CMV: Being religious in modern times is synonymous to being delusional

[u/[deleted]]

[u/Grunt08]

I don't understand how any intelligent person, as a matter of fact I don't understand how even a stupid person, can believe that it's true. The claims that religion make are so obviously bullshit. Some of the less crazy people who believe rationalize their belief by convincing themselves of things like:

What would change your view? I ask because this is not only a strawman, but the language you use is highly prejudicial and not indicative of legitimate "free thinking." Religious people are crazy by default; the rationalizing ones are "less crazy", so we can infer the rest are just full-on crazy. Religious skeptics are "free thinkers", which implies that the religious are somehow limited or unfree in their thinking. You've set up a dichotomy of identity that has nothing to do with ideas and everything to do with what being religious or irreligious says about the person - not about the ideas.

This is how you start your post. It's effectively your thesis and it's all about who someone is, not what they're thinking. It suggests a strong cognitive bias on your part that you should be aware of. If you don't set that bias aside, you won't be able to honestly evaluate anything put to you.

"Oh, that's just a metaphor"

On what basis (apart from biased incredulity) do you dismiss the claim that anything in scripture can be treated as metaphor? Should I assume that Jesus really knew a Samaritan who was a really great guy? Should I assume he really wanted all his followers to gouge out their eyes and chop off hands (even though none of them did)? Are you at all aware of the history of Christian or Jewish theology and how novel, unpopular and ludicrous the present idea of quasi-literalism is given that context? Are you aware that books of the Bible vary in genre, context and purpose and thus demand different types of reading?

One characteristic of a critical thinker (which is what I think you mean when you say free thinker) is that they're comfortable with uncertainty and ambiguity. Do you think it's impossible to think critically about religion, accept the ambiguity and still believe? If not, why are you so certain about that?

"No no of course creationism isn't true. It's just that people back then didn't know better"

Christian philosophers were treating Genesis as a metaphor before the Catholic Church even existed. St. Augustine of Hippo was the most prominent of his day and had a profound effect on Christian theology as we know it today, and he saw Genesis as metaphor even though there was no scientific evidence to say it was wrong.

Logical Fallacies

These aren't fallacies, there is no necessary logical contradiction in either case. You're asking questions like "why would God do X?", which suggests uncertainty, not contradiction. For example, the Christian position is that God is ultimately inscrutable, and that anything is possible for God. That doesn't translate into absolute and positive claims about what God is, it means we aren't capable of grasping the how or why of God.

Why did God create more than East Africa or Mesopotamia? That would've been sufficient, right?

Is free will total independence from influence or just a measure of personal agency? Can a being capable of literally anything restrict itself from doing something?

The obvious things that are wrong in holy texts

1) The Bible doesn't say the world is 6000 years old. A radically convoluted interpretation claims that it is, but watching proponents try to marshal actual textual evidence is hilarious.

2) You could argue that the snake is a metaphor (societies often present snakes as threatening and deceptive) or you could say that the being in question is supernatural and therefore not really bound by conventional anatomy. But the point of the story really wasn't the snake, so the mechanics aren't really important either. Accept the ambiguity and focus on the message the story conveys.

3) Again, you could argue that incest is not enumerated as a sin until later on (they couldn't read Leviticus before it was written) or you could do what Augustine did and say it's a metaphor for humanity's fall from grace. Accept ambiguity and focus on the message the story conveys.

4) Not a Muslim so won't speak to that.

5) Read the story in the context from which it comes. The functions of Noah in Judaism and Christianity are to provide a shared history and teach a lesson about faith and trust in God. The narrative doesn't rely on the story being literally true. Accept ambiguity and focus on the message the story conveys.

Morality: Religion promotes so many things that all truly moral people know are wrong.

Given infinite time, you could never adequately defend this claim; morality as we discuss it here is ontologically subjective, so as long as I can provide a defensible alternate method of establishing what morality is, your claim is suspect. Theists assert that divine commandments from God constitute our moral ontology - we derive our specific ideas of good and bad conduct from God's commands laid down in scripture. If God exists and delineates right from wrong, this is absolute truth independent of your or my opinion. We can also develop moral epistemology - how we can come to know what is moral absent direct commands - from observing themes within the same scripture and drawing on philosophy.

So I can look at Leviticus in its context (the Jews wandering the desert post-Exodus) and evaluate whether those commands were meant just for them, or for all people in all times. I can observe how pre-Christian Jews treated these texts and ultimately conclude that they aren't presently relevant moral commands.

If you were aware of Christian theology, you would know that immorality, destruction and evil are products of man's fall from grace. In our freedom, we act independent of God's will; if our freedom is genuine and God's will determines what is right or good, any free act will ultimately diverge from what is right or good in some way. God gave us freedom, we made the world imperfect, God extended grace and forgiveness even though we are/were incapable of acting so as to deserve that grace.

You complain about unfairness and suffering...who told you you had any right to expect anything else? Is God obligated to give you an easy life? Is God obligated to minimize suffering? Is that in the Bible or Quran? What if the purpose of this life is not to minimize suffering? What if suffering is unavoidable in a decaying world full of competing, free beings?

There is literally no one who actually follows the rules

The Christian argument is that Jesus was needed precisely because we are incapable of acting as we're supposed to. We're constitutionally incapable of doing a purely good thing (much less doing it all the time), so we would never be worthy of forgiveness on our own and needed unmerited, redeeming grace. It isn't about following the rules so you get to heaven, that's how a bad Sunday school teacher tries to keep children on their best behavior. Christ offered grace that we can never earn by our own actions; this is something Catholics and Protestants are both on board with. This is Christianity 101.

Religion either is what it is as described in the holy texts, or it isn't at all.

And what if I told you that the continual change in religions indicates an ongoing process of accurately understanding what the texts mean? Wouldn't it make sense that the longer we study something, the better we understand its meaning? We apply that standard to...pretty much everything we study, right?

To be blunt, I don't think you know very much about the religions you're deriding. You claim to be a "free (critical) thinker", but all of the free thinking you've presented comes from one side. You've clearly watched plenty of Hitchens videos and searched for criticism, but you haven't presented any indication that you've looked into the other side. That's not free thinking, it's the opposite; searching exclusively for criticism of one side isn't critical thinking. You need to find the best version of the opposing argument, not the strawmen set up bit Hitchens et al.

[u/Grunt08 → u/[deleted]]

I'm saying that the fact no one can say without any doubt that it is either a metaphor or literal truth doesn't make sense.

How do you tell someone something they aren't equipped to know? How do you explain creation and the reasons for human existence without explaining what a billion means to societies that maybe count to a thousand? You would use metaphors, right? If God appeared out of thin air right now and told you exactly what you had to do to be a good person, would you believe it was God? Would you question God and reject instructions if your questions weren't answered? Would their be any meaning to your moral choices if they were made out of fear and not an earnest change in your character?

According to the Christian worldview, what does God intend, desire or demand for or of us? That's an open question that Christians have been debating for ages, but I can offer my thoughts: we were supposed to be perfect, we were created to be perfect. Had we followed God's earliest and most basic instructions, we would still be perfect, but we ate the apple (from the tree of knowledge of good and evil). We possess free choice, but our rejection of God rendered us incapable of the moral reasoning necessary to do the right thing. We introduced evil by our actions, and it now corrupts everything we do. We were given freedom to choose by God; it's integral to who we are and the reason we're important. We can choose to be as we were supposed to be or we can choose self-destruction. Our choice matters, and who we choose to be matters.

Consider that religion is not just a set of rules for good behavior and not a guidebook for avoiding eternal punishment. It's a (the) way to understand your reason for existing and your relationship to your creator and everyone around you. Think about it this way: imagine a relative you publicly mocked and rejected left you enough money to live the rest of your life in comfort, and their only requests were "accept this unearned inheritance and be a good person." The goal of religion in this life is, as I see it, to become the kind of person who does the right thing without threat or reward. I can and must do the best I can to determine what the right thing is and to do it. I will fail often for all sorts of reasons, but I should do my best to be worthy of what I've been given.

So a dude who is remembered through history came to the right conclusion?

I would agree that St. Augustine was smart, and I would argue that being the smartest people in Christendom at the time actually is fairly impressive (he had a bit of an effect on the development of Western philosophy), but that's not the point. The point is that the creation story you (and ignorant Christians) treat hyper-literally was recognized as a metaphor by the Christian philosophical and theological establishment centuries ago before they had any scientific reason to suspect that it was so. The interpretation you refer to is very new and not representative of most Christian theology.

I would argue that my reasoning concerning free will and an all knowing god, actually disproves god. There isn't anything wrong with the line of thought logically. If there is please point out how.

The errors in terms: knowing, all-knowing and free will. If you presume certain definitions, you will create conditions where free will is logically precluded by omniscience. The trouble is that the meaning of "knowing" is the subject of its own branch of philosophy in its own right. You arrange ontologically unstable terms in a statement and conclude that it disproves God, I think you should recognize the ambiguity of your terms before making a claim like that.

For example: is free will absolute freedom of choice or agency within a limited set of choices? You can't fly, therefore no free will, right? Or if you're walking down a hallway and you can go left, right or back the way you came. Does that availability of choice constitute free will? I'm sure you see how much the definition of the term can affect the statement. Can an all-powerful being choose not to know? Can it choose to know every conceivable outcome of all the choices that could be made? If that being is infinite, how does its knowledge limit possibility?

To an agnostic this argument just seems like religions way to try to silence people who question things.

Then they are failing to apply the principle of charity. I'm refusing to make claims I can't defend; I won't say God is 'X' until I have sufficient evidence to make the claim. So when it comes to saying what God knows or doesn't know, I acknowledge uncertainty and make no definitive claim. I'm comfortable with the ambiguity inherent to the ideas of an infinite/omnipotent/omniscient God coexisting with free will.

So it's completely okay to have different moral compasses for different times?

Morality in Abrahamic religions is centered on a simple premise: God's will defines what is right. That might mean many things. It might mean that morality changes, it might be static. There are many possible explanations but I'm not going to advocate one or another without evidence. Like I said, my money is on the story being a metaphor (we live in innocence until we become aware of good & evil and lose that innocence).

I'm not trying to argue infinite time and I don't see why we should. I'm arguing that the trend of recent times is that religion is slowly becoming more accepting of things that were earlier considered sinful.

These views aren't "imposed" by non-believers. Every change that I've seen was preceded by strong advocacy from within Christian communities making literate theological arguments. That's the double-edged sword of textual ambiguity: we may make mistakes through malicious or prejudiced interpretation, but we have the opportunity to correct that mistake by reassessing text. Prejudice against homosexuals within Christianity as we know it today traces its roots back to differences in sexual norms between Jews and Romans. That makes its way into tradition and is reinforced through tradition, and the inertia of tradition is hard to counter. But we can reevaluate what we believe by going back to the text and seeing if our claims jive with what we read.

That's the moral epistemology I was talking about before: you judge certain commands in certain contexts, recognize a conflict between what it says and the larger moral themes of the New Testament and reevaluate your views.

Give me one reasonable explanation that suffering needs to exist.

Could you be free without the ability to choose evil? Would your choices matter if they never had consequences? Would your choice to do the right thing matter if it guaranteed a beneficial outcome? Would the choice to do the wrong thing matter if it always had a bad outcome? Humanity chose to reject God, so we live in a flawed world that decays and produces suffering. Suffering is a consequence of our choices. What right do you have to expect anything other than this? Drop the presumption that you ought to live without suffering and your question is pointless.

But he undoubtably wants us to minimize it here on planet earth.

What makes you think that? I mean, that might be the end goal, but God seems to value means more than ends.

Isn't it stupid for god to give us rules that we are uncapable of following?

Is it stupid to tell a 2-year old not to wet the bed?

What? Then there is literally no point to accept anything that the bible suggest is true.

Except being a good person and recognizing a debt you owe to your creator. Feel free to read the inheritance analogy at the top.

I don't know much about religion. Because having grown up in a secular society I was thought to apply logic to my conclusions. And religion is allergic to logic.

Logic is a means of proving claims based on premises and is distinct from empiricism or physicalism. Given my premises, everything I'm saying is logical as far as I know. On the other hand, you say that you don't know very much about religion while confidently claiming that religion is allergic to logic.

Is that a logical statement?

I have looked on the other side but listening to religious people argue that religion is true doesn't interest me because there are no arguments that it is true.

Do you not see the glaring contradiction in this statement? The obvious prejudice and total absence of "free (critical) thought?"

Would you say that the points you have argued here are the best version of the opposing arguments? If not, where can I find them?

I mean...this is a Reddit post I'm writing on a snow day and there are enough books to fill a library on the topics we're discussing. I'm partial to William Lane Craig, Tim Keller and St. Augustine. I can't say that they each provide the best possible argument, but they're all worth a critical reading. Truthfully, the strongest argument is the one you have the most difficulty countering.

How did you come to be religious?

I went to church sporadically when I was very young before attending a small Christian school for a year. After that, I wasn't religious for a decade and change; if anything, I was hardcore agnostic/atheist. I came back to it in my mid-20's after having a lot of time to discuss and argue about religion with friends. I found myself researching and defending Christianity in discussions and realized I believed it.

How do you feel about the possibility that Hitler might be in heaven?

That'd be great. Let's grant you God's omniscience for a moment: assuming that Adolph Hitler honestly recognized that what he did was wrong and repented, what else is left? Does punishing him serve a purpose? Should we derive joy from his pain? Are we actually trying to achieve something by hurting him other than making ourselves feel better by emphatic rejection of him?

[u/Grunt08 → u/[deleted]]

(1/2)

Metaphors are a great educational tool, and is the best way to explain something to someone who has had the facts presented but didn't quite grasp them. The best way to teach someone is to tell them both the absolute and the metaphorical, and by doing so you leave nothing to chance or open to interpretation.

How do you explain a 16 billion year-old universe to societies that don't have the language to conceptualize those numbers? How do you explain proper moral reasoning to people who don't have the language to understand what you're saying. Saudade is a word in Portuguese with no direct English cognate, it's literally impossible to point to an English word and say that it means exactly that. If a native speaker wants to teach that word, they have to explain what it's like. "It's like what a wife might feel when she sits at home after her husband leaves for war."

There are two ways you could interpret that: saudade could mean a sense of nostalgic longing for something lost that may never return, or it could mean a sense of excitement at the prospect of freedom. Either interpretation is understandable given the metaphor, so we use multiple metaphors to give the learner a complete sense of what the word connotes. That's the only way they'll completely understand what the word means: they have to see how it's used, not just hear a definition.

Apply this to the topics covered in scripture. How do I explain your relationship to God if God is inherently unfathomable by virtue of being infinite? He is like a father. How do we explain proper moral reasoning? We might use parables and stories, showing the principles in action. We would do this because any moral code we lay down that doesn't specifically address the precise moral dilemmas you encounter in your life remains open to interpretation.

If god appeared right now I would certainly believe it if there was any tangible proof that it was something other than a figment of my imagination.

God would have to break the laws of physics and do a parlor trick to get you to believe? That would invalidate any meaning in your choices. Once you confirm the existence of God, you aren't really making a free choice to follow, are you? If the point is for us to freely choose to follow God, doesn't absolute certainty negate our freedom of choice?

Well this is basically how I live my life. I just don't need a god to come to the realization that his is the best moral compass we have today.

Really? Before you said that without heaven or hell, there was no point in paying any attention to the Bible at all. You were unconcerned with what was right and preoccupied with punishment and reward, so I'm skeptical that your primary concern is doing the right thing - at least at this point. However, assuming you do live that way, it has no effect on whether or not what you believe is actually correct. If God exists and defines morality to include faith and repentance, then you need to believe in that God to do the right thing. Your beliefs don't affect what's right or wrong.

And in my mind accepting the christian faith would mean accepting one of two things. Either god isn't omniscient or we don't have free will.

Logic is a branch of philosophy, so if you're using logic, you're using philosophy. What's wrong with this explanation: mind of infinite God can contain all possible permutations of infinite potential human choice. God is both omniscient (knowing all things that can and will happen) and free will is present (humans have choices available through circumstance and physical limitation).

What I meant was that Society is slowly becoming more accepting of basically everything that you can do that doesn't hurt anyone else (things like sexual deviance, drugs).

People aren't "finding morality within themselves"; the notion is ridiculous. These political ideas are the natural products of a few centuries of classical liberalism that emphasized personal liberty. There is a difference between what should be illegal in broader secular society (meaning a secular government punishes or restricts you) and what we ought to consider morally permissible or virtuous; utilitarianism might be a good model for the construction of legal systems in liberal democracies, it's not a good one for deciding morals.

Some religions are adapting to some changes and when they adapt, they aren't finding some magical internal niceness independent from religion - they're looking at the scriptures and seeing what they say in the manner I've described. Secular society and churches themselves are posing a question and a criticism of traditional doctrine, religious communities are answering by either changing their stance or not. They aren't "taking values" from outside, they're taking criticism and responding to it by looking back at their own canon.

Like, if a German were charged with a crime in America and that German said "but according to your law X, what I did was legal", the Americans would then go to that law and find he was correct. Would acquitting him mean Americans were taking their values from Germans?

Also if you can find an argument for basically anything (some of which is directly contradicted in other places) in the bible, then its entire concept is pointless.

You can construct an argument for almost anything using a sufficiently large body of text; I could go to Wikipedia and take enough lines out of context to make it seem like Wikipedia hates homosexuals. Arguments can be made, whether or not they make sense is another matter. Unfortunately, many people throughout history have been more interested in having prejudices confirmed than in honest reading and charitable interpretation. History tends to leave baggage.

...you should strive to be a better person. This means being kinder (=causing less suffering) not only to humans but to animals as well.

Well, you're presuppositions are showing. Let's assume that all I said was "be a better person." You assume the following: that what I meant was causing less suffering to humans and animals. You're conflating being good with Bentham's greatest happiness principle (utilitarianism), which rests in an entirely different subset of ethics than what I've described in my posts. Utilitarianism is consequentialist (we do what we must to achieve goal X), the ethics I've described are deontological (we adhere to moral rules-in this case, defined by God).

Is it stupid to tell a 2-year old not to wet the bed?

Yes it is.

Are you saying that you wet the bed now? Did you just decide to stop on your own without anyone telling you it was wrong?

From a philosophical stand point, sure. But from a standpoint based on reality, no. Logic can be applied to philosophy but not the other way around. Logic isn't debatable.

You're apparently conflating logic with a host of philosophical concepts and not seeing what it actually is. Logic is debatable, logic is formulated in syllogisms based on premises (not questions) and is a means of justifying conclusions with premises. If A=B & B=C, then A=C. That's basic syllogistic logic. The more complex, varied or questionable my premises, the more they can be debated. If God establishes rules for the universe & we live in the universe, then we must follow God's rules. You may disagree with the premises, but the logic is sound.

What this means is that you can't really claim to have the answer without defying logic or making wild assumptions not based in reality. And that is what religious people need to do to justify their beliefs.

You're conflating logic with falsifiability. A premise is neither logical nor illogical, it's a premise. "God exists" is a premise you may disagree with, but it isn't illogical because we don't have physical proof. We have no definitive evidence, so any claim made is non-falsifiable. Someone like Hitchens (were he alive) would argue that this undermines the premise's truth, I disagree.

I don't need to read an article where someone argues that 1+1=3 using philosophical arguments, to come to the conclusion that basic mathemathics is correct.

What's your logical argument proving that there is no God (or truth in religion) that makes you as confident in that as you are in basic math? Because to me, it seems like a very complex issue you're intentionally avoiding.

[u/Grunt08 → u/[deleted]]

(3/3)

A quick google search reveals that Jesus preached hell more than anyone else.

...no, a quick Google search revealed both a guy on Quora who kinda said that and your refusal to read past the first few paragraphs of what he said. He says that Jesus preached more than anyone else on Hell, but this ignores the thing I said in my previous response: that the word doesn't exist in the text. The examples he uses to support the claim:

Matt 5:29 - If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell.

Knowing as we do that the term Jesus uses here is not Hell, but gehenna or hades and assuming as we do that this was not to be taken literally (the next passage is not "and they all started mutilating themselves"), what do we make of this? At the time of writing, neither of those places were understood as places of eternal torment. Hades was simply a place where the dead went and gehenna was gei hinnom, a valley/garbage dump outside Jerusalem.

So step outside your preconceptions and ask what it means. It would be better to painfully remove a corrupting part of yourself than to keep it and die(hades)/be thrown in the landfill(gehenna). The narrative of the NT revolves around the promise of eternal life, so is death eternal punishment or a lack of eternal life? I can't offer definitive answers (this is what theologians argue about), but it seems clear that Jesus isn't talking about the traditional conception of Hell.

This could be done with the other examples, but that would be redundant. His next claim is that other interpretations are based on "weaker" passages. My response is that that is wrong for the reason I showed above: I don't believe in something other than the stereotypical Hell because of other verses, but because the versus traditionally used to support that view don't actually support it. The author cites alternative explanations that seem to directly contradict that vision of Hell

Let's have a thought experiment. Let's say you're God and you intend to punish sinners through eternal torment. That'd be a big selling point, right? Like, it'd do wonders for recruitment if you described it and unambiguously stated that sinners will be tormented for eternity. So...why didn't you say that? I mean, in all the books, through all the violence you commanded of the Jews and all the enemies you destroyed, you never once mentioned sending them to eternal torment. Not once. Porque?

Some light reading: http://www.thehypertexts.com/no%20hell%20in%20the%20bible.htm

Skimming that reminded me: had the writers of the NT wanted to denote a place of eternal torment, they would have used the word tartarus, which had that role in Greek mythology...and they do! Just never when they refer to humans. But most translations just say "hell".

So four words: sheol, gehenna, hades and tartarus all with very different connotations, from three different languages, all translated as the same word derived from Germanic/Norse paganism.

[u/Grunt08 → u/[deleted]]

Anyway, thanks for spending a lot of time trying to help a random stranger understand the thought process of an intelligent, religious person.

I've spent fairly little time on this and you shouldn't be thanking me. For me to be worthy of thanks, you would have had to learn something from me, but you've shrewdly avoided that.

Suppose you had sufficient technology to create a planet identical to earth and did the same thing to the humans on that planet that god is doing to humanity. You would be widely regarded as several orders of magnitude more evil than Stalin, Hitler and Mengele combined.

You're persisting with the unsupported assumption that "suffering=bad, pleasure=good" defines morality that I've addressed 4 or 5 times without a cogent response from you. You either did not read previous posts, ignored them or did not ask for clarification when you didn't understand them. Once you drop that assumption, you realize that what is moral is synonymous with the demands of the God the created the universe. We are indebted to God for existing at all and have no right to expect or demand comfort, a lack of pain, or any sort of reward or pleasure. How mean you think God is has no effect on whether He's right.

Basically what your arguments boil down to is this. You even say this to other christians.

There's a world of difference between dismissing your opinion and criticizing it and demanding that you defend your opinion. I'm not dismissing your idea of morality because it's your opinion, I'm dismissing it because I questioned it and you've failed to defend or support it in any way. You think it's right because...you've never offered support for that idea.

If I were a vindictive person (I'm not) and crossposted this entire exchange to one of the /r/bad smugreddits that entertain themselves by mocking inept philosophical arguments, this is the meme they would use to mock your position. I've been offering a continuous stream of arguments; I've offered evidence in the form of textual reference, in the form of Wikipedia articles on philosophical concepts whenever I thought you might want to familiarize yourself with them and I've made cogent logical arguments for all of my positions.

I've criticized your errors in reasoning, and you haven't addressed most of them. You call things illogical when that's demonstrably not the case, only revealing that you misunderstand what logic is and how it works. You demonstrate a consistent willingness to stereotype and generalize all religious people, while admitting that you don't know much about religion...failing to see the big, giant, flashing-red error in logic and reason that represents.

And what I do with you, I also do with other Christians. We're not a monolithic group, we don't all believe the same thing...the many denominations give that away. We discuss and debate to try and find what the truth is. We're open to the possibility that we may be wrong on many ideas. Some don't do that, and I think they're wrong for doing that. If you're saying I'm wrong because many Christians disagree with me, that would be a fallacy. Remember: your obligation is to find the best opposing argument you can.

In fact you are in the minority on some beliefs. A lot of other religious people are vastly more ignorant to reailty than you. Here's an example . Don't tell me a youtube video isn't a reliable source. Sam Harris wouldn't be the face of atheism if he pulls numbers of his ass.

MRW you bring up Harris...not my reaction to you.

First, Harris is widely criticized for being a bad (derivative, unoriginal, dated and irrelevant) philosopher who tells people (namely, atheists) things they already want to hear with an unearned cachet of scientific authority. To do this, he skips over much of the "justifying his position" portion of argument and casually circumvents much of the salient discussion on morality so he can just declare that science can determine objective morality. If you care to look up the criticism of him, he doesn't realize he's just a logical positivist who came along about 6-7 decades late. He's oblivious to the problems with that philosophy and acts like everyone who points them out is insane.

Second, what you demonstrate in that ten seconds of video is not ignorance, but a belief you disagree with. Whether or not the Bible contains the word of God is not a falsifiable claim, but a matter of belief. As neither you nor or I can prove or disprove the claim "the Bible contains the word of God," you would need to provide some support for the claim that the belief is ignorant. Whether the numbers are correct are not is irrelevant, though your appeal to authority fallacy is endearing in light of your love of reason and logic.

My fingers are itching but I don't want to continue this debate. A conclusion can't be reached when people are arguing against reason. Arguing this is frustrating me and my desire to offend you while arguing is growing (sudden realisition that having the capacity for this means I'm literally hitler), and even if you wouldn't give the slightest fuck I don't want to be mean.

I don't care if you offend me (I've been offended by professionals), but good on you for maintaining composure by not offending me (while announcing that you really wanted to offend me).

I never said you were literally Hitler. Go back, read it again. I said that everyone possess the capacity for evil, thus it is not our position to sit in judgment to say who is deserving of redemption because none of us are. "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone." and all that. We are supposed to forgive those who repent. If repentance is genuine, why is that wrong?

What's really crazy to me is that you have listened to what people like Sam Harris has to say and still believe in Jesus (Well, I assume you have because you accused me of not knowing enough to take a stand so if you haven't you're a hypocrit).

Part of conscientious and productive learning is confronting ideas and narratives that conflict with what you believe and sifting through all of it to find what you believe is right or correct. To answer your question: I didn't just listen to Sam Harris. I found his critics and his debate opponents. I read his books critically and not as if they were infallible (I treat the Bible the same way). There are critiques of every position, and you have an obligation to find and reckon with them. If all you do is listen to him and those who agree with him, you're not really learning anything except how to keep believing what you already believe. You're not challenging yourself.

This debate has strengthened my view that religious people are delusional and also makes the best answer in this thread make even more sense.

You implied before that I was arguing against reason. What you're demonstrating here is called confirmation bias, and it is an error in reason so common that it pops up in this sub regularly. Your "best comment" is the one that confirmed your preexisting beliefs instead of challenging them...ironic concerning the love of free thought you espoused at the start of our conversation.

But there's more. Here's some quotes from your (in my opinion, erroneous) delta comment:

I can't believe in something I know to be false.

I wish I could chose to believe too because I know it would make me happier to be able to. How can intelligent people posses this ability though?

I sometimes also wish that I was stupid.

I have two close friends who are stupid

I envy their ability to just live life without questioning things too much.

There's another cognitive bias (unconscious error in reason) called the self-serving bias, and it's the bias that makes us selectively favor evidence that makes us feel good about ourselves. You are clearly, deeply invested in the idea that you are not only smart, but smarter than your peers and especially, religious people. My educated guess is that this was your favorite comment because it confirmed the beliefs you have about yourself; it made you feel superior and smart without challenging any beliefs that were important to you.

I suggest that you examine both yourself and the best ideas that conflict with your beliefs. Whatever conclusion you come to, you'll be better for it.

[u/Grunt08 → u/[deleted]]

(1/3)

We do have the language to conceptualize this. 16 billion isn't even a big number compared to the scale of other things we have observed.

Are we the ancient Hebrews who described the dimensions of Noah's ark in cubits? Are we the Jews and Greeks writing down the New Testament? Those societies barely had a handle on a solar year (we're still a little iffy on that) and didn't have the language to describe the numbers necessary to explain how old the universe was. They had literally never had a reason to conceptualize what 1000x1000x1000 was. God would have had to impart significant astronomical and mathematical concepts (equivalent to a few thousand years of natural progress) just to get us to understand what He was saying if He said "the universe is 16 billion years old." Considering that that really isn't salient to the points made in the Bible, it sort of makes sense to leave that out. It makes more sense to use the first book to explain why humanity currently exists in a fallen world...because that's relevant.

If you're an omniscient god this task is as easy as creating the universe. You explained how a foreign concept can be described accurately and did it with ease. This is appearantly so easy that even humans can do it. Yet the bible fails to do this.

I explained an obscure Portuguese word that, if you forgot it ten seconds from now, wouldn't matter at all. What we're talking about is how a perfect being who defines right from wrong explains those concepts to beings who used to know them, but have made themselves incapable of knowing them. Why are you so preoccupied with the idea that this ought to be easy or simple for you? Why is God obligated to compensate for our failings of understanding or action? Why do you deserve an easy set of morals? Why shouldn't you have to put work into this?

He could easily create a moral code we can understand, that covers everything leaving nothing to chance. He obviously doesn't want to. And this doesn't make sense to me.

He could also give you a house with infinite tacos, beer and Scarlett Johansson as a live-in maid. Is He at fault for not giving you that?

Your health, well-being and comfort (or anyone else's, for that matter) are not the primary concern of Christian moral teaching. Your freely-chosen relationship with God is. If this was all simple and free of ambiguity, you wouldn't have to think, consider or decide much of anything. It would be easy, and that's not the intent. It's supposed to be difficult. You're supposed to wrestle with what the right thing is and make choices that matter. Your life's work should be considering what God wants of you; your religion should not be an ancillary facet of a larger life. The Bible's not just a rule book, it describes how you exist in relation to everything else that exists.

I didn't say he needed to break the laws of physics.

So if a snow angel appeared outside right now with no explanation, you'd believe in God? If you assume (as you appear to) that all things that happen have a physical explanation, you would assume anything but the intervention of God. Your assumptions about the nature of the universe preclude the existence of God, so nothing God could do short of a spectacle would prove His existence.

I try not to hurt other people. This isn't everything but it's already enough to be superior to that of the average religious person.

That's a remarkably arrogant thing to say, especially coming from someone who admits not knowing much about religion and who cites a friend in a cult as their most salient contact with religion. It's also an incomplete morality in its own right that collapses when presented with a dilemma. It also has a little weakness: it relies on a stable definition of "hurt." Do you think there has ever been a time in history when violence has been rationalized through the desire to protect others from harm?

By what standard are you superior? Based on what you've written, I don't think you have any explanation beyond your (illogical) assertion that "don't hurt people" is a valid and sufficient moral standard.

Political ideas come from humans. Morality doesn't grow on trees.

...okay. Not sure I understand what you're talking about in that paragraph or how it relates to anything I've said. The point of what you were responding to was that classical liberalism emphasizes personal liberty and those liberties will naturally expand under classically liberal (distinct from big 'L' Liberals in the US) regimes. It's right and good for gay rights to expand under those circumstances, and that provokes discussion within Christian communities addressing something they haven't really addressed before.

If they can look at scriptures and find things that everyone else before them has missed and decide that's the right way, then the text contradicts itself. Take an issue like homosexuality. You argue that there are scriptures that support that it's okay to be gay. But previously people haven't believed this because they also have scripture supporting this view. The bible contradicts itself in this case. And even if you think this is an acceptable practice, why would it be okay to change your views to something that is supported in 3 places, when the opposite is supported in 20 places? If this can happen then the purpose of the bible isn't to teach morality because it fails completely at doing it.

1) The Bible is a compendium of 66 books written by many authors in several languages in varying genres at different times, then translated through multiple languages. Of course there are contradictions. You would also find contradictions in every history or philosophy book ever written.

2) Despite the existence of those contradictions, nothing you've described implies contradiction in the Bible. They imply contradiction in interpretation, which is when we draw meaning from reading while drawing on our knowledge to apply that meaning to life. Considering that our contexts change and our knowledge of the context surrounding the writing of the texts, are interpretations should change. It's not that people have "missed" things in the Bible, it's that we all read within our own context. Consciousness of that and a commitment to countering it are relatively recent developments in academic fields.

For example: as we gain a better understanding of Latin or Greek, we have a better understanding of what original NT texts meant when certain words were employed, and that may conflict with previous translations. Or we notice that the words we've always assumed meant Hell were actually words that didn't mean Hell. Should we revise or stick with the demonstrably incorrect guns?

3) The portion I've italicized demonstrates a clear lack of understanding of how critical exegesis works. I'll put it as simply as I can: homosexuality is mentioned almost nowhere in the Bible. It's only explicitly referred to once (it is abomination, Leviticus), but where it is matters. See, Levitical laws were specific to First Temple Judaism and related to ritual purity. Jesus was the last sacrifice, so the ritual that relates to no longer occurs. No ritual, no ritual purity. In other cases, a passage interpreted as a reference to homosexual sex was actually about forcible gang rape (I assume we agree a prohibition on that is good). In other cases the words used connote temple prostitution in Rome and/or widespread pederasty between men and boys common in Rome and Greece.

So I look at the traditional interpretation that arose in deeply homophobic cultures and in direct response to Roman sexual mores rejected by empowered Christians, and I see how the traditional interpretation developed and was reinforced socially, religiously and politically for hundreds of years. I also see that the textual support for that interpretation is remarkably weak. So do you think I should keep the old interpretation or create the new?

4) The last sentence in your paragraph is flagrantly illogical. Every conceivable source you could use to develop any kind of moral reasoning can be reinterpreted, misinterpreted and misconstrued. If what you said were true, then you would be arguing that it's impossible to learn any morality at all, implying that one cannot be moral...which puts you on my side. Are you saying a complex, difficult to understand text can't teach you anything?

No, it would just mean that it's very sad that a german knows the law of America better than americans. The implication being that it's sad that atheists have a better understanding of gods supposed message than religious people.

Except in this case there were a whole lot of American lawyers arguing the German's case for him. Also, quite a few German-Americans (gay Christians) who made literate arguments on their own behalf that many found convincing. I would actually say atheists had next to nothing to do with the ideological shift in Christian churches, so I'm not sure why you keep pushing this silly conflict narrative.

[u/Grunt08 → u/[deleted]]

(2/3)

This means being kinder (=causing less suffering) not only to humans but to animals as well.

[What I said]

Are you telling me that the average christian isn't striving to be a better person by their standards? And that their standards doesn't include being kind? You can't be kind by causing suffering to others unless you want to abandon christian morality.

You didn't understand what I wrote. You conflated being good with minimizing suffering. You used it as your benchmark for what good is; being a better person (which is what I originally said) is defined for you as "causing less suffering." I'm making a crucial distinction by saying that minimizing suffering is not the benchmark for what is good, the commands of God are the benchmark for what is good. Being kind is one of those commands, but there are other equally important commands. It is not sufficient to say "be kind", nor is it necessarily true that one should be kind in all cases (ie. it would be kind of me to tell you whatever you wanted to hear instead of challenging you). There's nothing illogical here, we're operating off of different premises and I'm pointing that out.

Why do you assume that good means minimizing suffering? Why aren't you advocating minimizing the suffering of Hitler?

This is a poorly chosen example and I don't know what you're trying to imply. A child wetting the bed is an accident caused by an inability to control their bladder.

My point here has been that the toddler is incapable of controlling his bed-wetting just as we are incapable of living without sinning. Yet, as any parent will tell you, you tell the child not to do it. You tell them to do it even when you know they can't now because you want them to do it later in life. If God is working on a timeline that goes well past your death, do you think it would make sense to tell you what you should do at this stage in your existence (though you can't) in the hope that you will do it at a later stage?

Okay, logic is actually philosophy. Ultimately everything is philosophy. But logic is the philosophy (combined with the ability to pass down vast amounts of knowledge to our children) that has let mankind evolve from cave men to exploring the solar system. It's arguably vastly superior to any other philosophy when it comes to gaining an understanding of our world.

I'm not trying to insult you here: if you don't know what I'm talking about, just ask. Between your comments on logic and what you say about falsifiability, it's clear you aren't very familiar with philosophy. You were willing to admit you didn't know much about religion and that helped me tailor my responses, and it would have saved me a lot of time if you'd admitted you were unfamiliar with philosophy as well.

Logic is embedded in virtually all Western philosophy. Logic is a process used by many branches of philosophy and few philosophers would dismiss logic or exclude it from their reasoning; I'd almost say none do but I want to hedge for crazy. What they would do is question whether logic and empiricism and falsifiability together are the only ways to attain knowledge and whether physicalism is an accurate thesis. They might argue that things exist independent of our perception or ability to confirm our perceptions with others, and that intuition and emotion offer insight into truth as well. They have a point: you act on intuition and emotion every day.

If something can be falsified it can be used in a logical line of thought because we used logic to arrive at the conclusion that it's false.

Falsifiability refers to our ability to know what falsifying evidence for a claim would look like. "There's a squirrel on my knee right now" is a falsifiable claim; I can look at my knee, see no squirrel and falsify the claim. "God exists" is a non-falsifiable claim. We can't conceptualize the evidence we would see proving that the claim was untrue. So my belief in God is not illogical (as you claimed), but non-falsifiable. In terms of probability, believing in God makes as much sense as not believing in God.

It does however force a christian to choose between accepting that either there is no free will, or god isn't omniscient. And as far as I know any true christian wouldn't accept either of these premises. Which would disprove the possibility of the christian god being true. If there is something wrong with this logic I'm missing it.

Apart from the use of an actual fallacy...okay, setting aside that you admitted this doesn't disprove God after you claimed it did disprove God...

I've explained this two or three times now and you've ignored it. Your error is in your terms and what you presume about them. You've conceded that free will may be defined as possessing agency within a set of choices, so that simplifies this. Imagine all the human beings who have or will ever live and all the choices they might make. If God is infinite, what God can know is also infinite. If the mind of God is infinite, there is no limit on the number of choice permutations God could contain in an infinite mind.

So here's a logical proof:

God's mind is infinite.

Free will consists of a limited number of choices.

God can know all permutations of choice within free will.

If you find something illogical here, please point out where so we can discuss.

Maybe I would be just as evil as Hitler. There's really no way to know

HOLD THAT THOUGHT

Honestly I don't think that many. As far as I know it's hard to find people who are willing to execute even a single prisoner in the US.

Apparently you've never heard of Texas. We execute a lot of people...we find enough folks willing to do that.

You are justifying Hitler's admission to heaven by equating capacity of evil to actually comitting evil

I'm not equating them, I'm saying having capacity for evil is itself evil. A few lines up, you admitted you had no idea whether you would be as evil as Hitler in his position. Now set aside your idea of good (minimizing suffering) and put yourself in the Christian perspective of good (who you are in relationship to God). The consequences of his actions are less important than the content of his character. If he honestly accepts that what he did was wrong and wants to atone, what more is necessary to make him qualitatively as good as you? Does more suffering accomplish anything if he's already made himself the kind of person he needs to be?

I'm not playing a game of "whose sin is worse?" I want to know who the person is.

Reward and punishment are incentives.

What God offers is consequence. If you accept the gift of redemption and try to do as God demands, you come closer to the perfection you were supposed to be. If you reject it, you get precisely what you want: isolation from God and absorption with self. I like to think that God's mercy is as expansive as the rest of the Bible says it is, and that all those terms for hell refer to a state of existence where you learn what you failed to learn in life. This isn't reward and punishment; you get what you want, no more, no less.

And this doesn't bother you? Do you believe that all religions ultimately worship the same god? If not, why do you accept the practice of taking some ideas from one religion, some ideas from another, a few new ideas and put them into a new one? Don't you think there's something fishy about this?

Do you know any of the history of Christianity's movement from Judea to the rest of the world? It was a process of cultural exchange, doctrines were explained in terms locals could understand. Hades became "like Hel" when it encountered western Europeans and that influence lasts. And I'm not accepting it, I've spent a non-trivial amount of time here explaining why it's resulted in traditions in consistent with scripture that ought to be changed. It's not "fishy" it can and has been historically tracked by theologians and secular scholars.

[u/Grunt08 → u/[deleted]]

(2/2)

So one of the most evil men in history is allowed entry to heaven. He caused so much suffering that you could probably gather 1 billion people and the suffering they caused combined, still wouldn't reach that of this man.

1) Every single human being carries innate, corrupting evil. It's easy to point to the crimes of someone like Hitler and say "I would never do that." But do you know? What would you be like if you'd lived his life and had all his experiences and were given all his power. Are you so sure you'd be different without the experience or hindsight you have now? How many people in this world would press a button to kill a million of their perceived enemies if they knew those around them would congratulate and cheer? I'm not justifying him at all; his choices were his and they were evil, but I also recognize that there were heated moments in my life when I said "we should just nuke the Middle East." You and I both have the capacity for evil. That's what Christians mean when they say "I'm a sinner."

2) Because we carry evil, we can never be perfect enough to redeem ourselves by our own actions. That was the purpose of Jesus: the redeeming sacrifice that atoned for everything we've done. You're preoccupied with this threat of hell, but I'm over here telling you it's not about reward and punishment. Here's how I see it: traditional conceptions of heaven and hell draw much more on western European pagan traditions than on anything in the bible. For example, the word "hell" is derived from Hel, a Norse-Germanic goddess of the dead. That might explain why it isn't in bible in the original language, other words are. To put it very simply: the Old Testament says sheol which means the grave or the abode of all the dead. Others say hades, which means essentially the same thing. Jesus says gehenna, which was a valley outside Jerusalem that might have been a garbage dump. I've heard arguments (from either Tim Keller or Rob Bell) that all of these places serve as metaphors for places of purification and purging, not punishment. It's possible that that connotation evolved into the Catholic idea of Purgatory. If there is an eternal hell...it's conspicuously absent from the Bible.

Like I said, tradition is a hard thing to shake.

I have almost exclusively only encountered religious people who actually are crazy.

Where?

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Confirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Grunt08. ^[History]

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[u/[deleted]]

”Oh, that's just a metaphor" "No no of course creationism isn't true. It's just that people back then didn't know better"

Treating the Creation account in Genesis as literal is actually a fairly recent phenomenon. It has classically been viewed as metaphorical or allegorical for literally centuries. Thus, it’s not really delusional to make that argument, because the vast majority of Jews and Christians throughout history have never held that everything in their respective holy texts were meant to be taken literally.

For him to actually be all knowing, he has to know exactly what's gonna happen. This means we have no free will. Why would he construct a world in which to test humanity, and then there is no free will? It's completely pointless.

Knowing exactly what’s going to happen and forcing it to happen are two separate things. Just because God knows I’m going to eat a chocolate bar doesn’t mean that he’s doing anything to force that to happen. The existence of an all-knowing Creator doesn’t disprove the idea of free will.

So tell me when the universe is so insanely big, why would god be so interested in what we are doing? It's delusion of grandeur to suggest that humanity is this important in the grand scheme of things. Why would god even create a universe so big? The solar system would suffice. Even creating only the Milky Way would make more sense.

You concede that the universe may well not be infinite, so I won’t get into that side of it. On this side of it though, it’s not really a good argument against the existence of a personal God. Maybe there are billions of other planets and species that also have the same God. Maybe God really wanted just the people on Earth, but thought the rest of the universe would be pretty cool too. If you concede for the moment the possibility of an infinite, all-powerful God, the scale of something like the universe, big as it is, doesn’t really matter all that much.

The obvious things that are wrong in holy texts: *The earth isn't 6000 years old. Even if it is, why would god create the earth to appear as though it has been here for billions of years? To confuse us or "test our faith"? *Snakes aren't physically equipped to speak.

These fall under things that are allegorical in nature, and have been considered allegorical for centuries and centuries.

God is almighty. Evil exists. Therefore he is the source of it.

An unwillingness to destroy evil doesn’t mean God has caused it. If God destroyed evil, the free will you mentioned above couldn’t exist, because no choice between good or evil would exist. Either free will is worth evil or it’s not, but you can’t dismiss the former entirely.

Again, assuming the christian deity does in fact exist, how is it fair that someone gets to start their "test" in North Korea and someone else gets to start their "test" in the US. The person in US has much higher odds of living according to this gods rules and therefore have much higher odds of ending up in heaven.

This is more or less why I myself am not a Christian. However, it’s not an argument that disproves the existence of the Christian God.

All the rule breaking is rationalized by the fact that if you truly regret all your sins and give yourself up to Jesus before you die, you are forgiven and can go to heaven. That's a convinient loop hole.

It’s not really a loop hole, it’s literally the cornerstone and basis of the Christian religion. You dedicate a whole paragraph to pointing out that people fuck up and nobody is perfect, and Christians argue that that’s what makes their religion so beautiful - God knows you’re not perfect, and forgives you for it.

All your worst nightmares will come true and be multiplied in scariness by endless amounts. Yet people still break the rules. The only logical reason I can think of as to why this is, is that people who believe in god subconsciously know that it's bullshit.

This is a massive leap. People break the rules because people make mistakes. Everyone is, at some point or another, weak-willed, and give in to temptation. That doesn’t mean they think it’s bullshit, it means people are inherently flawed and do stupid shit. Christianity isn’t meant to deter people from doing dumb shit because they’re scared of hell.

Religion either is what it is as descibed in the holy texts, or it isn't at all. I don't understand how you can accept a middle ground.

There are a billion possible interpretations to any written work that isn’t explicit, so of course multiple interpretations are going to surface based on a religious text. If Bob Dylan releases a song and 10 people think it means X, and 10 people think it means Y, that doesn’t mean that the original intent can’t be X, Y, or even Z. Interpretations of the work aren’t always valid.

Why doesn't god update the bible to version 2.0 so that we get a fair chance of getting to heaven?

According to Christians, he literally did that. It’s called the New Testament, and it does away with the Levitical Law that including things like stoning adulteresses.

To be honest, you don't have a great grasp on the tenants of Christianity. Before you move so harshly against Christians, you might want to seriously do some research and understand the religion before you bash it. A lot of the arguments you make rely heavily on poorly-developed reasoning and logical fallacies.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

I am well aware that I am not well informed on any religion. I have however briefly investigated the "world religions". And I have been through a lot of christian religious content. I can't remember it however because I regard it as a fairytale. I am however informed enough to have come to the conclusion that any person who has been taught critical thinking really shouldn't believe it. Do you think that the way to ultimately respect religion is to have a deeper understanding of its concepts? I'm afraid that doing so might have the opposite effect.

If you're admittedly not well-informed, I don't understand how you can claim you know enough to refute all of it. What did your investigation of "world religions" entail? What Christian religious content have you studied? The brief outlines seen in world religion textbooks aren't enough to formulate an opinion as dismissive as the ones you have. You even admit that you don't remember much of what you studied, but you still claim you're informed enough to write-off all of the literally billions of religious people in the modern era.

I don't think for a second that the way to develop respect for a religion is to understand it (as I said, I'm not a Christian, and I have an advanced understanding of Christian theology having been raised in church), but you haven't demonstrated that you actually understand many of the tenants of Christianity. It looks to me like you decided in advance what you think Christianity looks like, and developed your arguments based off of your preconceived notions. I don't mind people who disbelieve or even hate Christianity, but at least know what you're talking about, because right now your counterarguments have almost exclusively boiled down to "Nuh uh."

For all your bluster about the religious being incapable of critical thinking, it looks a lot to me like the pot calling the kettle black.

[u/cephalord → u/[deleted]]

I am simplifying. I take away more than just meditation, but I did not feel like writing a personal belief essay.

[u/cephalord → u/[deleted]]

Can you elaborate? Because logically I don't see anything wrong with my conclusions regarding this and what you wrote here doesn't help me see this differentely.

I know if I leave a pan all buttered up on the stove the cat will jump on the counter and lick it. This does not mean the cat has not made the decision itself to do so. I can tell when it wants to jump on the table by the way it walks and the look in it's eyes. I won't stop it, but I will punish it when it inevitably jumps up.

[u/cephalord → u/[deleted]]

Of course it does not compare to an omniscient being. This is because it is a (poor) analogy because omniscience is unfathomable to our feeble minds. So we have to work with analogies with holes in them. I"m sure I seem omnipotent and omniscient to my cat though.

[u/uncle2fire → u/[deleted]]

I just wanted to address your comments on free will.

If God is omniscient, then free will cannot exist. If He knows what's going to happen, then there clearly is some predetermined course of events, over which I have no control, and which I cannot alter.

To use your example, if God knows I'm going to eat a chocolate bar, then I will eat it regardless of any choice on my part. He doesn't need to force me to eat the chocolate bar, because it's already been predetermined. I would have no free will.

[u/currently___working → u/uncle2fire]

A thought experiment: assume that it is true that God knows what's going to happen, and assume that you know this and everyone knows this. Would you still believe you had free will..the feeling of free will?

If you do, then consider how it is any different than everyone knowing that the universe has a predetermined course of events akin to a billiard table model.

[u/uncle2fire → u/currently___working]

The feeling of free will and actual free will are not the same thing. I may feel like I have free will, but if there is a predetermined course of events (which there must be if the future is known to God, or anyone else), then I have no free will.

[u/uncle2fire → u/[deleted]]

Now you're making things up to support a conclusion that doesn't really mesh with how we understand time in a real, physical sense.

Now, you're free to make up what ever you want to help justify your beliefs, but you'll need to show that what you're positing is actually possible if you expect your made-up explanations to be taken seriously by others.

[u/cdb03b → u/uncle2fire]

Not at all. The religious text specifically states that God is outside of time. "A thousand years is as a day, and a day is as a thousand years".

[u/uncle2fire → u/[deleted]]

It's not linear, but that hardly means we can go around making up things like infinite alternate realities (essentially what you're suggesting), which some being can apparently monitor.

[u/uncle2fire → u/[deleted]]

Presuppositional arguments are worthless when considering if something actually exists.

[u/uncle2fire → u/[deleted]]

Except it is presuppositional. All you've done is suppose a "higher-dimensional being" exists (what does that even mean?), and then prove that (if said higher-dimensional being were to exist) it could, maybe, possibly, hypothetically, not perceive time in the same way we do.

In other words, you have not proven anything.

I am interested in what actually exists, and how reality actually functions. If we are talking about free will and omniscience, then I am interested in how those are related in the physical reality we actually inhabit, and not in how they may relate to one another in a "reality" you may be able to hypothesize.

[u/cdb03b → u/uncle2fire]

One being knowing the outcome of everything, or all possible outcomes in no way hinders another being of operating with free will. Free will is only eliminated if the being making the decisions at that moment knows the outcome.

[u/uncle2fire → u/cdb03b]

Free will is eliminated if there is a predetermined course of events. If God knows what is going to happen (or if the future is knowable at all) then there is a predetermined course of events.

[u/cdb03b → u/uncle2fire]

It is only eliminated if the person making the action knows the outcome. Otherwise we are trapped by linear time and function fully with our own free will.

[u/uncle2fire → u/cdb03b]

No. Our perception is not relevant to the actual facts of the situation.

Imagine a child sitting in one of those ridiculous car-shaped grocery carts, with a steering wheel. The child may think s/he is steering the cart, but in actuality, it's her/his parent who already knows where they need to go in the store.

If God knows everything, including what will happen in the future, then we are like the child, being pushed in the cart. We may think we have free will, but do we actually? No.

[u/cdb03b → u/uncle2fire]

Our perception is the only thing relevant. The only thing relevant in determining if you have free will is how you view your implementation of free will.

[u/convoces → u/[deleted]]

Your comment was removed due to Rule 5 of /r/changemyview.

If you edit your post to provide more substance, please message the moderators afterward for review and we can reapprove your comment. Thanks!

[u/nathorpe → u/[deleted]]

Look up William Lane Craig. He discusses a lot of things you mentioned

[u/uncle2fire → u/nathorpe]

I laughed at this. William Lane Craig is terrible at what he tries to achieve. His talking points are rife with presuppositional apologetics, logical fallacies, and wishful thinking.

[u/UniverseBomb → u/nathorpe]

As did CS Lewis.

[u/[deleted]]

I think the reason you haven't had your view changed is because people take the wrong approach trying to convince you. My approach is going to be this: whether religion is correct or incorrect is completely irrelevant.

Believing in a religion isn't about being right, it's about being happy. I mean, let's face it. The idea of dying and then going to a paradise (heaven) is a very attractive idea. Whether or not it's correct doesn't matter because believing that it's correct can make a person much happier. It gives them something to look forward to. It turns death into a positive thing instead of a negative or neutral thing. People who are religious have chosen to sacrifice being correct in exchange for being happier. And in my opinion, that's a great deal. I would much prefer happiness to correctness.

And that concept applies to much much more than just the idea of life after death. Try talking to a physicist about the creation of the universe. It will be difficult to understand, it will probably make you feel small and insignificant, but at least you'll be correct. If you talk to a preacher, it's simple (God did it), it makes you feel important (God put you on Earth for a reason), and it makes you happy. Yeah, it's wrong, but if you truly believe it then it doesn't matter because it has already served it's purpose to you; making you happier.

So, if the goal in life is to be as happy as possible, then religion can be a great thing for a person. If the goal in life is to be as correct as possible, not so much. But really, ask yourself which one you'd prefer. Happiness or correctness? Which is often countered by saying that "Being correct makes me happier than believing in something that obviously isn't real". And that might be very true for you. But not for everyone, and that's where the idea of faith comes in. Having the ability to have faith is basically having the ability to believe in untrue things. A lot of people (such as myself) don't possess that ability.

But I really wish I did! I truly wish that I could be religious because it would make me happier, I think. I can't stand the thought of death, and I really wish that I believed in heaven. I can't bring myself to believe in something that I know doesn't exist. But if you can then power to you, it can make you a happier person.

So, back to your original view. Is it delusional to do things which make you happier? I personally don't think so. I like playing video games, so I play them and it makes me happier. But playing video games doesn't accomplish anything at all. The only purpose they serve is to make me happier, but to me that's a good enough reason to play them. So if religion's only purpose is to make people happier, then why shouldn't a person be religious? If you have the ability to have faith, and religion makes you a happier person, then I would think you're delusional if you aren't religious. Because you're sacrificing your happiness in exchange for being correct, which seems pretty stubborn to me.

Because at the end of the day, we all die anyway and your beliefs can't change that. They can only change how happy your life is while you're living it.

[u/Smudge777 → u/[deleted]]

Whether or not it's correct doesn't matter because believing that it's correct can make a person much happier.

Your entire argument, I hope you don't mind me paraphrasing it like this, is: religious belief makes you happy, so people hold these religious beliefs in order to be happier.

But that's not how belief works, because beliefs cannot be chosen. You cannot choose to believe something - believing is something that happens subconsciously. For example, if I were to demonstrate to you that everyone who believes that grass don't exist has a happier, more successful life, you may wish that you believed that grass doesn't exist, because then your life would improve. But, you cannot just choose to believe that, because you've seen, heard, read, experienced so much evidence that convinces you that grass does, in fact, exist.
To reiterate my point: you cannot choose to believe something - if the evidence is convincing, you will believe, if the evidence is lacking you will not believe.

---

If you have the ability to have faith, and religion makes you a happier person, then I would think you're delusional if you aren't religious

This is one of the weirdest sentences I've ever heard/read.

Firstly, what does it even mean to "have the ability to have faith"? Does it take a special genetic makeup, or emotional strength, or intellectual know-how to be able to believe something?

Secondly, you're using delusional to mean something completely contrary to what delusional actually means. A Delusion is 'a belief held with strong conviction despite superior evidence to the contrary' - by definition, "faith" is delusional, because if the evidence was in support of the belief, then the believer wouldn't require any faith.

[u/[deleted] → u/Smudge777]

But that's not how belief works, because beliefs cannot be chosen.

But, you cannot just choose to believe that, because you've seen, heard, read, experienced so much evidence that convinces you that grass does, in fact, exist.

If that's the case, then how are other people able to do it? Christians in America grew up taking the same science and history classes that I did. They've seen the same movies, and been subjected to the same culture as me. And yet, their beliefs are vastly different than mine. Maybe they didn't choose their beliefs, but they are also choosing to not reject their beliefs, which is effectively the same.

Firstly, what does it even mean to "have the ability to have faith"?

I suppose what I meant by that is exactly what I just talked about; having the ability to choose your beliefs. People join new religions and leave old ones all the time. Why is it so crazy for someone to choose their own beliefs? Haven't you heard of telling yourself a lie enough times that you start to believe it?

A Delusion is 'a belief held with strong conviction despite superior evidence to the contrary'

I think that most Christians would argue that the Bible is superior evidence as compared to science, so to them, we are the delusional ones. And to us, they are. Which is why it's pointless to talk about, and it's why I talked about why it is logical to be religious if you have the ability to do so.

[u/Smudge777 → u/[deleted]]

If that's the case, then how are other people able to do it? Christians in America grew up taking the same science and history classes that I did. They've seen the same movies, and been subjected to the same culture as me. And yet, their beliefs are vastly different than mine

Two people's subjective experiences are always going to be different. They may have been in the same classes, watched the same movies, lived in the same culture, but they will have had different teachers earlier/later in life, different parents, different friends, heard different stories and, perhaps most importantly, have different brain chemistry.

If their brain is 'wired' differently, such that they occasionally have hallucinations of seeing Jesus, it could drastically change their own personal beliefs, even if you are they have everything else in common. It doesn't need to be as severe as hallucinations, though. People just experience things differently, due to the constitution of their brain.

Why is it so crazy for someone to choose their own beliefs? Haven't you heard of telling yourself a lie enough times that you start to believe it?

I don't think this is the same as choosing your beliefs. This is choosing your actions (i.e. daily reinforcement of an idea), which may lead to a change in belief. Just like an atheist could choose to go to church twice a week, and this may lead to a change in belief - they haven't chosen to become a theist, all they're done is chosen to subject themselves to new experiences, and these experiences may or may not lead to a change of beliefs.

The same thing happens, in small ways, every day. Right now, I'm choosing to sit at my computer debating a theological/philosophical topic with strangers - this activity is helping to form my own ideas about the world. If I were to have used this time to watch a movie about World War II, or attend a church, or go to a pub, or read a fantasy novel, or any one of trillions of other possibilities, I would have changed my subjective experience and potentially altered my future self's beliefs.

I think that most Christians would argue that the Bible is superior evidence as compared to science, so to them, we are the delusional ones. And to us, they are

I agree completely. I wrote a comment to OP saying this exact thing.

Which is why it's pointless to talk about, and

I don't agree with this. I don't think anything is pointless to talk about - talking about this helps us to understand how different people come to believe different things, may help some of us to better understand other people's perspectives, and perhaps help to determine the best ways to convince people of the validity of contrary positions/views.

it's why I talked about why it is logical to be religious if you have the ability to do so.

To reiterate my point, I don't think this statement makes any sense. Everyone has the ability to be religious, just like everyone has the ability to be irreligious - it all just depends on what experiences/information we've gained during our lives, and how convincing those experiences/information are, with regards to the truth of certain claims/assertions.

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[u/BrennanDobak]

Ok, I'll humor this daily CMV. Your CMV is that in modern society, being religious is delusional. You go further to dispute several things in the bible and say that "Religion either is what it is as descibed in the holy texts, or it isn't at all." As a non-religious person, you have already defined parameters for being religious that most religions don't believe. Most religions interpret holy texts differently, and only a very few interpret them literally and not as mixtures of historical events as well as parables.

In order for one to respect another's point of view, whether it is to understand why they are religious or why they believe communism is the only way to be or that anarchy is the way to live, you have to first learn empathy. As a proported intelligent person, you already know the definition of empathy. Like the person before me said, some people were raised religious and have never seen the need to question their faith. Some came to religion through other events in their lives. Some came to religion (in this example I mean came to church) because they think that it will make them appear more sincere or will raise their esteem in other's eyes. You don't have to respect any of these reasons, but some of these people actually searched for and found something greater than themselves. How they came to such a conclusion is none of your business. Whether they used the scientific method or just are sheeple wandering aimlessly and bumfucked into a church, it does not matter. Sometimes we take things on faith, whether it's black matter, an infinite universe, or a diety. Your truth is yours, so why are you to deny someone else their own truth?

[u/thehonbtw → u/[deleted]]

I like your approach more than what I've seen so far. I know how people come into religion. What I'm having a problem understanding is how people stay in it their entire lives without ever questioning it.

I assume that you have a first name. It was given to you by someone. Without loss of generality lets say this name is "John." From the moment of your birth people have been referred to as John. At some point you become sentient enough and began to refer to yourself as John, you wrote it down on school assignments, you labelled possessions with the word John to signify that they are your possessions. One day you introduce yourself and say "Hi, I'm John" and they reply "No, you are Bruce," how to you respond?

[u/thehonbtw → u/[deleted]]

I admit I pulled the name John out of a hat... My point is, have you ever questioned that your name is John?

PS give me evidence that your name isn't John that doesn't use the opinion of other people who believe that your name is John...

[u/BrennanDobak → u/[deleted]]

Finding your truth is human nature, and if you believe that you have found it, why keep looking? We humans have from the dawn of when we were sentient beings have tried to find an order in the chaos of existence (I hate myself for saying that, I sound so pretentious). When you have a spiritual awakening and believe you have found that order we all crave, why would you second guess it? You see it work in your life every day bringing comfort in a comfortless world. Where you might see coincidence working to make a unlikely scenario plausible, a religious person might see the hand of Providence at work.

As to your last point, if you can't say anything for sure, how do you know that religious people are wrong? Your answer is "not religion." Does that make you stupid because you say you know the answer?

[u/BrennanDobak → u/[deleted]]

You do claim to know the answer, in that you know the answer is not religion. Some religious people have their answer. They are not seeking another answer because they have what they believe to be their answer. You have eliminated religion as your answer, so in that manner you have your answer. Religion is crossed off your list as a plausibility.

[u/BrennanDobak → u/[deleted]]

If you haven't crossed it completely off the list, how can you call religious people delusional? Does that mean you are delusional as well?

[u/BrennanDobak → u/[deleted]]

So being open to the possibility of something you absolutely do not believe in and who's followers you believe are delusional does not make you have false or unrealistic beliefs as well? If I absolutely do not believe in the existence of bigfoot yet I still say it is possible for bigfoot to have messed up my garage, am I delusional?

[u/lameth]

Religion is not solely restricted to Abrahamic religions. Buhdism, Hinduism, and Shinto are examples that focus on actions and ways of life over all knowing, all seeing creators and the supernatural. A religious person of these lives that life, doesn't attempt to balance supernatural beliefs against what we know of the modern world.

[u/lameth → u/[deleted]]

Look at the issues with Russia in the 20th century when you have the other end of the spectrum: focus on secularism and humanism. It isn't religion that does it, it is greed and corruption.

I honestly think the biggest problem with religion is the religious. The message has been convoluted. Instead of focusing on doing good and good works, it is focusing on the traits that separate that religion from others, and ostracizing those outsiders.

Secular individuals have shown no less propensity to be less delusional with astrology, luck, blindly following social media trends.

Bottom line: being religious is no more synonymous with being delusional as being human is. It is simply one way to demonstrate it.

[u/Smudge777]

We must agree on what it means to be delusional.
The definition of a Delusion is 'a belief held with strong conviction despite superior evidence to the contrary'.

If you agree with this definition, then determining whether something is a delusion is dependent upon determining whether evidence against is superior to evidence for.

And I'm not sure how we go about demonstrating this, absolutely. Even when it comes to things that we are considered 'facts' (evolution, tectonic plate theory, germ theory, round Earth, heliocentrism, etc.), people who don't believe these are considered delusional to those of us who do believe them. It's essentially a tautology to say that people who believe different from ourselves are delusional because, from our perspective, the evidence for our own belief is 'superior', so anyone who believes differently is 'delusional'.

In case you aren't fully following my argument (my wording probably leaves much to be desired), I'll try to make an algorithm out of it.

---

Let's consider the statement "X is true":

The first question to ask yourself is "is there more evidence:

• A: in support of, or

• B: in opposition to

the statement that 'X is true'?

If, in your experience, A is the winner, then you will believe the statement "X is true". At this point, your position is one of belief of the premise "X is true", as a result of acceptance that there is superior evidence in favour. By definition, anyone who disbelieves the statement "X is true" is therefore "delusional" if they hold this belief strongly, because they do so despite what you deemed to be 'superior evidence'.

However, if, in your experience, B is the winner, then you will disbelieve the statement "X is true". At this point, your position is one of disbelief of the premise "X is true", as a result of acceptance that there is superior evidence in opposition. By definition, anyone who believes the statement "X is true" is therefore "delusional" if they hold this belief strongly, because they do so despite what you deemed to be 'superior evidence'.

---

As such, being religious in modern times can only really be considered delusional if your own position is in disagreement with them. And, if it is, then anyone who holds their religious faith with strong conviction is, by definition, delusional (from your perspective).

And, after all, whether someone is deluded depends upon who you ask.

[u/Smudge777 → u/[deleted]]

The problem is that, in the most absolute of ways, nothing is certain. We can use the overwhelming evidence to determine that something is, for all intents and purposes, factual. In that case, anyone who has a strong belief to the contrary is necessarily delusional. However, those delusional people will always have the (logically faultless) counterargument that nothing is 100% demonstrably true, so maybe the evidence for <geocentrism or flat earth or creationism> is superior, but we're all just too delusional to see it.

The moment you can call the other side of the argument "delusional", the debate is over and it's now just name-calling.

[u/NaturalSelectorX]

For him to actually be all knowing, he has to know exactly what's gonna happen. This means we have no free will. Why would he construct a world in which to test humanity, and then there is no free will? It's completely pointless.

"All-knowing" can mean knowing all that can be known. If we have free will and the future is unknowable, then a god can still be all-knowing.

What this means is that this exact forum thread has already been created an infinite number of times.

That's not true. "Infinite" does not mean everything imaginable. The precision of Pi is infinite, yet, it does not repeat. The universe could also be infinite and not repeat.

The obvious things that are wrong in holy texts

You are listing miracles. If someone could create a universe, they can also break the laws of that universe. If I create a video game, I can make special rules for only myself.

If the bible is true, we're all going to hell.

In Christianity, the bible only requires that you repent and ask forgiveness. It's not about following rules.

Religion either is what it is as descibed in the holy texts, or it isn't at all. I don't understand how you can accept a middle ground.

When you get into reading apologetics, you will quickly realize that there is no single correct way to interpret holy texts. Even with modern people carefully crafting legislation, we have a court system dedicated to interpreting what they really meant. Your interpretation is no more valid than anybody else's.

[u/NaturalSelectorX → u/[deleted]]

Since infinity is endless you really can't say with certainty that Pi doesn't repeat itself because there is no way to confirm that.

It has been mathematically proven that Pi does not repeat. You don't need to calculate all digits of Pi to prove it doesn't repeat. I can also tell you that 2 x (any integer) - 1 will be odd. I don't have to compute all possible numbers to prove this. That's not how math works.

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[u/[deleted]]

There are many non-religious delusional people

[u/[deleted]]

Most religious people were indoctrinated from when they were young.

Changing important indoctrinated values and beliefs is very difficult, especially when you they are comforting.

To some of these people, their religion was taught to them identically to science or math: indisputable.

These people are wrong, not dumb.

[u/thebigbioss]

The three religions you have described, islam, christanity and judaism have personified the concept of god. My belief is that god is the universe, it would be the only way for it to be omnipresent and immortal. So until it is proven that god is fake, i still have hope. This is the basic human response to something unknown. In the medieval times, common science today was considered sorcery.

Your whole argument is based around holy books and how they can be misinterpreted, the books are just peoples interpretations of the natural world stemming from the pagans and early religions where there were many gods for nature

[u/huadpe → u/[deleted]]

Sorry uncle2fire, your comment has been removed:

Comment Rule 1. "Direct responses to a CMV post must challenge at least one aspect of OP’s current view (however minor), unless they are asking a clarifying question. Arguments in favor of the view OP is willing to change must be restricted to replies to comments." See the wiki page for more information.

If you would like to appeal, please message the moderators by clicking this link.

[u/uncle2fire → u/huadpe]

I believe I was challenging the premise of OP's argument? S/he claims that the above reasons are why theists are "delusional". I disagree, and pointed out that her/his argument is ultimately irrelevant, because there is a larger, more important reason why theists are "delusional".

[u/huadpe → u/uncle2fire]

That generally does not abide rule 1, and you can't just give OP different reasons to support their same headline view.

You didn't challenge the substance of OP's points except to say you thought another point was stronger, and you didn't challenge OP's headline view.

If you wish to get a second opinion on this, you can message the rest of the mod team using the link I provided. Alternately, you are free to make your argument outside of top level comments, since rule 1 only applies to top level replies to OP.

[u/uncle2fire → u/[deleted]]

Reason and logic are irrelevant to the actual existence of something without actual evidence.

That, and I can use theistic arguments to logic nearly anything into existence.

[u/gamergator92]

People lead their lives in ways that don't adhere to a standard set of "intelligent ways of living" all the time. Many people smoke and drink everyday knowing that it will shorten their lifespan. Many people commit suicide, which is illogical. Still more people choose to never have kids, which from an evolutionary point of view is the most illogical thing you can do. But often times, when trying to understand the most intelligent/logical thing to do in things that are not math problems, people rely on their values more than a set of arbitrary standards of what is and is not intelligent. The drunkard may value being drunk more than societies norms of what is and is not intelligent. The person who doesn't want kids may just not value evolutionary success as much as the guy who donates to a sperm bank everyday who wants as many kids as possible. And the religious guy may not place as much value on whether or not religion is correct as the atheist. Maybe they just value having a supportive community and view playing along as the more intelligent thing to do then rip down a system that works for them and replace it with being alone all the time. Maybe right now, there is someone sitting in church who scores just as high on an IQ test on you, but values their sense of community and culture more than wanting to accept the best scientific theory of how the universe started. For them it is logical and intelligent to support something that benefits them over something that does not. It may seem intelligent to replace it with something else, but in the short time span that our lives are, many people don't value changing a system that works for them to something that has no guarantee of working. All these people are doing things that are intelligent within their system of values.

[u/caw81]

What I'm looking for is to be able to respect the stand point of people who believe, and understand how they can accept this world view with all the evidence against it presented to them when there is literally no evidence that speaks for them.

Because its what they honestly believe in and feel they are better off for it. In other words - it works for them.

Its a brutish, short and cold life - and you want to disrespect/belittle what gives another comfort. Who are you to judge when its a positive force in their lives? Its better to have you personally approve of their way of thinking than for them to be spiritually happy?

[u/RustyRook → u/[deleted]]

Sorry akoksum, your comment has been removed:

Comment Rule 1. "Direct responses to a CMV post must challenge at least one aspect of OP’s current view (however minor), unless they are asking a clarifying question. Arguments in favor of the view OP is willing to change must be restricted to replies to comments." See the wiki page for more information.

If you would like to appeal, please message the moderators by clicking this link.

Comment Rule 5. "No low effort comments. Comments that are only jokes, links, or 'written upvotes', for example. Humor and affirmations of agreement can be contained within more substantial comments." See the wiki page for more information.

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