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Topic: For those of you who don't believe in God  (Read 16030 times)

Offline cmg

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Re: For those of you who don't believe in God
Reply #50 on: December 23, 2008, 04:08:13 PM
Interesting, but who is the bloke in the middle??

Thal


Nils.
Current repertoire:  "Come to Jesus" (in whole-notes)

Offline rc

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Re: For those of you who don't believe in God
Reply #51 on: December 24, 2008, 11:04:09 AM
This is the best, rc!  Experiencing that which can't be scientifically proven isn't always just "faith" however.  Buddhists experience "satori" or "kensho" through rigorous hours of  meditation employed to quiet ALL thoughts.  With that condition prevailing, a glimpse of what the religious call Eternity or God is possible.  The experience is often referred to as Enlightenment or Awakening. 

Can a Buddhist prove that what he has seen is the ineffable?  No.  Intuition, as Emerson says, tells you so.  William James in his great scientific study called "The Varieties of Religious Experience" documents people from all faiths who have "intuited" God.  It happens.  He didn't challenge it, nor disprove it.  He simply observed that it existed.

Experiencing it is like proving scientifically that you love someone:  you know the feeling is there.  You KNOW it's real.  It's beyond proof.

I'm glad you liked, sir *salutes*

I also like your last paragraph, and bringing up love. It's such a good example!

To link it back to Buddhism, my favorite difinition of love came from a buddhist: taking delight in another person.  So simple and so true.  and we know it when we feel it.  Beyond proof, such a good description!

And love goes beyond people.  Like the love we may feel for a great piece of music, or any given expression of nature.  To the right attitude, it's all so beautiful, sometimes overwhelmingly so.  It's all the same thing I would equate with God.

For the longest time, I thought love was a myth.  Now, when I talk anyone, I truly feel like the lyric from 'It's a Wonderful World' : "I see friends shaking hands, saying how do you do. They're really saying 'I love you'"

Offline frigo

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Re: For those of you who don't believe in God
Reply #52 on: December 26, 2008, 07:54:41 PM
1. Motion exists because particles are influenced by the four fundamental forces: strong, weak, electromagnetic and gravitation that exist only between them due to their physical characteristics, If every motion can be explained by 'obsvervable' effects of this forces, why create an imaginary being that moves everything?  A particle stays at rest if no forces act on it, where's god here?

2. Of course 'nothing is caused by itself '. Our obsvervations of the universe point us to the standard cosmological model we have, that is certainly insuficient to explain all things, but is at least more suficient than atribute everything to a mythical eternal father.
   You can make all arguments yours in order to defend the existence of god, because since our idea of god is a 'created all, is perfect, knows everything, all that exists has him on its origin' idea, I can say whatever I want about forces and causes and you'll say: 'well, it was god who create those things'. We have to have the sense that not everything can be understood by our brains, they are insuficcient machines of statements, the universe certainly has observable thingsthat our thinking will not ever understand. Creating god is pure egoism, is man looking at himself with his instinct for surviving mixed with is intelligence and saying' Im really the best, something great and perfect must have been in my origin', man cannot accept the idea of being made of the same stuff that all animals and things are.

3. That's no cosmological at all. It is true that everything is not eternal, all 'physical things', as you call them. But then you state 'since time is infinite'... and what is that? It was 100 years ago that Einstein proved that matter, energy, space and time are one and the same thing. Time is subjective, there's no 'absolute time', there isn't a clock that rules all the others. Time as we humans understand it has no universal significance, time can be converted into space or energy or matter, contract or get longer, even stop, even go backwards, and this strikes our common sense. Time as we sense it would exist at the 'big bang', we have the need of an overlasting presence of time even accepting 'big bang', but that's not what universe tells us, the universe itself doesn't need overlasting time because time isn't the way we commonly sense it.

4. The 'differing degrees of qualities' that objects have, 'such as goodness', are subjective! It is humans avaluating things for the purpose of improving the way he lives! Jumping to the conclusion that the comparisons are made with a 'maximum' is another way of the egoistic sense of puting man on the center of the universe. Man states his values and qualities of things by its own desire and way of looking into things, and this statements will not influence the way things are formed. 'Goodness' is not a characteristic of things, it is a man's strategy to know better how to survive.

5. What you call 'goals', just like with the arrow, is nothing more than the forces and causes that exist by the characteristics of things, the physical laws, if you can name it. This argument of yours is in fact the same as the first.

This text you posted is actually a very good demonstration of the medieval thought, ancient and poor, lacking unity with nature.

Offline yuc4h

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Re: For those of you who don't believe in God
Reply #53 on: December 26, 2008, 11:18:57 PM
Quote from: punkpianist360
{thousands of lines}
tl;dr

Anyways, the concept of god is so stupid that it demands no arguments for or against.

Offline richard black

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Re: For those of you who don't believe in God
Reply #54 on: December 27, 2008, 12:05:24 AM
Frigo - it's all very well to quote physics, but that doesn't answer everything (I speak as a degree-qualified physicist). One of the 20th century's greatest physicists, Richard Feinmann, wrote towards the end of his life that 'we are slowly getting closer to understanding why, when we pick up one end of a ruler, the other end follows'. His humility wasn't false, and while the four 'fundamental' forces you name are known to exist, we haven't yet found with certainty the reasons behind them. When we do, we'll probably only find another interesting puzzle to solve....

Quote
a very good demonstration of the medieval thought, ancient and poor

Strikes me as unnecessarily patronising to the medieval thinkers!

Quote
the concept of god is so stupid that it demands no arguments for or against

I tend to agree with that one, but I'm not at all sure that said concept was quite so stupid in centuries gone by.
Instrumentalists are all wannabe singers. Discuss.

Offline a-sharp

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Re: For those of you who don't believe in God
Reply #55 on: December 27, 2008, 06:38:22 AM
[Have you ever wished you'd never clicked on a thread?]

Offline morningstar

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Re: For those of you who don't believe in God
Reply #56 on: December 27, 2008, 09:19:10 AM
[Have you ever wished you'd never clicked on a thread?]


A few times. Mostly to do with recent ones pianistimo posted in...this is on my list now though.

Offline G.W.K

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Re: For those of you who don't believe in God
Reply #57 on: December 27, 2008, 04:26:53 PM
A few times. Mostly to do with recent ones pianistimo posted in...this is on my list now though.

Yet you keep coming back for more...;)

G.W.K
When I'm right, no one remembers. When I'm wrong, no one forgets!

Offline frigo

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Re: For those of you who don't believe in God
Reply #58 on: December 27, 2008, 04:27:46 PM
Frigo - it's all very well to quote physics, but that doesn't answer everything (I speak as a degree-qualified physicist). One of the 20th century's greatest physicists, Richard Feinmann, wrote towards the end of his life that 'we are slowly getting closer to understanding why, when we pick up one end of a ruler, the other end follows'. His humility wasn't false, and while the four 'fundamental' forces you name are known to exist, we haven't yet found with certainty the reasons behind them. When we do, we'll probably only find another interesting puzzle to solve....

Strikes me as unnecessarily patronising to the medieval thinkers!

I tend to agree with that one, but I'm not at all sure that said concept was quite so stupid in centuries gone by.


I absolutely agree with that, I'm conscient that physics does not explain everything no matter how much we want it to, I just used physics to, somehow, make some opposition to the arguments used here to prove the existence of god. I think of physics as an healthy way of thinking the universe, as a way to improve our life as society not only physically but our ideas about daily life as well. Religion has shown to me that it is an "ilness" that puts us all confronting each other, science is at least ''humanly universal'', and improves our capability of an healthy thinking about everything that comes to us. This is why I choose scientific thought, not because I think it will explain everything.

Offline yuc4h

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Re: For those of you who don't believe in God
Reply #59 on: December 27, 2008, 10:20:39 PM

Offline morningstar

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Re: For those of you who don't believe in God
Reply #60 on: December 27, 2008, 11:04:11 PM
Yet you keep coming back for more...;)

G.W.K
Only because I haven't worked out how to remove topics from my notification list yet.

Offline G.W.K

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Re: For those of you who don't believe in God
Reply #61 on: December 27, 2008, 11:06:01 PM
Only because I haven't worked out how to remove topics from my notification list yet.

I'll tell you via PM or chat, one day.

G.W.K
When I'm right, no one remembers. When I'm wrong, no one forgets!

Offline aslanov

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Re: For those of you who don't believe in God
Reply #62 on: December 29, 2008, 08:03:55 AM
as i read the headers of whoever-tisimo or punk-whosits (im new to this forum so im not aware of these people), i realized that these are the ridiculous arguments for the existence of god that richard dawkins was arguing against in his God Delusion. while i read the book i thought to myself......who would use some of these ridiculous arguments........turns out punk-tisimo used them all, and then some.

good luck with your missionary work.
suggestion though: dont target atheists...people claim themselves to be atheists for a reason. most poeple who arent sure say they're agnostic, but those who think there is a greater than 50/50 chance that god doesnt exist are atheists, and those people have read enough to not be swayed by these fallacy-ridden arguments.

Offline thalbergmad

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Re: For those of you who don't believe in God
Reply #63 on: December 29, 2008, 10:27:01 AM
(im new to this forum so im not aware of these people)

Your experience of this forum will be very much the better for remaining unaware of those particular people.

Welcome.

Thal
Curator/Director
Concerto Preservation Society

Offline G.W.K

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Re: For those of you who don't believe in God
Reply #64 on: December 29, 2008, 04:01:10 PM
as i read the headers of whoever-tisimo or punk-whosits (im new to this forum so im not aware of these people), i realized that these are the ridiculous arguments for the existence of god that richard dawkins was arguing against in his God Delusion. while i read the book i thought to myself......who would use some of these ridiculous arguments........turns out punk-tisimo used them all, and then some.

good luck with your missionary work.
suggestion though: dont target atheists...people claim themselves to be atheists for a reason. most poeple who arent sure say they're agnostic, but those who think there is a greater than 50/50 chance that god doesnt exist are atheists, and those people have read enough to not be swayed by these fallacy-ridden arguments.

Congratulations! You are the first new member I have met to voice their opinions against the members who are under the idea of a God, without considering ANY other possibilities.

For future reference: punkpianist360 and pianistimo (and you only need to read other's comments to notice how...exasperated...people get with them). ;)

G.W.K
When I'm right, no one remembers. When I'm wrong, no one forgets!

Offline aslanov

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Re: For those of you who don't believe in God
Reply #65 on: December 29, 2008, 07:16:16 PM
Congratulations! You are the first new member I have met to voice their opinions against the members who are under the idea of a God, without considering ANY other possibilities.

For future reference: punkpianist360 and pianistimo (and you only need to read other's comments to notice how...exasperated...people get with them). ;)

G.W.K

well....actually i have grown up in a muslim household all my life questioning whether or not to believe in a god (allah in my case) and have always been taught by my parents to believe in him(or her) and why he exists and how they know he exists and i always found inconsistencies with almost every argument. it wasnt until recently i decided to do some reading, and being a rather scientific person (studying science) i found that in my research i could come to no other conclusion other than....why would god exist? and if he did, why would my search for knowledge and truth make him spite me. and above all else living without a god in my life is very freeing (and no, religionuts, i dont mean i feel free to commit crimes because there's no hell). on top of all those there are the usual arguments against the new and old testament, and morals, etc ,etc. i really dont wanna type it all here, and you'd probably do yourself some good by just reading the god delusion. its not a book to convert people to atheism, its a book that argues the existence of god is NOT as some people a 50/50 chance, statistically speaking it argues how the chances of gods existence is less than 50%. (but not in a mathematically way, no numbers involved or equations) just counter-arguments for all of reasons why people say religion is right and true and beneficial to society. a great read, frankly.
i myself went into reading the book thinking, this same guy who talks so snidely to people he interviews in his documentaries and makes them seem so ridiculous, i wonder how he wrote his book.

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