Is there a God?

[Salandriagado]

Just a curious question for atheist here what do you think about people who died and came back to life saying they "saw heaven" I just want to know what your guys explanation is.

Pretty well the same as dreams: random neurological firings.

[Steppe Khanate]

I don’t know, and no one does. Scientific evidence cannot prove the existence of God, nor does it disprove it, since there are many things we simply just don’t know. I do, however, have a problem with zealots, including Atheist zealots (let people practice their religion in peace)

[New yugoslavaia]

Just a curious question for atheist here what do you think about people who died and came back to life saying they "saw heaven" I just want to know what your guys explanation is.

Pretty well the same as dreams: random neurological firings.

AKA delusions.

[Salandriagado]

No, there is no God.

I wish there was. It would give us someone to blame when things go awry. We would have someone to hold accountable in the aftermath of catastrophe.
We would also have someone to praise when things go right. We would know who to thank when good things happen to good people. Someone to guard us in the night.

That isn't the case however. In the face of war, hunger, peace, and prosperity - we have no one to blame. No one to thank. Instead, where we would perhaps hope to see the sway of a divine struggle, we only find the fingerprints of men.

All Gods and all Devils have been human. Our only true prayer is solidarity with the struggles of those who would work for an equitable world. Those, the downtrodden, are our Saints.

Sorry to ruin your philosophical moment, but the underlined bit is...simply wrong. War? Blame the warmongers. The attackers. The wrongdoers. Thank those bringing justice. Hunger? Blame those who created the food shortages. Thank the people making food currently. Peace? Blame...can’t really blame there, but you can thank those who created the peace. Same with prosperity, thank those who created it.

Nope. The problem with omnipotence is that you could fix everything, so not doing so is a choice, and thus you are responsible for all of it.

[Salandriagado]

See? If the Gospels where a myth why is there so much excessive and mundane details?

The same reason Harry Potter and any other work of fiction you care to name is full of mundane details like that: it's a well-known literary technique to help your readers connect to the story.

[Salandriagado]

Novels can often have excessive or mundane details. Does that mean they are true? Using your metric it does...

This is 50 AD, nobody would waste precious paper to write mundane details about an event they won't consider real or at least inspirational.

The Iliad is full of similarly mundane details about the Greek gods. That doesn't mean it isn't a work of fiction.

[La Xinga]

See? If the Gospels where a myth why is there so much excessive and mundane details?

The same reason Harry Potter and any other work of fiction you care to name is full of mundane details like that: it's a well-known literary technique to help your readers connect to the story.

May I ask you what you think about the Bible? When, Where, Why, and Who?

[Nuroblav]

May I ask you what you think about the Bible? When, Where, Why, and Who?

Yes

[Salandriagado]

Works of fiction existed back then too, so that isn't a satisfactory rebuke at all since what you are saying just isn't true. So, again, using your metric, those works of fiction are all true.

What about the bones of Saint Peter in the Vatican carbon dated to be from the Apostolic era?

Old bones are not surprising.

Not to mention, the characters in the crucifixion narrative are independently validated by Archeology?

For example the New York Times published about the 2000 Year Old Ring of Pontius Pilate.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/30/worl ... est%20Bank.

Using the names of real people in your fiction doesn't mean it isn't fiction. The Dark Tower isn't real just because Stephen King turns up in it.

[La Xinga]

May I ask you what you think about the Bible? When, Where, Why, and Who?

Yes

yes wat

[Salandriagado]

Not what you were arguing. Don't change the argument. To reiterate, you said: "If the Gospels where a myth why is there so much excessive and mundane details?"

Since you are now trying to decoy the subject away from that point after I blew it out of the water, I'm taking it as a nonverbal retraction of what you said.

The topic is about God not our bickering, notice how in my first post I said that "Why would the Apostles die for a lie?"

People die for lies - ones they genuinely believe in or just ones that are politically convenient - all the damned time.

And the bones of Saint Peter in the Vatican prove that they died there.

No, they prove that at least one person died 2,000 years ago. This is not surprising.

[Salandriagado]

So yes, you do concede that we cannot use the presence of excessive or mundane details as a reliable indicator of truthfulness because of the presence of a significant number of works of fiction that include the same thing. Good. We got there eventually.

Not really sometimes excessive or mundane details are part of "circumstantial evidence". I'm no expert

That is clear.

but works of fiction have certain styles which is drastically different from works of historical accounts.

This is mostly a modern thing. 16th century historical accounts read pretty well the same as 16th century fiction.

There's a book written about it called "Cold Case Christianity" wherein a forensic detective using criteria he uses for solving cold case crime, arrived upon the veracity of the Gospels via a literary analysis.

It is literally impossible to arrive at facts about the real world by literary analysis.

[Geneviev]

It can seem that way. But he does care for people anyway.


He does help people get through it, which is reducing the suffering. He just doesn't end it.

Any way you spin he, he sounds like an asshole. Any being who allows unnecessary suffering to continue when it is well within their power to stop it is not worth even a modicum of respect, much less worship.

It does sound like that. But God should be worshipped because he cares for people, even when it doesn't seem that way.

He already does it for people. It's fair to assume that he cares about caterpillars just as much.

Apparently not, since he created a world with parasitic wasps. And could fix that for them at any time. But doesn't.

Romans 8:28 can apply to caterpillars too. I'm not sure how, but God can use suffering.

"Uhm ... Adam? Eve? You realize I can see through those fig leaves, right?" Maybe he was just pissed because they were tearing leaves off the Ficus.

Genesis 3:8-9

Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden. But the Lord God called to the man, 'Where are you?'

They seemed to succeed in hiding. Where can I find one of these God-impervious trees that obscures his vision?

Or he let them believe that they were succeeding. Or he wanted to give them a chance to come out.

[Salandriagado]

The same reason Harry Potter and any other work of fiction you care to name is full of mundane details like that: it's a well-known literary technique to help your readers connect to the story.

May I ask you what you think about the Bible? When, Where, Why, and Who?

Written by a whole bunch of people, for a whole bunch of reasons, mostly political, spread out over millennia and thousands of miles.

[La Xinga]

May I ask you what you think about the Bible? When, Where, Why, and Who?

Written by a whole bunch of people, for a whole bunch of reasons, mostly political, spread out over millennia and thousands of miles.

May I ask how you think people just accepted it?

[Nuroblav]

Yes

yes wat

'Yes' as in it's hard to pinpoint to any particular answer to each question. There's a lot in there - different ideas, different stories, different genres.

[Salandriagado]

Written by a whole bunch of people, for a whole bunch of reasons, mostly political, spread out over millennia and thousands of miles.

May I ask how you think people just accepted it?

Mostly? They didn't until they were forced to, or until it was politically useful for them to use it to control others.

[Battinson]

I think I like the idea that we were created with reason in mind, that there is something more than this world we live in, and a life after death. So I guess this is less I think so and more I hope so

[La Xinga]

May I ask how you think people just accepted it?

Mostly? They didn't until they were forced to, or until it was politically useful for them to use it to control others.

1. Forced to?
2. The peasantry ain't controlling anyone.

[Estanglia]

Mostly? They didn't until they were forced to, or until it was politically useful for them to use it to control others.

1. Forced to?
2. The peasantry ain't controlling anyone.

For 2., the powerful certainly can.

Say, everyone in your country believes in religion X. In religion X, going against the word of God is a one-way trip to hell.

If you're a royal, you can claim that God chose you to lead your country. Opposing you would therefore be opposing God, and grounds for eternal damnation if you die.

There, religion is politically useful for you to use it to control others. If others believe that religion, and believe that you're speaking the truth when you claim to be chosen by God, you've got total control.

[Salandriagado]

Mostly? They didn't until they were forced to, or until it was politically useful for them to use it to control others.

1. Forced to?
2. The peasantry ain't controlling anyone.

The peasantry were mostly forced by their rulers.

[La Xinga]

1. Forced to?
2. The peasantry ain't controlling anyone.

For 2., the powerful certainly can.

Say, everyone in your country believes in religion X. In religion X, going against the word of God is a one-way trip to hell.

If you're a royal, you can claim that God chose you to lead your country. Opposing you would therefore be opposing God, and grounds for eternal damnation if you die.

There, religion is politically useful for you to use it to control others. If others believe that religion, and believe that you're speaking the truth when you claim to be chosen by God, you've got total control.

That's still not forcing people to believe in it.

[La Xinga]

1. Forced to?
2. The peasantry ain't controlling anyone.

The peasantry were mostly forced by their rulers.

We have no records of that. If something like that happened we probably would.

[Estanglia]

For 2., the powerful certainly can.

Say, everyone in your country believes in religion X. In religion X, going against the word of God is a one-way trip to hell.

If you're a royal, you can claim that God chose you to lead your country. Opposing you would therefore be opposing God, and grounds for eternal damnation if you die.

There, religion is politically useful for you to use it to control others. If others believe that religion, and believe that you're speaking the truth when you claim to be chosen by God, you've got total control.

That's still not forcing people to believe in it.

Sure, but it is using it to control people, which was Sal's point 2 of why people would follow it.

[La Xinga]

That's still not forcing people to believe in it.

Sure, but it is using it to control people, which was Sal's point 2 of why people would follow it.

Then how come people ended up believing in it if they had no reason to?