RE: In your opinion what causes christians to believe in Jesus
May 12, 2025 at 11:10 am
(This post was last modified: May 12, 2025 at 11:11 am by Fake Messiah.)
(May 12, 2025 at 10:44 am)John 6IX Breezy Wrote:(May 12, 2025 at 12:34 am)Thumpalumpacus Wrote: Not only is your sample size far to small, the fact that you're happy to publicly generalize from such a particular speaks volumes about your own thought process. Stick to philosophy, because you don't know shit about statistics or demographics or analysis.
It was certainly clear to me that Bel wasn't making any formal statistical inference—he is allowed to suspect. And no statistician would treat Bel's suspicion as invalid; they would simply say that the inference doesn't carry that much information or that it has low reliability. But that's both obvious and implied in the conversation, unless, of course, you're an obtuse and uncharitable reader.
But since you know about statistics and analysis, surely you can at tell us what the appropriate sample size should have been? (Tip: You can't answer that unless you know how much information we wish to obtain, among other things, which you don't.)
You miss the point that saying how some Christians have the right image of god while others have wrong does not help you, but it rather shows what a frivolous thing god is that it can't be even defined.
If we start with the Bible, we can see that it gives, what you would call, a simplistic image of god - as a man with human anatomy who walks around, has human feelings and lives in the sky.
Now, any other ideas of a more complex god is just a simplistic image of god plus ad hoc rescues.
"If God lives in the sky, why can't I see him?"
"Because he is very high up."
"But rockets flew very high and didn't see him."
"That's because he is invisible."
"But if his heavenly kingdom is so big that millions of dead people and angels live in it, then we would encounter it, like an airplane would flew into it and crashed."
"That's because his kingdom is in another dimension."
And so on. And this is how you get your "sophisticated" god.
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"