Punished for Babel?

[The Reality Salesman01]

'Belief' isn't faith. I believe through faith in God. Faith in the Christian tradition is acting upon knowledge you trust to be true/ My belief in God rests upon knowledge that I've accepted to be true.

That’s how you use faith. I don’t use the word because I think that even in your definition, it is incorrect. If faith is acting upon knowledge you trust to be true, you are suggesting you have a reason from which you compounded this knowledge. If your reason is that you really believe in God, then that is not verifiable by anyone but you. It is something you personally hold to be true but cannot provide evidence of it to anyone else. You are the only expert on the matter that can verify whether or not you really believe something. That would be like me asking you to prove that chocolate really is your favorite ice cream. That’s ridiculous! Why would I challenge whether or not your opinion of something is actually your opinion? That’s pointless.

However, if you extend your claim to the external world, my world, my reality, then I can measure the validity of your claim using processes that are reliable to me. Your belief in God proclaimed as knowledge, to me, makes me think you can show evidence of this knowledge. But, you cannot. You have faith, that is, you believe without reasons that are verifiable by anyone else. You say that your experience of God prevents it from being blind faith, but to everyone else that doesn’t agree, it IS blind faith. It’s still only verifiable by you. Like your favorite color. That is faith to me. You believe something, about the external world, is true, and cannot show evidence of it. To me, that is not a reliable process to determine truth, and I would not accept your claims as true for me or my experience of reality, which is the type of claim asserted when you claim to have knowledge. This confusion can be avoided if you would stop calling it knowledge that your belief is true. I don’t say that I have knowledge that Pulp Fiction is my favorite movie, it’s just my opinion, and it’s subject to change.

There has to be an assumption because ultimately God cannot be proven.

I agree God can’t be proven. God is indistinguishable from Non-existence. Why would I assume, that its real? It shares the exact characteristics of a figment of imagination, and doesn’t correlate with my experience of reality. The assumption I make, is that there are things I don’t know yet. Accepting God on the grounds that there are things I don’t understand seems absurd to me. If by God you mean, that which we don’t understand, then fine. Don’t assign characteristics to it, and then claim to have knowledge of it that cannot be verified. I don’t understand why you think that is a reasonable thing for anyone to do.

People do believe so isn't that fuel for speculation? They say it's true but you don't concur. On what grounds?

Because the process that you use to arrive at your conclusion is unreliable. The conclusion itself is unverifiable and shares the same characteristics with something that is made-up. It sounds like an unfalsifiable anecdote offered to bridge gaps of ignorance. I do not have a single good reason to entertain a single God claim, and any knowledge one claims to have of the contrary is equally unfalsifiable and indistinguishable from a false-claim. This sounds unreasonable to you?

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Exactly! Thank you Drich. I've been trying to tell the Social Services people that forever. A few years back, I caught my 4 year old son trying to catch his shadow in the hallway. I knew he wasn't going to actually catch it. I just beat him senselessly because I didn't want him to harbor creativity or an imagination. Sometimes the real issue is below the surface. I wish everybody was as level headed as you Drich. (Completely made-up story by the way )

What if you knew that if your son were to continue to try and catch his shawdow it would lead to his death or the death of everyone else around him?

No clue, pure speculation and completely irrelevant. Do you find it easier to make excuses for faulty logic when you change the details of the original line of thought being defended.

I know that is a bit extream but appearently God saw the path we were going down pre bable and it wasn't good for the whole species, so He made a course correction that put us back on track.

I believe that you believe that. I just see it as more speculation about a could-be fictitious tale. Combine that with the fact that you cannot show any reason for me to think the agent involved in such a tale is true, and the entire thing makes me wonder why I even responded!!! You are crafty Mr. Drich…Verrry CRAFTY.

Plus how do you know the story was made up?

Originally I was referring to MY story about beating my son…lol. To this Babel babble, I say there’s a good chance it was made up, based on the details that don’t correlate with reality, but I can’t prove it false any more than you can prove it true.