RE: How to select which supernatural to believe?
July 31, 2022 at 3:33 am
(This post was last modified: July 31, 2022 at 3:34 am by Fake Messiah.)
(July 30, 2022 at 10:26 pm)WinterHold Wrote:(July 17, 2022 at 4:37 pm)Fake Messiah Wrote: To believe in ANYTHING supernatural one may as well believe in EVERYTHING supernatural; like witches, goblins demons, gods, talking trees, vampires and dragons to name a few. Why be selective? When no evidence exists for any of them, why dismiss any and not all?
It depends on the source of the info.
If the source is full of nonsense, you dismiss it and vise-versa if the source is full of spot-on stuff.
For example: see how many verses in the Christian bible point to nonsense.
See how many Islamic Hadiths point to nonsense.
Compare it with the Quran which is spot on in every verse; you'll get your answer.
Many people depend heavily on a book to justify their belief in a particular god or gods. Where would Judaism be without the written Torah or Christianity without the Bible? The Bhagavad Gita is precious to Hindus. It is unlikely that Islam could have been so successful without the Koran. The Book of Mormon was the catalyst of a new religion in North America in the nineteenth century.
But there is not one book that contains any good evidence for the existence of a god.
No holy book contains anything so special that it cannot be explained as the work of mere mortals. Believers have tried very hard for centuries but no one has ever found anything in any book that is clear evidence of a god.
Furthermore, the impact of holy books seems to have a limited effect on people. No single collection of sacred words has ever managed to win over most people. This is odd. If one of these books really is a direct message from a god, then why has it failed so miserably to convince so many people? The Bible and Koran, for example, are by far the two most successful holy books ever, but neither one of them is impressive enough to silence the other or to convince even half of the world's people that it is the truth.
They make important claims that are contradictory and cannot be reconciled. For example, one says Jesus is a god; the other says Jesus is not a god. This means that, at the very least, more than a billion believers have been hoodwinked by a book that is not a message from a real god.
The fact that one of these books must necessarily be false, yet still manages to convince so many people that it is true, shows how people can be entranced by a book that is just a book. And if that can be the case for one book, then it could be the case for all of them. So it seems that all holy books, no matter how old or popular, are the work of people and not gods.
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"
