Why believe in gods? I cannot find a rational answer.
MAYBE because its NOT rational..........now what
Why Believe In God?
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MAYBE because its NOT rational..........now what
Ah, that's the essential point, isn't it.MAYBE because its NOT rational..........now what
Now what? Well, consider this: suppose somebody polled the nation with a question like "Do you agree that irrationality is something to be proud of and deserves respect?" What percentage of people do y'all suppose would answer yes to that?
Then try to reconcile that with the well-established fact that an overwhelming majority of people profess at least some degree of religious belief.
Thanks for the post.
That has already occured in miracles all over the world and in many generations.
Must certain things be in place before these can occur? What encompasses our sphere of reality? It is globally understood that there are in reality things we do not understand as well as those we do, that would be reality in the true sense.
It assumes that everything God can realize and conceptualize as a super being of exceedingly high intelligence can always be understood by lessor beings. It assumes the level of ability to reason,intellectualize and conceptualize by any being is never a deterhent in the receiver's ability to understand it.
It would stand to reason that if this is so there is a possibility that we would have a progression that would allow for degrees of knowledge to be revealed as times moves on, and dependant on the ability of the lessor to absorb it. If revelation was occuring now in our lifetime, and this is yet one more allowance to help us believe, what negates it has valid data for our cause now.?
What of rights of beings? Can it also be possible that God wishes to test His creation? If we were to create sentient aware intelligent cyborgs would we have the intrinsic right to test them, or would they rightfully demand they are given all that they are fated to know and we by some universal rule obliged to give it immediatley? Would we not be justified to hold some knowledge is reserve dependant on merit? And what of the characteristic of these machines that gives them pleasure in discovery and reward. Would it be unfair of us to reveal knowledge gradually? No.
I think we would want those machines in our immediate sphere to be the best there is and more proven loyal.
One huge miracle that would knock your socks off occured in the raising of Lazarus. All the factors you require were present. This guy was festering in a contained vault for days in 110+ degrees, and Jesus didn't rush. He wanted Lazurus really ripe for the non believers!. :laughing7:
If a huge global miracle occured now and man is still around in 500000 years, would that miracle be documented along with the Jurassic extinctions, or would a Lazarus event be required every year or so.? If God required that we trust each other, why would He submit to our insistance that He perform if his laws provide the solution?
On the flipside, I can see a truly godless logical person really living out that logic. It would be illogical of him wasting his finite time convincing religious that their days are finite. Every minute away from that party boat destined to extinction is a minute wasted. Some of them may insincerely hold has a minor irritation that possibly there is the one in a trillion chance that these religious people may get to live forever. To them that is too much to take.
Worst of all perish the thought, that perhaps in that same trillion to one odds that God who he thought did not exist, and who he is in front of now, really did wait for him to love Him and respect his religious duties, and obliged him to teach his children the same.
In summary, the truly godless person by that tenet he holds to, the rule of probability, alone has a better chance to gain if not by believing outright, by a sincere effort to try to make himself receptive to assistance to help him believe, as from his opinion his life is finite anyway. From his perspective, benefit of the doubt is just as finitely unrewarding as anything else he will do, but at least carries with it a possibility..
AndyF
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I see your point Dex but this ISNT rational. Faith is Faith its not rational. In my case its a do over . The god i was raised with sucked so I created my own belief system. Its human to want comfort when noone will comfort them.........Goddess/God is always there. Unconditional Love is a human need Darlin its not rational.
spirituality is naturally occurring in humanity. it always has been. if people everywhere, seperated by land and time, have felt something exists in this world of a spiritual nature, then I fail to see how it is irrational. it is organic. it is engrained in us. it's been proven there is a genetic difference between people with a sense of spirituality and those without. just because some may lack the gene to sense what others do doesn't mean it isn't there. color blindness occurs naturally too, but just because some people can't see green doesn't mean green doesn't exist for the rest of the world. and it wouldn't mean that those who can see the color are being irrational simply because others can't.
That IS my point, it ISN'T rational, and I can't grasp how irrationality is a useful way to try to make sense of anything.
Me too. More than just sucked, actually... Obviously we've responded very differently to that though. I abandoned all religious belief, you invented new ones.
Agreed, but again, I can't grasp how inventing supernatural beings serves that need.
We part company on that one. I'd agree it's a human need, but don't agree it's not rational. It's readily understandable in terms of the evolutionary pressures that have shaped us as social creatures and the things we know about human nature that cross all social and cultural boundaries, like our propensity for magical thinking, our pattern-seeking intelligence, our need to belong to a group, and so on.
Personally, I've found that things make a lot more sense to me, many more things are comprehensible, since I abandoned all religious belief and the explanations it offers, not least because so many of those explanations are so easily shown to be simply wrong, or elaborate rationalizations that don't survive skeptical scrutiny.
I can even give you a for instance. There are those who claim that god is active in the world today responding to prayers to cure cancers, repairing damage from heart disease, and so on, and they can cite superficially convincing cases where intercessory prayer appears to have worked. I'm sure our friend Sanctus is among them. They'll also point to passages in the New Testament where Jesus reportedly talks about all prayers being answered. I'm sure you're familiar with some of them: seek and ye shall find, ask and it shall be given, stuff like that. I've been told by many well-meaning believers that all prayers are always answered in one of three ways: yes, no, or wait. And I'd like to know why for certain prayers the answer is always no. There is no reliably reported case of a paraplegic, a quadriplegic, a victim of muscular dystrophy, multiple sclerosis, paralysis induced by polio or injury, an amputee, ever being divinely cured. Not one. Not ever. Why not?
That "yes, no, or wait" claim is a no-lose cop out. Whatever happens after attempts at intercessory prayer, it'll fall into one of those categories. Explains everything, and nothing.
Really? That's an extraordinary claim. You're going to have to give me something better than just the claim before I'll accept that. And it'll also have to demonstrate that it's genuinely a genetically determined awareness of spirituality, not merely a genetic predisposition for magical thinking.
sure,
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7147
And from this link (http://www.thebinarycircumstance.co...alters-heaven-were-is-it-how-do-we-get-there/), the most pertinent excerpt....
Hamer suspects spirituality might be a personality trait encoded in our genes. He began his research by asking more than 1,000 people to answer a series of questions about faith and spirituality. He then tested DNA from the study participants and found that those who scored highest on his survey had a mutation of at least one gene that seemed to affect their level of spirituality. He named it “the God gene.”
“It’s a gene that’s called VMAT2 and we can isolate it, and we can study it in detail. … This particular gene controls certain chemicals in the brain. And those chemicals affect how consciousness works. They affect the way that our feelings react to the events around us,” he tells Walters.
I'd have asked for links too if I hadn't heard the scientists talking about it. Frankly, i wouldn't believe it just off the net, but the excerpt is from a Barbara Walter's interview.
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You might also try to produce a rigorous definition of what "a sense of spirituality" means. I'm an atheist and a rationalist and a materialist, but as selfactivated can tell you, I'm certainly not without spirituality, and I'm inclined to think anybody who completely lacks that is likely to be a nasty psychopath.
a rigorous definition of spirituality? that'd be tough. I'd have to say that spirituality is the sense we are all born with, that there is some undercurrent present in the earth that we can sense but not explain. not the same as religion. religion as far as i'm concerned is a flawed human construct used to attempt to explain where our spirituality comes from. i am catholic, and I love the rituals and practises, but i think being human, we botch **** up no matter how hard we try to get it right.
I think you and I are basically on the same page we both agree this is not a rational subject. We both had experiences that took us away from the "church" . I took the mystic way because it gave me comfort and healing. I "made up" deities that had charecteristics I wanted and have within myself.
In My opinion "prayers" are just good thought, positive energy that I stick out into the universe. Have you seen the work on fractiles? Sending positive or negitive thoughts to water......its amazing stuff. (Im spelling it wrong) And to think our bodies are mostly water.
No it hasn't. The church's standards of evidence for miracles are laughably low. All it demands is hearsay from a few witnesses, there is no well attested "miracle" that survives routine scientific scrutiny. It's all hearsay, wishful thinking, credulity, and error.
A few years ago, most people thought tomatoes were poisonous, too. A few years ago, most people thought the planet was flat. A few years ago, most people thought Sol went around the Earth. etc.
Um... I don't think there's any closet about it. If there are deities at all (which I strongly doubt), it seems far more sensible to me to suppose that there are many more than one of them. Nature as far as we know provides no examples of lifeforms of which there is only one. Even the Bible talks about other gods. Seems to me that either there are none (my position) or many (your position).Dex is a closet Pagan *giggle*
It is non-tangible, unlike molecular items and energy. It relies upon supposition and faith.
Spirituality is organic? You are saying it is carbon-based. Show me a piece of spirituality, please.
So are phobias. (Those are irrational fears).
Link?
I agree, Spirituality may exist, but it is an assumption that it does. A hypothesis. There is nothing to show it existing outside of minds or imaginations.
Wasn't just a few years ago. I recently saw a video at YouTube of a French version of "The Millionaire" game show in which a contestant was asked which of these bodies orbits the earth: the sun, the moon, Mars, or Venus. The contestant didn't know, so he went to the audience for a vote. 58% of the audience voted that the sun orbits the earth, the contestant accepted the majority rule, and lost.
I really hope that program came from France, not Quebec.
Explains that they may be able to tell to what degree someone is deluded. It does not indicate anything is real or rational about spirituality outside the imagination.
Are all personality traits rational? Are they all based on reality? Obviously not.