The Lie of the True Christian™

[FiniteImmortal]

A perception of something that isn't there IN REALITY, but exists only in our minds.

Oh...so we exist in the Matrix? Things don't actually exist?

Did you give up on the comfort thing?

and becuase it suggests there is something more than meets the eye that transcends pure MATERIAL. My happy ass will gladly move along when you can tell me how beauty can exist in the effect, without existing in a first-cause.

I didn't say beauty was A Thing. I said beauty was a perception.

God exists as a perception to me, as I see beauty in the universe; it incites wonder and a deeper urning to explore it. The beauty I see in my infant daughter transcends the shallow explaination of evolved instinct, and points in the direction of a transcendent being of infinite beauty in the first-cause, from which beauty in the effect is perceived.
If that is a conversational abomination to you, grow some thicker skin, or get on a forum that will only reinforce the ideas what you want to hear.

Aw, I wasn't 'hurt' by it, merely disgusted. [pats head] Yes, I see - you love your daughter, therefore god..because no one ever loved their spawn before.

I never said you need to acknowledge God in order to love. I don't need to acknowledge gravity to fall. If I acknowledge gravity and proceed to study it though, I'm a better suitor for employment at NASA then a child who doesn't understand why, though accepts the fact than when you drop a baseball it goes down.

What I'm saying is you have no epistemological basis for love, other than you merely do it. I don't need to look directly at the sun to be able to acknowledge that by it, I am able to look at anything at all.