(February 28, 2013 at 12:31 pm)ronedee Wrote:(February 27, 2013 at 5:56 pm)Question Mark Wrote: We know gravity is there because we can test gravity. I can pick something up, and every single time I drop it, it'll fall. I do not take it on faith that each and every day gravity will be there, I have reasonable expectations based on past occurrences that gravity will be present. The same with the sun rising every morning. I take nothing on faith, because faith is not a pathway to truth. Faith is a means by which one can believe in something without evidence.
And you just admitted that. "God needs to prove nothing to us! He gave us LIFE!", yet no evidence is forthcoming, because your god is exempt from needing it. That's disgustingly ingenuous, and a clever way to deceive people.
For instance, some years back when I had started college, there was a fellow on my campus who had a box, which he said contained a goldfish that could swim in air as well as water, and which was invisible and intangible, so no one could see or touch it. He said that god had given him the fish, and had created the box to contain it. It had the number 777 carved on the front beneath a silver lock to keep the fish inside.
Do you believe Justin had an invisible, intangible, air-swimming goldfish that god gave him?
I also know someone who picks his nose and wipes it on the wall in a cross shaped design thinking he's blessing the building...maybe he is and your friend has fish swiming in his head! Who gives a ratz posteer?
Look, we can go round and round here about what our "opinions" of God are. But no one can explain LIFE!
Think about this FACT: There was a beginning. There will be an end.
There is NOTHING that explains what happened before, and what will happen after.
So, what do we do? You have your thing...and I have mine! Hopefully we will meet and be friends, joke and laugh about this whole mess on the otherside!
The point of the fish example was to see if you apply faith to something connected with your god, instead of only for your god. I find it remarkable that many theistically minded people take faith in god extremely seriously, but then scoff at applying it upon anything else. It's a form of special pleading.
Having no explanation for an event does not justify making something up. I'm perfectly happy saying "I don't know" in answer to a question when that is the honest truth of the matter.
Incidentally, we have some theories on explaining life. Whether you or anyone else accepts them is when we drift into the realm of opinions, and when debate can no longer be a possibility.
I would delight in being friends with you here and now, in this life we both know that we have. I would rather that than wait for an afterlife I'm not sure I'll ever have, and have no evidence for.
If you believe it, question it. If you question it, get an answer. If you have an answer, does that answer satisfy reality? Does it satisfy you? Probably not. For no one else will agree with you, not really.
