Theism is literally childish

[Catholic_Lady]

Well, I guess if I believed in the kind of God the atheists are describing then I suppose that might count as delusional. Personally, I don't believe in that God nor do I know any Christians that do.

A lot of these arguments are stawmen of Christianity/Christian people (like the entire OP for example). Sometimes it's best not to bother responding.

[Brian37]

Well, I guess if I believed in the kind of God the atheists are describing then I suppose that might count as delusional. Personally, I don't believe in that God nor do I know any Christians that do.

A lot of these arguments are stawmen of Christianity/Christian people (like the entire OP for example). Sometimes it's best not to bother responding.

Sorry CL, but both you and NEO believe in the super natural. 

What we object to is the naked assertion ultimately and we could care less if you call this the God of the bible, or Allah or Yahweh, or Vishnu or Apollo or Isis or Yahweh or Thor. 

I would agree that it IS better to have your facts in order before you present an argument though.

Neither of you take any time to consider why you reject all other claims besides the one you latched yourselves onto. Much like how easy it is for a used car salesman to con you into buying a rust bucket covered in bondo and a new paint job.

Yes it would be great if the world's religions, not just yours, but all, would refrain from making claims of "fact", but you wont just like Muslims and Jews and Hindus and Buddhists.

It cant be that humans mostly buy what their parents sell them at birth. It cant be humans don't like not having an answer so they gap fill.  It cant be that humans hate the prospect of the reality of being finite. It cant be that. It has to be that in a 13.8 billion year old universe, knowing humans are only 200,000 years or so, that "all that" was put here for one species in a vast ocean of hostility and nothingness.

Fine, you know I don't hate you, but sorry, I cannot take your claims anymore seriously than if you claimed Yoda was real and "the Force" was too.

All I see are my fellow humans clawing at a utopia that does not exist, and never existed, when they could be using their time to help the world extend it's finite ride.

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[Cod]

Well, I guess if I believed in the kind of God the atheists are describing then I suppose that might count as delusional. Personally, I don't believe in that God nor do I know any Christians that do.

A lot of these arguments are stawmen of Christianity/Christian people (like the entire OP for example). Sometimes it's best not to bother responding.

If I had a belief I would feel compelled to respond, I would fight my corner knowing that what I was saying was correct. I would definitely not have to use the term strawman to deflect from my views, my argument would be so watertight that nobody could come back with an easy response.

The problem you have is that you know as well as we do that your argument is weak and doesn't hold water. The God that you believe in differs greatly from the God that someone else in the same religion believes in, you are all making it too easy for us atheists to poo poo your ideas.

I suggest religions should get together and come to some kind of arrangement, and not fight against each other, that way you may be able to preserve the way of life you have come to love.

[emjay]

 what would you call, 

I call it a delusion...not because I'm interested in diagnosing someone or isolating abberrent patterns of thought or behavior...but because it's delusional.

That's a relief... at least I don't have to change my terminology

Only offered the exposition because I found it amusing that someone was retreating into the clinical disgnosis...and that does more to harm their objection than it does to support it.  That and to help you understand that the status of gods as proven or unproven is irrelevant.  God beliefs could be delusional even if there were a god.  Two people claim that god speaks to them in mutually excluive ways..they can;t both be right, at least one of them is delusional...as expressed in the example of christians and hindus...however...the third possibility, that they're both delusional...infinitely more likely.

Understood but my point was more about how behaviour indicates the basis of a belief, as either driven by emotional need (irrational - confirmation bias, brick walling, special pleading etc) or not. With the former... at its most extreme... being almost impossible to talk to and actually be heard, and therefore pointless to try, and at lesser extremes, that nature of the belief reducing its credibility, in my eyes anyway; especially when that is all that is offered to find God; ie 'keep knocking and you'll find him eventually' or in other words 'put yourself into the same emotionally biased state I am and then you'll find God'... that is not convincing to me in the slightest; I will not willfully walk into a self-fulfilling prophesy and come out of it thinking I've found God. Just as I will not entertain horoscopes, tea leaves or tarot cards that rely on the power of bias to do their thing.

[Whateverist]

I do think though that Christian indoctrination is specifically infantilising. God is almost always portrayed as a father figure. Sometimes as a shepherd of a flock but that's hardly any better. The Lord's prayer is not 'Our God/Creator/Supreme Being/Ultimate Power who art in Heaven ...'

Christian indoctrination pushes its god character as an ersatz father, with Jesus being the older brother that leads by example. Fellowship then becomes an extended family, or in severe cases of cult conditioning, the new family. I'm seeing questions from  my brother on his facebook feed for example to his cult leader about how to push the idea of their fellow adherents as their new family. You can see this with worshippers often referring to each other as brother and sister.

A god cannot literally be a father though without also being human and breeding (which would at least explain why God cannot be referred to as Goddess, an idea that christians seem to loathe). Being a creator is not enough to be referred to as a Father. He is referred to as that because of how he is portrayed. Just type "god is your father" into google to see the hits that come back.

There are many analogies made during indoctrination about how God is your father. The famous one being about two footprints in the sand and when there is only one set of footprints during troubled times then it's when God carries you. How can that not put anyone in mind of being on a long walk as a young child and being picked up by your dad because you became tired?

This does then explain why family values are so important to abrahamic faiths, particularly with christianity.  By pushing these values christians are also promoting the importance of accepting a position of personal subservience to an authority figure who will take responsibility for them.

But the whole idea behind having children is that you will raise them to eventually live independently in the real world. Christian indoctrination never talks of their adherents eventually becoming independent, except perhaps Mormonism where everyone gets their own planet in the end, a claim which has since been retracted by the Mormon church.

Christian indoctrination is regressive and hence infantilising, conditioning followers to become more dependent over time. This means that it then becomes harder to leave as your whole life becomes built up around your church. In the same way that narcotic drugs manipulate receptors in the brain to produce highs on demand, christian worship manipulates biological instincts that we have evolved to function as pack animals to produce a sense of subservience to a non-existent family.

To the degree that believers conceptualize themselves as an infant in God's care or a lost lamb happy to follow their shepherd Jesus, I agree that it is infantilizing.  However I don't find that all Christians (true or otherwise) comport themselves as if they were infants or lambs.  It is after all a metaphor and there are times when it can be not just comforting but functionally advantageous to take a first step even when one cannot see clearly what each successive step must be to reach a goal.  

There are xtians who seem to use belief to justify abdicating responsibility for their choices.  But not all xtians do so.

[Catholic_Lady]

A lot of these arguments are stawmen of Christianity/Christian people (like the entire OP for example). Sometimes it's best not to bother responding.

If I had a belief I would feel compelled to respond, I would fight my corner knowing that what I was saying was correct. I would definitely not have to use the term strawman to deflect from my views, my argument would be so watertight that nobody could come back with an easy response.

The problem you have is that you know as well as we do that your argument is weak and doesn't hold water. The God that you believe in differs greatly from the God that someone else in the same religion believes in, you are all making it too easy for us atheists to poo poo your ideas.

I suggest religions should get together and come to some kind of arrangement, and not fight against each other, that way you may be able to preserve the way of life you have come to love.

What? It has nothing to do with an argument for God's existence. Matilda is making assertions about all theists that simply aren't true. And people often say things about Christian beliefs that aren't true, meaning most Christian people don't believe what they are saying we believe in. It gets triring constantly having to respond and say "no, you have that wrong, I'm not like that, I've never met a Christian like that, no, that's not what I believe, no, that's not what Christianity is about..." it gets tiring, and it seems most times, people don't want to hear it. They want to keep thinking/assuming the worst of us. So yeah, I don't see the point in responding to that most of the time.

[John V]

The lack of presents could easily be explained away.

No, they couldn't. It's the one thing he does.

I didn't know that and would be interested to see where it says that.

Romans 8 & 9, Galatians 4, Ephesians 1.

It is a typical theist trick to try and limit how the other person can reply. In this case by assuming that life has to spontaneously arise and only from inanimate matter.

How else does it arise from an atheist viewpoint??

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Chemicals react, that's one thing they do, they also bond and form more complex structures (molecules etc), so it's not that much of a leap to think that given those two things, with enough time and the right conditions, self-supporting structures could be formed... in other words, little steps, which eventually amount to something much bigger. I'm no expert on all that but that's enough for me; it's perfectly plausible to me based on how systems evolve in other respects. It's certainly more plausible to me than the earth only being six thousand years old despite all the geological evidence that suggest that can't be the case. But if I'm wrong, so what? ...if it's proven to be impossible, then I'll just wait for the next theory to be put forward, which will again likely be more plausible than a six thousand year old earth and a magical being creating life, despite all the evidence of evolution. And more to the point, the truth, or not, of that, has no bearing on the existence of God or which specific God out of the many that are posited, it would be if there was; so there's no way I could use that theory being falsified to promote a belief in God, even if I wanted to, because one does not speak to the other.

Special pleading. You find inanimate matter coming to life plausible, so that's not delusion. You find a creator god less plausible, so that's delusion.

[emjay]

Chemicals react, that's one thing they do, they also bond and form more complex structures (molecules etc), so it's not that much of a leap to think that given those two things, with enough time and the right conditions, self-supporting structures could be formed... in other words, little steps, which eventually amount to something much bigger. I'm no expert on all that but that's enough for me; it's perfectly plausible to me based on how systems evolve in other respects. It's certainly more plausible to me than the earth only being six thousand years old despite all the geological evidence that suggest that can't be the case. But if I'm wrong, so what? ...if it's proven to be impossible, then I'll just wait for the next theory to be put forward, which will again likely be more plausible than a six thousand year old earth and a magical being creating life, despite all the evidence of evolution. And more to the point, the truth, or not, of that, has no bearing on the existence of God or which specific God out of the many that are posited, it would be if there was; so there's no way I could use that theory being falsified to promote a belief in God, even if I wanted to, because one does not speak to the other.

Special pleading. You find inanimate matter coming to life plausible, so that's not delusion. You find a creator god less plausible, so that's delusion.

If you say so. Ultimately it's entirely your prerogative if you want to consider me deluded for looking to the natural world first, rather than magic, for explanations. Or likewise for looking at psychology first, rather than "spirituality". But if so, you'll have to take it up with science. Occam's Razor. But whether you see me as deluded or not doesn't make any difference to what I've said; it makes me no more likely to see arguments steeped in confirmation bias as credible, and no more likely to accept arguments that rely on that in order to find God. So regardless of how credible you find me, it makes the likes of MK, little rik, and drich no more credible to me.

[I_am_not_mafia]

What? It has nothing to do with an argument for God's existence. Matilda is making assertions about all theists that simply aren't true.

No, I am making assertions about the character of theistic indoctrination. There is a limit in how infantilising it can be because people still have to function as adults in the real world. It's like the idea that children pick up languages very quickly and that we should all learn a second language as if we're a child. This doesn't work in practise because children have a much more limited vocabularly and they aren't expected to function as adults. But I am saying that there are aspects to the process of maturing over the course of your life, particularly as a child, that religious indoctrination tries to reverse or to at least inhibit. This is not the same as saying that all theists are immature. No person is a two dimensional character, we are all made up of many different facets and religious indoctrination tries to infantilise a select few of those facets.

Perhaps if you understood that you would see how I am not stawmanning but trying to describe the nature of a process.

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Special pleading. You find inanimate matter coming to life plausible, so that's not delusion. You find a creator god less plausible, so that's delusion.

Strawman argument and equivocation. No one said that it was inanimate matter coming to life. And equivocation as to what you ven mean by inanimate matter. Is a car made up of inanimate matter? I am not going to derail my own thead by explaining what we know to you though, but feel free to start a new thread about abiogenesis. But what I will say is that we are making inferences from a body of scientific knowledge developed from reproducible observations and falsfisable hypotheses that can be tested.

The more we learn about science though the less plausible the idea of a god becomes. But that does not mean by itself that it is delusional. The fact that all interactions and personal relationship with your god is indistinguishable from being an imaginary friend makes it delusional. You have zero evidence that what you are imagining is in any way real yet believe it anyway because you want it to be true. Part of maturing is understanding that you don't always get what you want no matter how much you want it. This is how religious indoctrination works. It gives you permission to believe in the fantasy it is peddling when it is not warranted. And if you want something else, then it tells you to pray for it.

[Angrboda]

But that's because children get told the truth by adults when they are still impressionable. Imagine a world wide virus wiped out everyone over 8 years old, the Santa Claus myth would then

... die out on the next Dec. 25th.

Jesus Christ said that he would return within a generation. And yet you still believe some 2,000 years later. By your logic, Christianity should have died out a long time ago.