Quote:I was a theist for years and it sounds like you do what I did; try to find the reality of god through all religions.
I had the direct personal experience first, with only a background in Catholic maintained schools. You could maybe say I was an atheist then, there's a brilliant story about how I said to the RE (Religious Education) teacher in school how I didn't believe in God. In fact I was known by everyone in the school as "the guy who doesn't believe in God". Got my ass kicked too by a bunch of older kids who said I was a protestant......which doesn't make sense, but we were only 7-9 years old and it was Northern Ireland after all. (I'll give you the full story in detail if you like, it's actually pretty funny, the parish priest even got sent for and I had "special lessons", which thankfully didn't end up in buggery
)After the personal experience I then started researching. Firstly I tried a more academic approach i.e. psychology. Studied that for a while, looking for those key words, "self-actualization". Eventually left though, because, get this, the irony is epic, my psychology professor was a born-again Christian! From there I came across my next step on the journey; history this time. Wanted to study history from it's beginnings, here in the UK, we go through over 8 years of studying Nazi Germany and I was getting fed up covering the same ground and never being able to fit the events of the second world war into any sort of context. So I set out to study humanity's history from the beginning of civilization to the present, big history as it is known by.
Right I'm gonna stop here, I could be assed writing my life story and I'm sure you don't want to hear the details. Point is: direct experience first, fitting it into a cultural framework second. And since my culture is 21st Century, Digital, Global Villagism (or whatever you want to call it) my experience has become shaped into that cultural environment, therefore, Omnifaith.
Quote:You've never heard of the word fallacious? I spelled it wrong but you knew what I meant.
I actually don't know what a fallacy is, I've mentioned that before on these forums and no one has explained it to me. I never studied reasoning, arguementation or formal logic or whatever the subject is called. So words like premise or fallacy just go over my head. In fact, I was going to join the Catholic priesthood at one time, however I was expected to get a degree in philosophy so I pulled out. I just have this all-encompassing aversion of philosophy and formal reasoning, not good on an atheist forum, but I like to speak from the heart, wheither it adears to the rules of talking as set forth by some Greek asshole is of no concern to me (I'm really just a racist, hate the fecking Greeks & Romans; Western Civilization...omfg)
Anyway, this thread is dead (that rhymes!)
The only evidence that we could possibly have against God's existence, which Tiberius says can't be done, something about "you cannot prove a negative" (which is another one of those arguementation thingamajigs which go over my head), is if the universe has always existed. If it can be shown that the universe has always existed then a creator god obviously doesn't exist. So there's one way of proving that God doesn't exist.
However, that isn't the case as far as modern science can tell. The universe appears to have...began. If it began there must be a causative agent yada yada yada.
So at this moment in time it is more likely that God exists than doesn't. Although string theory can be used to say that the universe, or metaverse, has always existed, however there is no evidence for string theory either....
It all boils down to creation, cosmology. Is there a Holy Spirit, a Holy Creative Will. Or has the universe always existed, and nothing has ever been created.
We haven't even begun to unravel the mystery. Let's just hope that CERN doesn't go tits up like it did the first time.
