Synaesthesia

Well Gilly, if you are struck down by lightning for testing the lord (thy God), I'll believe.
*Syn is struck by lightning*.

The consistency of God is an easy matter. Any knotty contradiction can instantly be cut by an appeal to God. Thus the consistency of any theist doctrine is not a virtue but a triviality.

This leaves us with the problem of justifying the substantial baggage implied by any theory invoking an undetectable system of arbitrary complexity and hence an arbitrary variety of behavior. Need the atheist shoot down the theory of God? No: since no evidence can float golden idols of infinite weight, it's not worth the ammunition.

Erm, forgive the mangled metaphors, I'm hunting for sleep and keep shooting off my mouth.

gilly54

Sorry to disappoint you Syn, but I'm still here and still asking for proof of a god. Since you say "God", it must be the Judeo-Christian one, described in the Bible, right? Or is it the newer, warm and fuzzy, new-Age-God-is-in-me, God is love, one that theists keep changing in order to keep their faith alive when science and archeology debunk the Bible?

Fiach

You have struck the heart of the debate. How can we debate what none can define? Even those who believe in entity cannot adequately define it. And those who try to define it, come up with thousands of different definitions. Sometimes the entity is singular, triune, plural, or pancosmos.

So we generally use the most defined God in history, JHWH (aka Jehovah, Joe Hovah, I AM, Elohim, Jesus Christ) who is either one, three, or none of the above. He is the God of Love who kills millions of babies in a flood when he has a rage attack. He is the god of omniscience who was surprised when Adam sinned, and had to ask Cain "Where is your Bro, Homey?"

Joe Hovah is the God of Justice who sends humans to Hell for questioning what seems totally barmy in dogma. Joe Hovah is the God of Mercy who created a burning lake of fire called Hell for those who would not worship him, to burn for eternity. Joe Hovah is the Omnipotent Creator whose creations, humans are full of anatomical, metabolic, and genetic defects and subject to terrible genetic mutations. His omnipotence in engineering created a spinal column in Humans best adapted for quadripeds (ergo, universal back pain.)

Jesus Christ, his human form resulting from Joe's paedophilic impregnation of a young girl, was also fully god, eh? Yet he didn't know that neuronal depolarisations caused epileptic seizures (he thought it was daemons). He didn't know about the germ theory of infectious disease such a Leprosy which he attributed to sin. Didn't he make the fecking germs or not? Why didn't he give them antibiotics instead of a guilt lecture for leprosy?

Fiach

Jobar

"I would note that your belief in the consistency of the world is dependent upon what your memory tells you about previous sensory experience. Are you then rationally justified in doubting your own memory or are you presupposing the consistency of the world above and beyond what is warrented by the evidence? "

So Tercel, are you going to tell me that you do not depend on your memory, and sensory experience? Of course human memory is imperfect- it does not need to be perfect. My understanding of the world explains that fact quite well. For our normal living, we all trust our memories and previous experience to a very large degree, or we wind up incarcerated as insane, or living a pretty miserable sort of life.

Heathen Dawn

Knowing God (and Goddess) empirically is the heart of Wicca. The whole reason for being of Wicca is not to have faith in the Goddess and God, but to know through experience that they exist. All the rituals and communions of Wicca aim to put the practitioner in a trance - an altered state of consciousness - in which he or she will see the Goddess and God as clearly as the daylight sun. Mystical experiences all emanate from the Goddess and God. There are many ways to the Divine, and whatever religion you are in, you can partake of the sense of the Goddess and God.

Amie

I think your beliefs are groovy Heathen Dawn. I know very little about Wicca. Do you pray to the God and Goddess?

Heathen Dawn

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Thanks

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It's a nature-based, pagan religion centred around the Goddess and the God. Its temples are the open stretches of green nature, and its seasonal celebrations run in the solstices, the equinoxes, and the cross-quarters between them.

Sometimes, when I'm in special need of something. I've prayed to the Goddess to give me a girlfriend.

♥ and light.

Ojuice5001

Well, I can say this. I have had several experiences that seemed to be real spirits (including Christianity, tree-inhabiting spirits, and others) and the only one I now accept is the experiences of the Roman gods, with the greatest presence in my life filled by Postverta of the Past. I accept this one precisely because Postverta meshes with my day-to-day life rather than clashing with it. I think that some Christians also see this kind of congruency between the natural and supernatual worlds, and that only these Christians should remain Christian, rather than believing in a different supernatural world or none.

Taffy Lewis

Jobar,

I find that theistic belief is likewise internally and externally consistent. It makes sense to me "in my head" and it coheres with facts about the world.

With regard to the experiences of others, there are quite a few theists who have similar experiences of God. Through every culture and through recorded history millions of people under varying conditions have had experiences which seemed to them to be of the presence and activity of a personal being of great power, knowledge and goodness. This is not to deny that there are conflicting descriptions of God. But there are conflicting descriptions of the physical world based upon sensory experience.

Your point about predictive power seems irrelevant to theism. The reason is simply because God is supposed to be a personal being with complete freedom. We know from our experience of human beings that we often cannot predict what they will do or say next. This is because we human persons do not follow simple, mechanical laws in the manner of inanimate objects. So predictions of our behavior are often wrong. We can only "predict" the behavior of human persons in a vague and general sense. Since God's freedom is greater than our own we should expect to predict his behavior with even less accuracy.

Thanks for your response.

Primal

Because extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. We decide on the truth-value of any given sensation via background knowledge, the more a given claim diverges from background knowledge, the more evidence is needed to support it. Especially when other explanations, like hallucinations are more readily available then background knowledge.