(May 25, 2017 at 12:17 pm)alpha male Wrote:(May 25, 2017 at 3:50 am)Fake Messiah Wrote: I'm not saying all feelings are false, but feelings are not enough to declare that a god is real because then why not aliens, unicorns, fairies?
Feelings can be evidence for the person himself, but I agree with you that others don't have to accept them.
But I apply that consistently.
You're not. Like I said if you watch "Alien" and you get scared and start to feel that xenomorph is somewhere in the house are we to think that you apply your rule that it must exist because you feel it?
The truth is you rationalize it, because if you didn't you'd be locked up in a mental institution because you would not know what reality is or isn't. Just as people you mentioned earlier that feel they are different sex then their genitals - they don't go by feeling alone. They also rationalize it for some time and talk to doctors.
Now, the difference with religion is that it's simply bad rationalization. For starters your application is to what god exactly? Jesus? Would you be impressed if a pagan were to cite feelings in support of his belief in the gods of Mount Olympus? I don't think so because faith and feelings cannot adjudicate because it is not a reliable arbiter of reality. It cannot help one to differentiate truth from falsity.
So let me guess important people in a your life (probably parents) were the ones who introduced the god? Now you have strong emotional ties to both the magical being and the real live people who taught and encouraged the belief. And I get it: why should you trust some anonymous guy on the internet then your own parents? It seems perfectly logical. Aren't you supposed to be loyal to them?
But forget about me and think it this way: are loyalties becoming powerful obstacle for you to think freely and question the existence of a god? And also since they were talking to you about religion how thorough were they about the subject? Did they tell you that there are many thousands of gods who people have claimed to be real throughout history? Did they mention that there are thousands of religions active today and most of them make contradictory claims so many of them must be wrong? And what about the part that no religion has any strong evidence to back up its claims?
I mean you were maybe four-year-old when they told you about Jesus and what were you supposed to do, challenge the parent to a philosophical debate? And it's no surprise that virtually every believer believes in the same god that her or his parents believe in.
It's time for you to think about religion for yourself. That doesn't mean that you will betray your parents and it also doesn't mean that they intend to trick you into believing things that are not true. They were likely indoctrinated in the same way by their own parents. This chain of belief transfer from parent to child stretches back a long way but one should not have to feel bad or disloyal for breaking the chain.
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
