Religion gives people the hope that there is more to life than just death. It is sort of like hoping for the fountain of youth and the ability to live forever. There are people I know that are missing out on alot of fun things in life because their religion tells them that it is bad. Live life to the fullest and have fun.

Yep. That's on topic.

You don't need religion to live forever anyway. This already exists via gene reproduction. Just depends on how you define 'me'. If you want all your memories and conditioning - hence the same responses to stimuli - to remain, then I'm sorry to say, but when you die, that part of the brain dies with you - and that much we can't contest.

I do kinda agree with this sometimes. However, when I read the stuff Aaron writes, I also kinda feel that he is the sort of theist where we would actually reach an "agree to disagree" point, unlike the cases of A2E and Splend in which the party on the other side of the conversation is incontrovertibly wrong.

Building on this point, this thread seems like one in which OP is going to have to accept that he simply disagrees. I mean until he has experiences that he feels defy his ability to rationally explain, he isn't going to be convinced by personal accounts of religious phenomena or other religious epiphany.

Just as a side note, OP is Jewbison, and hasn't said anything for a while. uke and asfdasdf and I have basically dominated the thread.

Question: you said your belief was based on experiences and your evaluation of those experiences. Would I be correct to believe that without these experiences, you would not in your mind have sufficient justification to believe?

For instance, I have never had anything resembling what I commonly nderstand to be a religious experience. At least not that I have noticed. Given that, am I rational not to believe in God? The reason I ask is to check whether we need to go into the experiences or not (which, as this thread indicates, is often messy). If you find the evaluation to be sufficient then you can surely communicate the evaluation to others for judgment. If the experiences are crucial, however, this is more difficult as it is hard to communicate experiences.

"Driving" feels like too strong of a word. Maybe something more like "actively influencing" is better. With "driving" there's a sense of out-of-control-ness that doesn't fit. (I'm not suddenly possessed by anything or whatever.)

Most of the time, I don't know. And most of the time, it doesn't actually matter, so I don't bother wondering.

That being said, there are times that I suspect it. For example, there are times when I appear to be aware of stuff that's beyond what I should naturally be aware of. This also tends to happen more often in conversations that are "deeper" (more meaningful, higher impact on the person's life, whatever you want to call it). Sometimes in those situations, I find myself talking a little ahead of my thoughts. This is particularly odd, because my talking (especially in these types of conversations) is usually very carefully paced, with extreme care with the choice of words that I use. It's something that could be attributed to verbal processing, but verbal processing isn't something that I tend to do. It leads to a response that sounds sort of like "How did you know about that?" to which my reply is something like "Know about what?" And then this takes the conversation to a new level.

You also have to recognize that sometimes it's not me who is being influenced. Sometimes in these conversations, the other person "feels" something (I never quite know what that means) or says something that surprises them. And then after they say it, the conversation goes deeper.

I don't want to give the impression that these are daily experiences. Most of the time, prayer doesn't lead to anything specifically deep or different or anything like that.

There is a sense in my prayers that is similar to Brother Lawrence's reflections on the matter:

I don't claim to have such a deep connection, but the non-discreteness of prayer (as a specific act and also what I "get" from that specific act) relative to other actions is expressed in these words. It becomes part of the "grid" through which other things are analyzed. Or perhaps a "lens" through which I view the world around me.

I think that would be correct. I want to note that the "experiences" are not like a top ten spiritual experiences type of list. It might be more proper to say "the experience" as a singular object, referring to the entirety of my life.

Sure. Not believing in God is not automatically irrational. (What is rational is a function of what is assumed. If you assert that God must first prove himself to you in some way before you believe, and that this standard has not been met, then the rational thing to do is to reject God.)

I think experiences are crucial. I do not think that formal reasoning and argumentation alone are sufficient.

Basically, it's the putting together of a puzzle. In our lives, we experience a lot of stuff. The stuff could be a random series of events with no particular aim or purpose in mind. But sometimes, our attention is drawn to certain patterns or individual events that somehow stand as significant, as if they lead to something. Then upon pursuing it, a sense of something larger begins to emerge.

This leads to questioning "downhill" from where you are to evaluate some currently held basic views to see if they square up with this larger thing. If not, then a decision is made between the larger thing and the downhill thing. If the decision is for the larger thing, then the downhill thing is removed/replaced or whatever in pursuit of the larger thing.

And so the process goes of having more experiences, then evaluating them relative to the changing baseline framework, in pursuit of seeing how these things actually fit together, and trying to make sense of it. And in this sense, it's not a pure formal logic that ultimately prevails.

I'm sorry, I don't mean to be facetious, and you have no real reason to believe me, but I get this all the time when I'm high.

Is the person you're talking to also high? I think that helps give that impression during the conversation.

Consider a situation where you're high and talking to someone who is completely sober (and trying to have a meaningful conversation with you). What would you say the sober person's assessment of your insights would be?

I wouldn't know for certain if there's any difference between talking to a sober or a high person because I've been smoking fairly regularly as of the last few months, and you quickly develop a tolerance and control over the effects, so it doesn't really stupify me anymore and I can function normally around sober people. The only real difference I notice is that my mind operates more laterally and - by association - as opposed to linearly when im sober.

However, even if the sober people around me don't consider my fast-track insights as impressive, it still doesn't take away from my own personal experience of precisely what you described.

1. The Fsm is for automaton atheists who are foaming at the mouth and spouting Marxist ideology aloud when they suddenly wake out of a bad dream in a cold sweat. It is a silly, stupid analogy. Not just silly, but just plain stupid. You are not stupid.

The two major, dominant religions in the world today are Christianity and Islam. Both are Judiac religions which recognize Jesus Christ as a messiah and major prophet. 2.9 billion people.

The Fsm is a mentational concoction designed to appropriate, counter, and mock this worldwide belief. My beef is that if you have to design and concoct an imaginary alternative to Christ and Christianity, you really don't have any viable, real-world arguments to fall back on.

Human nature, brah.


2. You are asking for answers, but front-loading your questions. What are you really looking for?

If you could succinctly explain existence top-to-bottom we would be handing you a nobel prize and you would be the most famous and important person alive, but 'existence can be explained', you say.

I'm always scratching my head at this kind of blind faith.

Really lost here.

God doesn't want you to believe in Him. Unless you are emotionally challenged, you already do. He just wants you to be thankful, for your own sake.

How about the belief in Ancient Greek Gods? Is that silly and plain stupid too? or the belief in Allah?

I think you miss the point of the FSM analogy. It is not meant to be an actual viable world view. It is not trying to win a popularity contest. What it is meant for is to demonstrate a reductio ad adsurdum argument by showing that a particular bad argument made by a religious person equally well applies to this ridiculous notion. So the fact that it is clearly imaginary is the entire point and demonstrates the invalidity of the religious persons argument.

Super glad you went for the "atheists are emotionally challenged" bit. The insult aside, do you have any studies or scientific evidence showing psychological problems that manifest in atheists but not in religious people that could be correlated with this?

Aaron re: latest response to me: fair enough, I just wanted to check for efficiency sake in case there was no need to dive into the experiences. While a top ten list of experiences may not, as you say, be a reasonable way to look at this, it is unfortunately hard to realistically communicate an entire life's experiences and so the best we can do in conversation is a top ten list, whatever limitations this may have are granted. What is your most profound and clearly influenced experiences that you have had in your life that helped form your belief in God?

Part of this is the following. The earlier example of an experience with your student after some time it came out that because you already assumed god existed you interpreted it as being a godly experience. But it did not, it seemed, indicate this separate from the assumption. However, at some point, you must have had the experiences that DID directly lead you to belief in God and that being interpreted through god was not solely describable given the assumption of God.

For example, take this: "For example, there are times when I appear to be aware of stuff that's beyond what I should naturally be aware of". If true, I would find that very compelling. As in if I suddenly had knowledge that I should not have been aware of, I would be pressed to understand how this occured and certainly a god hypothesis is consistent with that. So if you could convey some clear examples of that happening, I would be impressed.

As to the bit about your mind getting ahead of you, this feels much more common. Many of my more significant conversations and moments in my life have a similar almost out of body sensation. I don't see any particular reason to attribute god to this.

fml that's a lot of stuff to read. Will read later if I have time. Will def have time tomorrow.

I'll respond to the rest later, but I just wanted to point out something on the side here.

One reason you don't see any particular reason to attribute this to God is because you don't believe God exists. This raises the bar quite a bit. It would be very, very hard for something to happen to you and you say "That was God." This comes down to the evaluation of experiences part of things.

A lot of atheists take the line of "God never showed me any evidence" as basically a blanket statement. I always counter by with some sort of "what is evidence?" And then things taper off into the world of empirical testing, repeatability, and so forth. But most of the things we know about our lives are simply not subject to that type of rigor.

My suspicion is that most people have had experiences, but that they ended up being mischaracterized for whatever reason. I believe that not all experiences with God are fantastical things. There are many ways that God operates through the mundane as well.

It raises the bar to the acceptable standard of any form of inquiry where we only resolve the question after there is sufficient evidence and reason to accept it. Sorry, but that is just how it works. What lower bar than "i don't believe in god" would you want me to accept?

Regardless, you said it was a combination of experiences and contemplation. So there are two parts to this. First you have to convey the types of experiences, and then the contemplation that leads you to God. If the experiences you are talking about are ones that I share, but just don't attribute to God, that is great because then I know what you are talking about. if the experiences you are talking about are ones that I don't share, then that is also great because now I can try and understand these new experiences.

So if you think an experience that I suspect is quite common, namely the sort of out of body type experience that might occur in a significant life moment, then that is fine it seems we share that experience. So now the conversation shifts to the reasoning behind why you think this leads to God.

Religion is so ****ed up

Profound.

That's the word I'm looking for

As I noted before, once you have set your bar, you're rational to hold to it. My point here was also not an accusation that you've done something "wrong." But to point out that the evaluation happens AFTER the bar is set, and that certain ways of setting the bar can create situations in which experiences are mis-evaluated. (You could say the same of my evaluations.)

This is particularly frustrating to see, because it makes me feel like you're not actually paying attention. It's been noted repeatedly and explicitly that the experience I gave was NOT intended to be a proof of God type experience.

I'm absolutely NOT using the experience of having prayed in a normal daily situation as proof that God exists. Unlike our disagreement with how you've use God/Allah, there's no possible way for you to misconstrue this unless you're simply not paying attention or you're deliberately misrepresenting me.

So the vibe I get from believers is that God exists and that's just the way things are. It is evident that God exists based on your experience.

But I don't understand why you believers think this...

What other bar is it at all reasonable to accept? You make it seem like I have a choice of various bars and I am choosing this really high one. Is there any other aspect of your life where you aspect a lower standard than that there needs to be some level of evidence or reason in order to accept a claim?

And yes, I know what you said. I am trying to lead you to having a discussion that is less trivial than "I have this experience that I think is godly because I already believe in god". I want to know WHY you believe in god. You answered this at the lowest level that it was "experience + contemplation". I am trying to dig a little deeper into this and figure out what kinds of experiences and what kinds of contemplation. If you don't want to have that discussion, that is fine.

Btw, I am not asking for you to prove anything, and have steered well clear of that word. I don't need "proof" (or even know what that would mean in this context, certainly not the deductive proofs you and I do in mathematics), I am trying to figure out why you believe as you do in as precise a way as possible. These are not the same. For example, if the reasons you believe don't constitute a proof I don't want you to try to make one up, I just want to know what these reasons are. As you have repeatedly misinterpreted me in this thread, I am NOT looking for something in specific.

When I first saw Doggg's reference to Fsm ITT, I thought of the Free speech movement which shows how old I am. But then the Free speech movement did have some 'Marxism" in it.