I never claimed Faith is a virtue
No, its
implicitin the way you employ it. It
presupposesfaith is a virtue.
That does not however mean faith does not exist.
It exists in the minds of the people who employ it. But it is a cop out.
Also let me state here for the record, I am not preaching to you
I don't think you are. Its a dialogue, that's all. I'm not preaching to you either. We're just sharing opinions. Its all good.
No (I don't think God defines good and evil)
Then why call it God?
If you assume an entirely mechanistic universe
Its not an assumption. Its an observation. All evidence points to the universe being entirely comprised of mechanistic processes founded in the fundamental laws of physics, thermodynamics, etc. No evidence indicates otherwise.
but by that thought there is also no free will or choice at all
This is pretty much exactly the case. We have illusions of free choice or will caused by the fact that evolutionary processes have limited our capacity for awareness as a mechanism for survival. Excess information is weeded out of the conscious, into a subconscious arena, where in "choices" are derived founded in genetic predispositions. All evidence thus far, from neuroscience and other arenas, points in this direction, and no evidence points in the direction that we make conscious decisions in the way that popular culture has promoted for....thousands of years honestly.
Its a case of we operate from assumptions that are simply incorrect founded in culturally perpetuated concepts.
If however you believe that somewhere, even in the least of things, there is some 'slack' in the mechanistic machine, then that opens the door to choice. I believe there is slack.
That's fine if that's what you believe. But the thing is belief is meaningless, without evidence. That's really where the divide is here. I want to believe as many demonstrably true things as possible, and disbelieve those things which are asserted but have no evidence to support them.
So the process of making a decision takes time, and starts before we are aware of it. That does not remove the possibility of free will.
No, you've completely misunderstood this point. The point is that the decision is made, is decided upon,
BEFOREyou are consciously aware of it.
Which completely negates on every level the possibility that you've made a "choice" on any level of which you are cognitively "aware" of.
I'm not saying suffering is good for you I am saying pain can teach.
If pain teaches you, then suffering is good for you. Education is good. This is a contradiction. I hope you can see that.
Its internally inconsistent.
. We could theoretically all live subsistence existences while donating all excess wealth to feed the poor and solve their suffering. That we do not is itself a choice.
Are you so sure? How do you know? The reality is that our survival instincts underlie hoarding activities. In the same way excess calories are converted to adipose tissue as a means of surviving periods of lack of nutrition, our mental desire to consume and withhold is a mechanistic function of our evolutionary history. Those who did not have this trait died at a higher rate than those that did, leaving fewer off spring. The end result is that more people desire to hoard than not. All without any conscious thought going into the matter, since all these decisions are made in our subconsciousnesses prior to our being aware of them.
Also I would again like to point out that IF there is such a thing as a soul
There's no evidence for it, so there's no reason to even play games with "Well what IF there is a soul?". This is a modified Pascal's Wager style argument. "Well what if it IS true?" Without evidence to justify belief in a soul, there's no reason to even address the concern.
Or it's "He won't allow me to eat as much candy as I want and stay up all night, because he says he knows better then me".
There's no evidence "he" exists. Further, this seems very close to the sorts of mental graspings for justifications that I want to avoid at all costs in my interactions with reality. The fundamental divide between the believer, and the non believer, is the non believer is willing to face reality
as we observe it to actually existwhile the believer wants to face reality
as they wish that it existed.
Don't ask me what lesson that is, I do not know, I simply accept that much like my dad spanked me as a kid
Its a very telling quote. Just saying.
But the argument "The Lord works in mysterious ways" again, is just an apologetic. Its a way of convincing yourself to continue to deal with reality as you wish it were, rather than how it is. If the Lord works in mysterious ways, he's a monster. An invisible, immoral, sky tyrant.
Maybe God has lessons that are worth the pain?
He beats me because he loves me.
True there is no evidence for a Soul, and I do not 'feel' that a soul exists the way I 'feel' that God exists most times. That's why it'sthe excuse I give for believing in things without reason, justification or cause.
That might very well be true, and your thought processes certainly do have more evidence, but it is also possible
Its possible that unicorns and Bigfoot will fly out of the sky tomorrow and deliver Cadbury cream eggs to all the children. Its not
possibilitythat is the issue for the non believer. Its
probability, particularly in the face of overwhelming contradictory evidence.
I'm not preaching to you, either, just trying to give you an idea of how we non believers view these issues and the world, why we've come to the conclusions we've come to. So don't think I'm like attacking you or something here. Its trying to help you see the world through my eyes for a bit, so you can see how we non believers see all these arguments as really sort of a straw grasping attempt to generate explanations for questions that don't have easy answers, in fact have answers that are
quite uncomfortable, which is why it takes a strong degree of intellectual honesty and a willingness to live with hard truths over comforting fictions. This is how we view all these explanations. Anthropologically I would say it this way: When faced with things we don't understand, humans have a tendency to generate explanations, however implausible, as a means of allowing them to quiet cognitive dissonance so they can just sorta get on with their lives. Which is fine. Its a survival mechanism, fundamentally. Built into our genes.
that evidence we can process intellectually and through our senses will never get us to that conclusion.
You want answers, but you eschew the only methodology and tools with which we can possibly derive them, in fact you are attempting to create a wall around these beliefs that says "Beyond here be DRAGONS, intellect and reason DARE NOT CROSS".
This is what I cannot do. Intellectualism, reason, and our senses are
the only path to truth in this situation. All other routes are only a path to willful delusion. That's how the Athiest sees these arguments. Hopefully you can dig that.
The irrelevant part assumes inherently that we only have one life
Its not an
assumption. Its a direct
observation. The only people engaging in presuppositional thinking here are the theists who
presupposesomething for which there is
not a shred of evidence to support. That's the issue, you see? I'm not
assumingthere's only one life. Without
any evidence to the contrary, there is only one possible conclusion, and that is disbelief in claims that have no evidence to support them. The
null hypothesisis disbelief in this claim that there may be life after death. I could certainly be wrong. But the
probabilityof that is so low, in the face of 12,000 plus years of human cultural development and society promoting these claims of life after death without a single shred of valid evidence ever once being offered up to support them, that its a
functionally irrelevant propositions. Prove a probability of life after death first, then we can operate from a position that it exists. That's the issue. This is how we do rational inquiry. We don't say
well it COULD BE that Bigfoot is real, therefore we should operate from the assumption he is. That's silly. It leaves you with no choice but to accept the most ridiculous claims at face value with no filter to weed out the nonsense.
You dig?
This is the way the mind of the non believer works. Its also the way the mind of the rational empiricist works. Its also the reason we have airplanes and internets and all the cool shit we have today, as a result of this way of thinking, directly. Belief without evidence is a form of
cultural mass delusion, and willful self delusion. Its trying to deal with the reality
we wish existed, rather than the reality that actually does exist.
In any case, all I wanted to do was present the possibility that our condition and our suffering is part of a process whose goal we cannot understand, and thus that a God that allowed such suffering need not be malevolent. Thats all. Nothing more and nothing less.
I mean, that's fine. I respect that. All I want you to see is that, to the non believer, what you've got is a whole lotta "beliefs" that have no functional evidence for their truth value, which means you've got a lot of weak conjecture, which isn't enough to justify belief if you're engaging in
intellectual honestyand truly desire to seek the truth and know it to the best of your ability. That's how we view this entire debate.
Its all about burden of proof. Believers have lots of things they
believe, but not a lot of those beliefs can be
justified, ergo the burden of proof remains unfulfilled, and belief in these claims is unjustified. Unjustified beliefs are just willful delusions, in our worldview.
