Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
I can only assert that my truth is true for me. I believe (very strongly, of course) that it is a universal truth, but I can only state with certainty that it is true for me. And the reason it is true for me is because it is the only thing that feels right to me, that makes sense, that answers every question that can be answered.
Practitioners of most religions declare their faiths to be The Truth. Atheists believe what they have is The Truth.
If there is a car accident and there are three witnesses all on opposite street corners, all three will give you a different account of the accident and each will believe they are telling the truth.
What makes your Truth trutheir than anyone else's truth?
I'll give two rules for the discussion: 1)"God says so" is not valid reasoning and 2)You can't use your own holy book to prove your own holy book.
If there was a car accident, something caused it. It could have involved more than just one thing, but at the end of the day, what actually happened happened. That part is "the Truth." The three witnesses may be telling "the truth" based on what they observed. After all, that's all they can do. The fact that they may give different accounts could mean that, because of where they were standing when they saw the accident, they missed something someone else on another corner may have seen. That still doesn't change one thing about what actually happened. What happened was "the Truth."
Good post. But I would observe that truth and morality are different things. truth has a reality apart from human perception. Morality really doesn't.
So Truth is things as they are and (Quantum aside) they can only be true or not. All we can do is try to get as close as possible and make as few errors as possible. Scientific method and its director -logical reasoning, has the best track record in eliminating error and verifying facts.
Divine revelation of all kinds had no real validity in these areas. The very diversity of religious experience knocks that on the head, and those claiming that they have the correct revelation, interpretation or Understanding and all the others are deluded, are themselves deluded. Because the evidence (e.g. scripture) supporting this or that revelation does not stack up - and the Bible NT is the more convincing of the scriptures but, as I pointed out, it doesn't stand up to scrutiny.
So we have the Agnostic -god idea; the elephant that the Blind men have got hold of. They know it is an elephant but they all describe it differently. Now atheism is basically agnostic. Yes, there might be such a god, or maybe not (1).
Now the morality debate seems to have gone the way of the 'Hitler was an atheist' debate. The message seems to be getting acoiss that, just as Hitler being an atheist is a claim that will not stand up, so we just get Stalin and Pol Pot (plus N. Korea) thrown at us, the ideas seems to be getting across that the argument that morality means there must be a god giving the morality also does not stand up. To sum it up, the morality plainly IS relative and it is better that it should be. And if we need some sort of intrinsic reality to it, then an evolved human instinct is really all that you are going to get.
So back to a god with a lot of blind men trying to describe the bit they can feel. The analogy works as well if you have an instinctive feeling in all humanity that there is something bigger out there involved in our lives. And it is interpreted slightly differently, just as is morality. So there is no reason to suppose that this 'god' is any more real apart from human convention than morality, family groups, mythology, royalty and their hangers- on, organized religion and art, music and dance. Oh, and language. That isn't to say they are all delusions or con -tricks or without value.
But the agnostic sortagod really has no more claim to credibility than any of the other gods - except that a lot of people seem to believe there is one.
(1) and the question in reserve here is, if so, why does it matter? Why is it so important that we all have to be convinced of it?
(1) and the question in reserve here is, if so, why does it matter? Why is it so important that we all have to be convinced of it?
You don't have to be.
Is it important that others be convinced there is not a God? I get that sense from some of the atheists who post on these forums, and I wonder why that is.
Practitioners of most religions declare their faiths to be The Truth. Atheists believe what they have is The Truth.
If there is a car accident and there are three witnesses all on opposite street corners, all three will give you a different account of the accident and each will believe they are telling the truth.
What makes your Truth trutheir than anyone else's truth?
I'll give two rules for the discussion: 1)"God says so" is not valid reasoning and 2)You can't use your own holy book to prove your own holy book.
Practitioners of religions are known as "believers." Atheists are known as "nonbelievers." These two designations have actual meaning. Believers insist that their beliefs represent the truth, as you have indicated. For nonbelievers however, it's all about NOT subscribing to a hard and fast belief. It's about accepting the proposition that "I do not know." Nonbelievers tend to prioritize things from most likely to least likely, rather than declare that they personally hold the one and only real truth in their hands. Nonbelievers recognize that there is a massive amount of information that we simply do not have, and much of what we think we know could turn out to be inaccurate.
Studying the universe scientifically using the empirical method for acquiring knowledge, rather that the "make it up and declare it to be true" method employed by our ancient superstitious ancestors, has left us with a strong recognition that the universe seems to operate perfectly well for entirely natural reasons, no intelligent guiding force required. Since the entire concept of an intelligent Creator was made up to begin with, there is no real reason to make the leap to a supernatural cause. If the existence of a creator Being is true, then the physical evidence for that truth should become undeniable. At this point however, physical evidence for a creator Being is entirely circumstantial.
And what really gets me is when you have a situation like a child getting a dread disease that is fatal 99% of the time and surviving because every now and then someone does or it would be 100%. But the reaction is "Hallelujah! Our prayers were answered! It's a miracle!". Never mind that 99 other children, many of whom were also prayed over, died, presumably at the hand of this benevolent god, and you are bankrupt...
It's the survivorship bias. If 100 soldiers pray to God for safety before a battle and only 10 survive, those 10 will tell everyone how God saved their lives. The 90 who died can't tell everyone how God didn't save their lives.
I can only assert that my truth is true for me. I believe (very strongly, of course) that it is a universal truth, but I can only state with certainty that it is true for me. And the reason it is true for me is because it is the only thing that feels right to me, that makes sense, that answers every question that can be answered.
It's the survivorship bias. If 100 soldiers pray to God for safety before a battle and only 10 survive, those 10 will tell everyone how God saved their lives. The 90 who died can't tell everyone how God didn't save their lives.
Religious folks consider the ten survivors to be hard empirical evidence for the existence of God. In fact a 90% failure rate is hard empirical evidence for just the opposite conclusion. A God with a failure rate of 90% has little obvious difference from a God who never existed to begin with.
Religious folks consider the ten survivors to be hard empirical evidence for the existence of God. In fact a 90% failure rate is hard empirical evidence for just the opposite conclusion. A God with a failure rate of 90% has little obvious difference from a God who never existed to begin with.
Exactly right. They don't see it as a 90% failure rate, they see it as a 100% success rate. They don't even consider the cases of failure.
Wouldn't it be great if my boss acted like religious believers? "90% of your work is a failure, but don't worry, I'll only look at the other 10%."
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
