AdamWho

boneyard bill:

St. Robert asked in a previous post "Who here is a practicing Buddhist?", would you care to answer?

St. Robert

AdamWho,

Are you saying that faith and reason are mutually exclusive? That a person can't have both?

Most people who doubt the existence of God need reason to come to faith.

If a person is searching for an exhaustive amount of proof to have faith, they'll never believe in anything.

AdamWho

St. Robert:
Yes, on a given topic you cannot have both knowledge and faith.
Faith is belief without or in opposition to evidence.
Reason is a process of gaining knowledge through the integration of new evidence into a framework of known facts.
You are trying to say that a person needs faith to disbelieve in a god. This is false given the previous definition of faith. Faith is not required to disbelieve something for which there is no evidence. Nor is faith necessary for any issue which if knowable.
There is a difference between:
1. Belief given a state of evidence. (Reason)
2. Belief without or in opposition to evidence. (Faith)

Claiming that logic, science, (ect.) require faith is one of the weakest attacks on reason. It is an attempt to show that reasoning fails and that faith is needed to save the day, an appeal to ignorance, and an attempt to avoid responsibility for thinking.

So what did you think of the Freud quote? page 9.

St. Robert

AdamWho,

I have over 10 years of research experience in the hard sciences. I have a firm grasp on how to reach logical conclusions scientificly based on reliable evidence. When I was grappling with whether to commit my life to Christ, I asked a lot of probing questions. I wanted and needed as much evidence as I could get to soundly conclude that Jesus was worth giving my life for. Contrary to many beliefs, faith in Jesus does not come blindly.

When a person disbelieves in God, they are doing so with at least a modicum of faith. The person can't escape having to trust to some degree that God doesn't exist without knowing for sure.

Would you say that it's logical not believe in God and it's illogical to believe in God? If so, why?

AdamWho

St. Robert
You’re confusing what logic and belief are again.

The mistake you’re making is the tired old assumption that disbelief is a positive claim and therefore needs proving, however it is not.

I do not believe god exists, period; that doesn't mean that god doesn't exist; it only means that I do not believe the god exists. I hardly need faith to know what I believe.

Logical statements are tautologies; that is no new information can be gained beyond the premises. It has nothing do with and can have nothing to do with the concept of belief; belief is irrelevant in logic, things are true or false period.

However, is it reasonable to not believe god exists? Yes, not only is there no evidence of any supernatural beings, but there is even a coherent description of god, furthermore the god of Christianity suffers moral difficulties.

To see this in operation just ask yourself the question:
If a person told me [Robert], “Invisible pink unicorns exist" but failed to provide ANY evidence or even a coherent description of these objects, would you need faith that they don't exist? The answer is no. Would you be justified in your belief. The answer is yes, even though you haven’t traveled the universe looking for the “invisible pink unicorn”. Why, because the person making the positive claim is responsible to produce the evidence and until they do you are justified in not believing.

You had better not go here, you don’t know if I am Nobel Laureate in Physics or bum off the street.

Did you use Pascal wager to decide for Christianity? If you did, you didn't think hard enough.

vedic_dude

"Being raised in India, Siddhartha must have been sick of gods. Hindus worship over 300 million gods and goddesses. Who wouldn't be ready to do away with them all and design a new spiritual quest by elminating gods altogether? "

St. Robert,

So what's biting you, if Hindus have 300 million gods and goddesses. If they had 6 billion, it's none of your business. Those obsessed with a 1 world relgion will never be content or successfull in their endeavor.

Hindu philosophy is elaborate and complex, unlike your own.
I can refute your religion very simply. If belief in Jesus is the ONLY way towards spiritual enlightenment, then what about the millions of people who never heard your word ?, Were they automatically condemned to hell. For example before Jesus was born in 0 A.D. or whenever, many millions of humans lived before that, did they land on a superhighway to hell ?

roshan

"Being raised in India, Siddhartha must have been sick of gods. Hindus worship over 300 million gods and goddesses. Who wouldn't be ready to do away with them all and design a new spiritual quest by elminating gods altogether? "

lol, this is just so ridiculous. anyone who says such a thing has absolutely no knowlege of hindu philosophy at all.

300 million? thats more than the amount of people in india, say, 100 years ago. do you mean to say that there are more form fo god in hinduism than there are hindus?

ive been to christian fundamentalist websites, and they claim that hindus believe in 300m gods, but they never give any proof of it. and no matter how illogical it is for there to have been more hindu gods than hindu people, lots of people believe it.

[ June 17, 2002: Message edited by: roshan ]</p>

St. Robert

How many gods do Hindus officially recognize today?

[ June 18, 2002: Message edited by: St. Robert ]</p>

AdamWho

St. Robert:

Why is the number of gods in a religion important? Is it difficult for you to believe in more than one god? Think of Hindu gods as you do the trinity: as different manifestations of the main god Brahma.

After all Christians (whether they will admit it or not) have many manifestations of god in their pantheon. God, the son, the holy ghost, Satan, and if your catholic Mary, and the saints. So you have dozens of minor deities you can pray to, there are different deities for some holidays, there are deities for different situations in life (Patron saint of X)

When you look at it from the outside there is little difference between Hindi and Christianity on this issue.

vedic_dude

Hinduism believes in the Supreme being Brahman.
Brahman's 3 aspects are Shiva, vishnu, and Brahma.

There are sects such as saivaites in Hinduism for example who will worship only Shiva, or vaishnavites who will worship only vishnu. Hinduism is almost a "collection of religions".

Hinduism (maybe other Eastern religions also-- as far as I know) is also one of the few religions that says that we are part and parcel of the supreme being (analogy of spark to fire), and that the individual soul was never created.

However, the fact that you believe in a completely different religion doesn't matter to me one bit, because unlike some radicals (Like Islamic terrorists), I don't believe in a one world religion.