Is god real? Like lint? No. Is god real like Apollo? Sure. — Bitter Crank
Should believers in possession of a "hollow faith" be dismissed as fools? — Bitter Crank
Faith is real. But in the matter of the gods and their natures, they need not be taken as reliable sources of information about gods. — Bitter Crank
They will claim to know ("God wants us to...") but they can't. No one can know about the gods, so we need not argue about it. — Bitter Crank
You might find this intellectually lazy and slovenly too. so be it. I try to take religion and the gods as a serious cultural achievement of our species rather than a ridiculous hoax. i don't think god revealed himself to us, and then many believed. Man made god and then many believed. I used to believe in god, quite ardently. Getting from believer to dis-believer required a lot of effort--lots of long-standing beliefs had to be pitched overboard. — Bitter Crank
I believe you are on a fool's errand here. — mcdoodle
In short, I think God or gods are a stand-in for a different underlying problem, and an atheist yelling emotively at religious people isn't going to help what matters to me. — mcdoodle
I dislike that characterization. I don't believe I am "yelling emotively" in the argument I presented. I think I am emotively appealing to people's senses of fairness and empathy. Their "better angels", if you will. If you want to be fatalistic, and think that no believer ever changes their minds (that's what I'm hearing here), that's a sort of sad way to go, but that's up to you. I don't understand why you would want to try to impose that bleak view on anyone else though. — Reformed Nihilist
That was what the serious part of my remarks were meant to say. I fear the atheist Stalinist and the dictatorial Pope, and I tend to feel close to the meditative religious person and the atheist with an aesthetic or spiritual sense. — mcdoodle
Mental operations are so inextricable tied into emotion that it seems unlikely that atheists and theists would not be motivated in their movements towards and away from. At least, that is the way I see minds at work. — Bitter Crank
It's like you believe that either there is no God, or that any God who does exist will punish people for not believing. Aren't there other possibilities? I believe it's possible there could exist a deist God who either doesn't want us to believe, or doesn't care if we believe.To put it bluntly, what kind of an asshole god would punish someone for believing and expressing what the brain they were "given" concludes? If such a god did exist, would it be moral to worship it? I don't think it would be.
Not at all. The Calvinist view is that good works play no role whatsoever in salvation. Luther also argued vehemently that only faith mattered - his doctrine of 'sola fides'. That is particularly ironic given that Lutheranism these days is one of the most open, tolerant and good-works-focused of the Christian denominations. In contrast to Martin Luther and John Calvin, Roman Catholicism officially places a strong emphasis on good works - one of the nicest things about an otherwise often harmful religion. But even RC stops short of saying that only good works matter.Good works is normally the criterion for any reward, whether you have faith or not. — YIOSTHEOY
Atheism assumes there is no God. This is a negative and as such cannot be proven. To prove a negative you would need to search every square inch of the entire Universe in order to be able to report there is no God or that God is dead. — YIOSTHEOY
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