religion is a vacuous semantics game, btw.

  On 12/16/2013 at 10:11 PM, disparaissant said:

i would argue that if you fake your belief and god doesn't exist, you've wasted your fucking life on a fairy tale.

 

i would also argue that you're still lying to god.

 

i would also also argue that sr4 was 100% correct and you are either trolling or as thick as they come.

When you become a professor at UCLA you could teach a course on how ad hominem is a cool thing and how it has and will continue to do a lot for the feminist agenda.

I also appreciate how this whole thread has ignored my reference to Francis Collins. It's because that fact just does not fit into your Saganist worldview. It does not compute.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/questionofgod/voices/collins.html

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|things that change a person's deepest beliefs about reality|

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as you can see there is no crossover

What I meant by "Elvis is still alive and I saw him at the mall" is that he's alive in my heart.

Right. Deeply religious people are on par with idiots that think Elvis is alive.

I think my point a moment ago was entirely missed, lol.

*leaves thread as a non-religious but facepalming serious man*

  On 12/16/2013 at 11:17 PM, sheatheman said:

When you become a professor at UCLA you could teach a course on how ad hominem is a cool thing and how it has and will continue to do a lot for the feminist agenda.

"wah you called me a name therefore i'm going to suggest that you are harming feminism by calling me a name in a conversation that had fuckall to do with feminism because i am a whinny babby wah"

  On 12/16/2013 at 11:21 PM, luke viia said:

Right. Deeply religious people are on par with idiots that think Elvis is alive.

 

I think my point a moment ago was entirely missed, lol.

 

*leaves thread as a non-religious but facepalming serious man*

Err you obviously missed my point.

we're both pretty good at that it seems, lol

  On 12/16/2013 at 11:17 PM, sheatheman said:

I also appreciate how this whole thread has ignored my reference to Francis Collins. It's because that fact just does not fit into your Saganist worldview. It does not compute.

 

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/questionofgod/voices/collins.html

I directly commented on your Francis Collins bit, come on now. This is a pretty cool interview though, thanks for the link duder.

"As I began to ask a few questions of those people (dying patients), I realized something very fundamental: I had made a decision to reject any faith view of the world without ever really knowing what it was that I had rejected. And that worried me. As a scientist, you're not supposed to make decisions without the data. It was pretty clear I hadn't done any data collecting here about what these faiths stood for.

"Now, I was still pretty sure that faith traditions were all superstition and something that would not apply to me, and something that I wouldn't be interested in. But I did feel compelled to find out a bit more about what it was that I had rejected. So with an intention of shooting this all down, I went to speak to a Methodist minister in Chapel Hill, which is where I was at the time. I sat in his office and made all sorts of accusations, and probably said blasphemous things about the faith that he stood for, but sincerely asked him to help me find out what it was all about. And he was very tolerant and patient and listened and suggested that, for starters, it might be good if I read a little bit more about what these faiths stood for....""

a good scientist meets a good pastor

also lol @ saganist. hail sagan my dark lord and master.