Fed up of being an atheist in Limbo. Come at me, bro's(Christians)
Ah see wasn't that easy? I had already mentioned earlier that Islam was ascendency by works not faith to see whether that was the key difference or not. "You need to assent that human effort is insufficient" is very vague (insufficient at what? being perfect? apparently you mean insufficient as a condition of ascending to heaven).
If the context is not sufficient for you to understand what I've been attempting to communicate in a relatively concise manner, then this conversation is being abandoned.
In that post, you reference people who do not believe in salvation through Jesus explicitly. You then went on to give a more universalist definition that sort of appeared like it might not require jesus.
I will note that post 144 didn't get a response. I don't know if that was deliberate. But it seemed to be a reasonable culmination of the previous tangent.
Sounds like religion to me. You create a thread challenging people to convert you to Christianity, and then claim you don't want a religion. I think one of the roles religion is to apply meaning to our meaningless existence.
Is it? I mean sure it is a truism that we cannot know exactly how anybody outside ourselves (and even then it is questionable) thinks or feels about things whether they are muslims or christians. But we can certainly look at what people say, how they describe things, elements of psychology, and the like and try to come up with a picture of how people are forming opinions and what experiences they are having. It is not entirely a black box.
I am content to make broad statements about broad collections of people, but I do not think it's useful to make narrow statements about broad collections of people.
I have never had one of these experiences, however, I have not seen anything to believe that there is a meaningful difference between the experiences had by christians and by muslims.
The way that you've phrased things above, I think you're falling into the error of putting everything into an overly simplistic box.
Now I have a resolution. I think they are both wrong in their conclusions, I think that people choose religions based on the culture that they are a part of and interpret things through this lens. There are range of psychological reasons why such things are done, and so on and so forth. This view completely resolves the above tension and finds the jesus question to be an irrelevant detail.
Do you have a resolution?
I have a similar resolution on the political analogy which we can go into but it isn't really for this forum. Let me just say I don't think the aparrant divide between republicans and democrats is either as large or as significant as one might think.
Everything your wrote seemed like it could be written exactly the same except without any mention of god or reason to think god had anything to do with that experience...with the exception of the word "prayer" which to be honest I still don't quite understand what you mean by this.
This is why I keep going back to asking the question of what you're looking to get from me. You want me to answer the question on your terms, but your terms are not sufficient for me to describe to you the experience. I say more below.
Now you have rejected the idea that there is some isolated component of your experience that you associate with God. Normally I think of experiences as being reducible to consistuent parts but presumably you disagree.
So if not a "part", then where does God come in? Is it a sort of holistic thing? I feel like I am running into a linguistic wall for I can't say "what part does god come in" if it isn't a "part" but I don't know how else to say it in English
Holistic? Sure, I guess... though I don't think it's really the right word.
At the risk of repeating myself too often, I will remind you that I am not looking for any specific thing from you whether it is a specific definition or specific type of evidence. Other people have different justifications for their different gods and when I talk to them I will talk about that. What I want from you will always be YOUR justifications. If they are different from other people's justifications or different than how I might expect them to be that is perfectly fine.
Originally Posted by uke_master
I have never had one of these experiences, however, I have not seen anything to believe that there is a meaningful difference between the experiences had by christians and by muslims.
Originally Posted by Aaron W.
What indication is there that you've actually tried looking, or that your way of looking is realistic? Can you expand upon your experiences in a way that would lead me to believe that this is something for which you've taken anything more than the most superficial glance to reach this broad-reaching conclusion?
But why are you positing a God reason instead of a non-God reason?
I presume you can come up with a good explanation for why it would not make sense to interpret what seems to be a relatively commonplace sensation of compassion on pink unicorns. So my question is why you want to interpret it with some reference to god. I am aiming to try and find out why you believe in this concept, and you have referenced this personal experience so what about it is relevant to the question of the veracity of god?
Do you think you have communicated, in anything you just wrote, what it is about this experience that has anything to do with god? You have indicated a few things that it is not. It is not a constituent component, it is probably not holistic either. He doesn't come in or go out. Okay fine. So what about this experience is indicative of god?
I certainly am looking for something. I am looking for some reason why you believe in god and are attributing all of this to god. I don't care what the nature of your evidence is or the nature of your reasoning. But it has to be something. What can you communicate in writing that is in the slightest bit indicitive that a god actually exists?
Sure, you can *ALWAYS* posit a non-God reason for something. Any experience that I have, any thought that I have, any action I take... You can always tell me that such-and-such did not need to reference God.
It depends on what you mean by "reducible" but essentially yes. My life does not have a "God" part that is completely disjoint from the "not-God" part. This is not different from the experience of "taste" being tied to the tongue, the nose, AND the thing that you're thinking about. (Yes, your thoughts can change your ability to perceive flavor. Even colors can change your perception of flavor.)
God doesn't "come in" in the same sort of sense that God doesn't "go out."
Holistic? Sure, I guess... though I don't think it's really the right word.
It depends on what you mean by "reducible" but essentially yes. My life does not have a "God" part that is completely disjoint from the "not-God" part. This is not different from the experience of "taste" being tied to the tongue, the nose, AND the thing that you're thinking about. (Yes, your thoughts can change your ability to perceive flavor. Even colors can change your perception of flavor.)
God doesn't "come in" in the same sort of sense that God doesn't "go out."
Holistic? Sure, I guess... though I don't think it's really the right word.
This is why I keep going back to asking the question of what you're looking to get from me. You want me to answer the question on your terms, but your terms are not sufficient for me to describe to you the experience. I say more below.
You ask me for more, but when I ask you what more you're looking for, you tell me you're not looking for anything. Can you see how this creates a frustrating cycle in terms of conversation?
You ask me for more, but when I ask you what more you're looking for, you tell me you're not looking for anything. Can you see how this creates a frustrating cycle in terms of conversation?
Because it is more consistent with my view of the world than the rejection of God's participation in that event.
It's pretty much a black box. Many Muslims don't have a western worldview to begin with, thus putting a significant distance between understandings from the beginning. You are free to conjecture whatever, but trying to pull a couple billion people and boil them down to a single sentence description, and then expand that to encompass something about how they came to their particular conclusion is a fool's errand.
There is a sense in which ALL people are a black box and it is hard to make much progress on figuring out anybody. But I don't see why muslims are a priori any different from christians or jews or buddhists or anything else on this.
The way that you've phrased things above, I think you're falling into the error of putting everything into an overly simplistic box.
Your resolution is overly simplistic as well. Certainly, culture plays a role. Certainly, psychology plays a role. But the level of analysis here is extremely superficial.
As noted above, I think your viewpoint is overly simplistic. So I feel no compulsion to try to resolve anything about it.
I suspect that you would end up being overly simplistic here, as well.
Your resolution is overly simplistic as well. Certainly, culture plays a role. Certainly, psychology plays a role. But the level of analysis here is extremely superficial.
As noted above, I think your viewpoint is overly simplistic. So I feel no compulsion to try to resolve anything about it.
I suspect that you would end up being overly simplistic here, as well.
But you ignored the main point. You have not seemed to even acknowledge that there is a tension with the idea that the personal experiences of muslims and christians (which you acknowledged both had) lead them to directly contradictory views on the divinity of christ. Why do you think this is the case that to Christians their personal experiences seem to confirm christianity and to Muslims their personal experience seem to confirm Islam?
I am sorry, I thought it was implicit we were not working under the assumption of God's existence. If we accept God's existence, then clearly it is very reasonable to interpret any experience as being because of God. I had hoped that this experience was going to led some weight of evidence or reason to the hypothesis of God's existence.
You're basically making the accusation "You believe X, explain why you don't also believe Y" when X and Y are totally unrelated. This is not far from the God=Allah type of statements you've made earlier.
So my question is why you want to interpret it with some reference to god.
Take a look again at your redescription of my description:
I don't see what in this story points in any way to a god. Experiencing a profound sense of compassion, contemplation over a moving conversation, all of these things are common experiences among many people.
I am aiming to try and find out why you believe in this concept, and you have referenced this personal experience so what about it is relevant to the question of the veracity of god?
Do you think you have communicated, in anything you just wrote, what it is about this experience that has anything to do with god? So what about this experience is indicative of god?
I certainly am looking for something. I am looking for some reason why you believe in god and are attributing all of this to god. I don't care what the nature of your evidence is or the nature of your reasoning. But it has to be something. What can you communicate in writing that is in the slightest bit indicitive that a god actually exists?
I believe it's true because it makes more sense to me if it's true than if it's false. "Want to believe" is not playing any particular role here.
Edit: Nor does "want it to be true" play a role.
Edit: Nor does "want it to be true" play a role.
Edit: Okay, not you, but this line of conversation. I was actually responding to asdfasdf. This was the prompt:
Could you give an example of something you get from prayer, and why do you feel it's from God?
This was the start:
I thought we were trying to understand WHY you feel this experience is from God. I am thinking that your current answer is "because that is my worldview". As in, you say it is God because you already believe in God.
Since that is a vacuous conversation to have, I had assumed you thought there was some reason to interpret this experience as being Godly in some way WITHOUT the presumption that God exists.
edit: lol this is why i should refresh
For example, I had a student come to my office yesterday who is trying to transfer and was wondering about her placement. She's concerned because she's not that good at math and doesn't want to fail, but the level of stress she was exhibiting seemed larger than just this. It's not like I stopped the conversation with her in order to pray about it, but as I feel compassion for her I become more "open" to "hear" what she's saying and the "prayer" for her begins. (Again, "semi-tangible" -- it's nebulous, but it's a part of the experience of the conversation.)
I won't go into the details of the conversation (nothing in particular happened except for me walking her through some thoughts and helping her to focus). But afterwards, I then continued in a short time of prayer as I decompressed the conversation, seeking for any bits of wisdom to be gained from the experience, and praying for her as she continues down this formal process of tranferring and in her personal life as she's apparently bogged down with some emotional hurts from her past.
I won't go into the details of the conversation (nothing in particular happened except for me walking her through some thoughts and helping her to focus). But afterwards, I then continued in a short time of prayer as I decompressed the conversation, seeking for any bits of wisdom to be gained from the experience, and praying for her as she continues down this formal process of tranferring and in her personal life as she's apparently bogged down with some emotional hurts from her past.
Since that is a vacuous conversation to have, I had assumed you thought there was some reason to interpret this experience as being Godly in some way WITHOUT the presumption that God exists.
edit: lol this is why i should refresh
I might be totally wrong here but I highly doubt asdfasdf was trying to imply we should assume god's existence. But yes we took this at exactly the opposite intent. I assume he will confirm one way or the other for us.
No, I wasn't saying we should assume God's existence (but don't think it matters much). Additionally, I find it quite deflating if Aaron's answer to "why do you feel it's from God?" is "because that is my worldview".
It is worth remember that this is why Aaron says he believes:
In this thread thus far he has utterly failed to indicate why his personal experience is at all indicitive of a god outside of presuppose the existence of a god.
Additionally, I find it quite deflating if Aaron's answer to "why do you feel it's from God?" is "because that is my worldview".
I often don't "get" tangible things from prayer. No voices; no visions. I sometimes "get" intangibles. The process of taking time to slow down and choose to actively pursue things that I value (such as expressing concern for issues that my friends may be facing), giving space for the opportunity to listen. Then there are semi-tangibles in the time after the prayer (renewed focus, particular insights or whatever as I begin back into other things).
Could you give an example of something you get from prayer
I still have no idea what this intangible is that you are getting with quotes. I have spent some time in this thread really trying to get what this intangible is, but I can't get it out of you.
Considering how this is allegedly at the core of your belief, this should be something of a problem.
Considering how this is allegedly at the core of your belief, this should be something of a problem.
You won't get anything concrete out of Aaron. He just keeps picking away at the semantics and goes off on unnecessary and distracting tangents, until you're exhausted.
I understand. It's just, there are things that happen in your mind, such as inspiration, having a concept "click", sadness when watching a movie, feeling inspired, etc. which, some of the time (I think you would admit) is not the product of God. Presumably you feel God also helps you with those things some of the time.
How are you determining the times when God is driving the experience versus not driving the experience.
How are you determining the times when God is driving the experience versus not driving the experience.
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