A reason to believe?

[tavarish]

You can see the sun, it's demonstrably real. However, the fact that you believe it to survive another rotation of the Earth has no merit on whether it will actually do so.

No, it's not. The only thing proving it is real, to me subjectively, is that I can experience it's warmth, I can see the light it gives, and I can benefit from it's existance.

Didn't I JUST say it is demonstrable? Meaning you can demonstrate its existence?

I'm fairly confident through faith in my experience with the sun that it will not, in fact, explode or go out overnight. My belief has no bearing on whether or not it does or does not, that's correct, but I don't have to sit around worrying like a paranoid schizo because, hey, I believe in the sun and it's nature pretty confidently.

1. You proved my point that belief does not equal truth.
2. The sun doesn't warrant belief, your experiences are subjective evidence to lead you to your conclusion. You didn't just wake up one day with this belief. It came over time and through experience.

I believe without evidence, but through experience, that when I come home I will not find it burned down to the ground when I get there.

I hold everything as an active belief, so you're comment is moot. In other words, my beliefs are all actively held and I always hold them somewhere within me, whether or not I'm focusing on them at one time or another.

You misunderstand completely. Your trust lies with maintaining the status quo, specifically if the house stays the way it is. It is taken as granted that the house will remain in its current state and given the highly unlikely event that it would burn down, you treat it as a non-issue. Simply put, you do NOT believe your house will burn down when you're not home. This is not an active belief or positive assertion.

I'll reiterate: If you hold this as an active belief, I wonder what else you hold actively. Do you actively believe that cows won't fall from the sky and kill you? Do you believe that you won't fall in a sea of live grenades? Same concept.

Further, I don't need evidence to say that my house is not going to be burned to the ground when I get home, I'm just confident it wont be. Why would I need evidence for that?

Because you're making a positive assertion. Claims need evidence.

Especially if I'm certain of other factors, like having unplugged or turned off all my electronics before leaving, having turned my stove off, likewise, or not having left anything flammable within the home. I can be certain, to a point, that my house will not be burned down.

THIS IS EVIDENCE. Your factors are your experience, which is evidence.

Except that holding the belief motivates certain logical actions on my part. In believing that the relationship will work, I will take courses of action and hold myself in a very confident manner throughout the relationship. When the relationship is threatened, I put up a fight for it, rather than laying down and taking abuse. When problems arise, I will try to solve them rather than leave them lying and growing. My actions and feelings are dictated by this belief.

Uh huh. And they have no merit, as a relationship is not dependent on you alone, unless you're apologizing to your hand or something. Just because you believe in something with all your being doesn't mean it is true or that it necessarily works the way you want it to.

If I'm constantly worrying, instead, that the person I love will leave me, the chances increase that that person will pick up on those feelings and actually leave. Why? Because they will sense my lack of confidence, and really, who wants to be in a relationship where one party feels that the whole thing is extremely fragile? Not many, because love is not a fragile thing.

All of this is completely irrelevant to the conversation, but thanks for the insight, Dr. Phil. I'll make a note of it next time I want to discuss the emotions of a 16 year old. Love isn't fragile. Deep.

What? No. I think anyone would agree that holding hope throughout your life is better than losing hope entirely when things get rough.

You didn't say a damn thing about being better. You said it was "no more false hope than having hope through good times". What does your belief in this have anything with it being demonstrably true?

Don't use your response towards me to take petty pot-shots at fr0do. Your qualm, at present, is with me and not him.

LOL @ being defensive. That's so cute.

Because I've had experiences with God that suggest to me he is above and beyond the realm of scientific evidence. Furthermore, he is, to an extent, within the realm of scientific evidence. I.e.- all of your scientific evidence is just as much a part of God as is me or you, or my subjective experience evidence.

So he is outside and inside the realm of scientific evidence. Present any evidence for any of the arguments you posted here. Please.

This is what I'm saying, dude. You ask for objective proof of everything, but some things can only be trusted on the subjective level, and do not super-impose onto the objective unless one takes the time to think. I should have been clearer in my attempt to combine the idea of experience and evidence.

I asked for evidence, and paul asked for any evidence AT ALL.

I'll tell you how evidence works. Subjective evidence is fine, but you have to know how to weed out the fact from fiction. I could have a divine revelation experience right now, but it wouldn't mean shit if I didn't have some sort of way to interpret if it was real or not. Moreover, for me to relay this information with no evidence is much harder, as the other person lacks the subjective experience and is going by my word alone.

This is not good enough for me or most on this forum. You can't say "God is subjective", then complain that no one's on board with you. If he's in everything, we should damn well be able to see him in every possible sense of the word.

If you touched it once, you don't have to touch it again to know it's going to burn you. But on some subconscious level, yes, you do in fact say to yourself "From experience, I know that tove will burn me if I touch it."

That's called making a decision based on evidence. Learn to do it more often.

Yes...Yes! Exactly!

Yay for contradictions!