Demigawd

Geotheo presents the theist "who are *YOU* to judge?" rationization for his own beliefs.

Autonemesis

And I think religion, especially Christianity, causes one to do that. Everything is written off as an act of God, and everything natural is relegated to sin.

There's that solipsism again. What issue have we critically failed to examine? The issue of whether or not humans can think up something new, figure something out, all by themselves, without any help from any god?

Isn't that really what divides us, GT? You don't think humans are capable of that feat, I do.

GeoTheo

So, I am ranting and raving? Or are we engaging in rational discourse?
I have an answer but I have been accused of ranting and raving by you so I don't want to be guilty of that.

Autonemesis

Yes. I would like to discuss the differences between your thought experiment and mine, and how they relate to your views, and mine, and to belief in the existence of God. That was my purpose in posing the counter-experiment.

Goliath

GeoTheo,

Since you were not colorblind before the operation, your analogy fails.

Sincerely,

Goliath

(edited to replace "during" with "before"..oopsies!)

[ September 11, 2002: Message edited by: Goliath ]</p>

Philosoft

If you define a 'color' as a particular wavelength of light, then a blind person can certainly perceive color, just not the way the sighted do. If, by 'color,' you mean, "something a person sees in his visual field," then obviously color will cease to exist for some. It is disingenuous to refer to 'color' objectively as 'the wavelength of light an object reflects' and then subjectively as 'what appears in one's visual field when certain neurons fire' in the same thought.

K

Geo Theo:

I've noticed that you seem to think that atheists don't want to believe in God because they don't want to have any responsibility. I would be tempted to say the opposite is true, but I think that's far too broad a generalization. I will say that when atheists believe something is wrong, they know they have to take care of it. Sitting around praying isn't going to get squat done. I remember what my mother used to say when I would talk to her about the exponential growth of the human population. "I'm not worried about it. God will take care of it somehow."

Philosoft

Let's see. All concrete things physically exist. The matter that makes up my keyboard is equally observable to you and to me. Abstract things (thoughts, concepts) exist abstractly. They are physically unobservable and cannot interact directly with concrete things yet I can often instruct you on how to have generally similar concepts and thoughts to the ones I have. You propose a third form of existence, I'll call it divine existence, which has the abstract quality of unobservability and the ability to manipulate concrete things.

I'm sorry, Geo, there's just no way to rationally allow for the existence of divine things without either an observable example of a divine thing or an effect that was unmistakably caused by a divine thing. You can bitch all you want about "fair hearing[s]" and contradicting worldviews, but until you show me a divine thing or a sound logical argument for a divine thing, I'll have to rationally conclude there are no divine things.

You can show zero examples of things that exist divinely, yet you argue that things that exist divinely need not be dismissed out of hand?

<strong> There's a huge difference between believing something like 'M-theory is the GUT' and believing that a thing can have logically contradictory attributes. The former at least has a mathematical head-start. The latter is simply a jumble of letters and words that can be put together in a grammatically correct way but don't actually refer to anything. I suppose you can 'believe' there are married bachelors if you wanted to, but the fact that it's your belief and, in all likelihood, we don't begin to understand it, does not make it some mental nesting place of spiritual truth.

Kantian

GeoTheo-

• Language holds no intrinsic value whatsoever.

What? Why?

• Because Language is an "intersubjective activity" where people participate.
• Wittgenstein destroyed epistemology forever with his Private Language argument that concludes that there are no solipsistic definitions.
• Nobody has the ability to think before they learn the rules of the language in order to engage in language of any sort.
• Nobody has a "privileged" or to be precise: "private access" to the definition of a word.
• The term under question 'God' is but a common word in the English language.
• Therefore you cannot pretend to understand a word better than other people.

~Subjectivist~

[ September 12, 2002: Message edited by: Immanuel Kant ]</p>

wordsmyth

Note: Emphasis mine

The emphasis in the above statement highlights the most basic flaw in choosing one religion over another. There simply is no substantial evidence that points to one religion as more probable than any other. In fact, there doesn't appear to be any empirical evidence for any theistic claims.

Since there is no empirical evidence that validates one religion over another, we are left only with reasoning.

Reasoning and understanding in the modern world tells us that the beliefs of our ancestors are indeed absurd.

Natural disasters are not caused by an angry and unseen deity, but by observable and predictable events (e.g. weather patterns).

Mental Illness is not the result of demon possession and exorcism has never been demonstrably effective in treating it.

Lightning rods have proven much more effective against lightning strikes than prayer and ringing a church bell.

In fact, natural explanations have proven more valuable to human understanding and welfare than any supernatural claim. Can you provide a single example of how any supernatural explanation has benefitted mankind in any substantial way?

As natural explanations replace supernatural beliefs, the supernatural (including God(s)) appears more and more to be the result of ancient ignorance and superstition.

[edited for grammar]

[ September 12, 2002: Message edited by: wordsmyth ]</p>