(February 15, 2021 at 1:08 pm)Klorophyll Wrote:(February 14, 2021 at 6:36 pm)The Grand Nudger Wrote: Would you care o give an example of an honest way to dismiss your silly religion, in your estimation?
Why are you asking a Muslim if they found an honest way to dismiss Islam ? There obviously isn't any, from my perspective. I think some arguments for the existence of a just God are compelling, I accept the existence of a God. A just god in turn has to have already sent us guidance, I look at the candidate religions for perfect guidance, Islam is the closest match. bingo.
Maybe you're referring to the falsifiability criterion. I actually don't think this criterion can applied outside of the realm of scientific theories. There is no problem with something both true and unfalsifiable. Besides, Islam relies on the quranic text plus a substantial amount of authentic hadiths. If we accept consistency and correctness of scripture as a falsifiability criterion, it's already vulnerable to being falsified if any of the hadiths and/or quranic verses is shown to be false beyond any doubt.
A word of warning here : I don't have a rebuttal for every existent religion on earth. I am just giving my evaluation of the traditional belief systems. Christian trinitarian belief just happens to be something that can be dismissed outright, because it contains a plain logical impossibiltiy: the trinitarian god. Islam endorses monotheism, to my knowledge there is no logical problem with the existence of a unique God, for which I think there are compelling arguments. In this sense, Judaism is superior and less obviously false than christianity.
I thought that Christianity implied a unique god.... just one with 3 "sides", to help with distinguishing the roles. As I see it, one is the creator side, another is the human relations side and the other is the inner human side. You may only consider the creator side to be a god, but Christians will claim that god is so much more.
If Islam is so based on texts, then it is falsified by itself, as all texts are man made, thus man biased... and, as such, all they can be is a representation of the people who wrote them. Sure they may have been pious believers and wrote things in such a way as to seem like it was the absolute truth.... to them. But all that they wrote may have zero bearing on reality.
How can we ascertain if the writings of old times are grounded on reality?... I'd go with Science as that which discovers and explains reality to us. Thus far, there is no god in this reality, leading me to conclude that, very likely, the gods that mankind has worshipped in the past have all been products of human imagination, including Islam and Christianity.
Pascal's wager (and anything similar) is just a way to get people to fake it till they make it. A well known psychological fault in human brains. Given that it requires exploiting a shortcoming in human psyche, I don't think it would ever have been god approved. It would be priesthood approved, though, which is telling...
Why would a god value belief? If a god is interested in having people accept it as part of reality, wouldn't it be an obvious part of reality?
The priesthood, however, would indeed value belief by their congregations... If your livelihood depends on something that can't be shown to be real, only blind belief, faith, or whatever you wish to call it can avail them. Charisma and gullibility are well known to exist within humanity, so I attribute this factor a far greater chance of being aligned with reality than of any god existing and wishing humans to simply believe it exists.
Wager for wager, odds are there is no god at all, just people convincing people that there is.
