RE: Time to embrace Islam!
December 10, 2019 at 11:30 am
(This post was last modified: December 10, 2019 at 11:31 am by R00tKiT.)
(December 10, 2019 at 10:48 am)EgoDeath Wrote: Okay, stop. Why would I assume that?
A god with less than absolute properties is unknowable (say, less bright to be knowable) and didn't make an effort to communicate with us (since all major scriptures agree on properties like omnipotence and omniscience).
And isn't the god with these particular proprties the first one we shoud look into ?
(December 10, 2019 at 10:48 am)EgoDeath Wrote: Okay, so you're already operating on the false assumption that god exists, and have made yet another false assumption by stating that if we assume god exists, and has "desirable properties," then god would reveal to us the way to know him through scripture. But why would you assume that? Why would scripture be the only way to know god?
If there is any way to know god, it's already there (the assumed just God existed for the ancient people, way before the big bang was figured out, way before formal arguments about his existence were written) , it's clearly not something we will figure out one day, it's already there or it isn't, because the supposed God is just for our ancestors too and made a way for them to reach him.
(December 10, 2019 at 10:48 am)EgoDeath Wrote: ...Still operating on false assumptions. But okay; I'd agree that god would be better to give us a way to know of its existence than to not. If a god exists, surely it should provide some evidence of its existence to humans so we would know that it is there.
The false assumptions you're talking about are simply a logical disjunction : you either assume God exists or you don't, there is no third way
(December 10, 2019 at 10:48 am)EgoDeath Wrote: Okay, so you're already operating from a place of presumption... But who says I should believe you if you claim to communicate with god? If I say to you that I communicate with little green men from Mars, are you required to take my word for it, simply because I'm a truthful person, so far as you know? That seems like an odd way to treat "evidence" for god.
Of course you won't take anyone's word for such a claim. Messengers reportedly came up with miracles and such. The prophet of Islam is the most recent of the abrahamic religions and the original holy text is preserved, don't you think this might be a good candidate ?
A pages ago I mentioned the theory of Isnad being the way Islamic scholars ascertain what's reported about Muhammad, Isnad was acclaimed by orientalists and can be a good starting point for the serious researcher.
For example an authentic hadith narrates some miraculous event Muhammad did, the chain of narrators is made of very reliable historical figures reporting the event one after another. It's true it's far from an exact science, but once you look into it more carefully it completely dismisses the claim that Muhammad knowingly lied and faked his prophecy, and popular atheist activists today found a laughable way out of that : Muhammad was epileptic and was completely convinced that he is the prophet of God, everything he did was sincere but was out of his epilepsy.
(December 10, 2019 at 10:48 am)EgoDeath Wrote: As I've explained to many other users before, a lot of us have dealt with these same arguments over and over for years and end and simply don't feel like dismantling them anymore. I've personally argued about intelligent design more times than I cant count. You know how that conversation ended, almost every time? With some random theist quoting scripture at me and telling me I'm going to hell.
The dirty little truth about theologians and supposedly sophisticated religious thinkers is that a large number of them simply hope to drown these concepts in ambiguity in order to make religious concepts more palatable to a more scientifically literate generation. It's bullshit man. It just is
Well, that was my point in a way. Philosophical arguments are by definition inaccessible to the layman and prone to error, although I would give the theologians the benefit of the doubt as they merely try to convey their understanding of scripture - which convinced them of God - in formal terms.
(December 10, 2019 at 10:48 am)EgoDeath Wrote: No true Scotsman
I don't agree with that. If I join the fat right hand community, my right hand really should be fat.
If one claims to be a Buddhist and sharply disagrees with what almost all Buddhist scholars say about what he should believe in... I mean come on.
(December 10, 2019 at 10:48 am)EgoDeath Wrote: It sounds like one of those deals that's too good to be true.
Look man, I have a car to sell you... and it doesn't run great right now... but when it finally dies, I'm gonna' buy you a Ferrari, and then you'll be totally set. Trust me.
An existent deity should be good enough to make such deal, and given the amount of objections we humans can come up with, it's not an easy to get kind of deal.
The real challenge is to reconcile our beliefs with reality, not to give up on them