Open to explore possibility

[R00tKiT]

Why not?  In the absence of empirical evidence, a belief essentially is based on feelings.

I disagree. We can have good reasons to believe in something, which can extend beyond mere feelings or emotions. Let's take a simple but telling example: We both believe that Siera Leone exists somewhere in Africa, although we very probably never set foot there, nor saw any incontrovertible evidence/footage supporting its existence. 

I've considered the possibility on more than one occasion.  I've dismissed it every time.  The assertions of religion are not adequately supported by real-world data, so it's a waste of my time to consider the issue again.

The assertions of religions are mostly metaphysical, they clearly aren't the same as scientific assertions, so it's a category mistake to try to fit them to real world data. And actually, some parts of scripture - both in the Bible and in the Qur'an/hadiths - actually mention natural phenomena, making the entire respective religions vulnerable to falsification.

I'm prepared to reopen the issue if and only if better data is found - testable data, not scriptures or believers' personal experiences or philosophical thought experiments.

Again, please consider that whatever convinced you may simply not be enough for someone like me.

It's actually not up to you to decide what would be convincing or not. There is a whole field in philosophy called epistemology that deals with this problem. It's a stretch already to restrict the scope of knowledge to testable data. Mathematical truths are not testable data, nor are historical facts or truths based on inference, such as the existence of an external world and of other minds, etc.

The trinity notion claims that there are three persons in the godhead.
Not three gods. Just three different "tasks" attributed to the one god.

That's their clumsy attempt to hide the contradiction I am pointing to you. Of course they won't say the three persons are God, because they know how insane it looks, they nonetheless consider them equal to gods.


"There are three persons, denominated the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, who deserve to be called God, and yet there is but one God, not three."
https://www.reasonablefaith.org/writings...e-trinity/

If a deity communicates with people, then that deity communicates with all people. Not just a few select individuals who then get tasked with spreading the message, because then the result is a mess - which is what we see in the world.
Also, all the supposedly divine texts in existence were manifestly penned by humans - none by the divine.

You may have heard it before, but a deity is communicating with us right now through what it created. We can recognize the majesty of the universe around us all by ourselves. What's the best way for some entity to prove it is powerful or intelligent? creating something like this intelligible universe.

Now if by communication you mean laying out the detailed message of how to worship this deity, then it's not really up to us whether this deity communicated with all people or only a handful of people. After all, he's God, we're not.

Furthermore, if a deity communicates with only select individuals, then these individuals become models, superstars. And models have a tremendous influence on people in general.

It's true that there are manifest signs of human error in scriptures like the Bible, the book of Mormon, etc. I still think the Qur'an is an exception though. To this day I never heard or read a single serious criticism pointing out some flaw in the Qur'an or authentic hadiths, including in arabic literature.

I agree that the truth of religion and the reality of a god are two different things.
However, every religion hangs on the premise that a god exists. (except Buddhism, let's ignore that wrinkle)

So, does a god exist? any god?
What is a god and what does it mean to exist?
To exist is to be real, to be a part of reality.
God is usually considered to be the creator of all there is... at the least, the creator of the Universe, at the most, the creator of reality.
If we're just going for "creator of the Universe", then it seems to be just a somewhat powerful alien.

If we're going for "creator of reality", then one can't logically exist (i.e. be a part of reality) and create it. The created must be subordinate to the creator.
As such, reality can't have been created by anything, given that this thing would have had to not exist.
Religious philosophers walk around this by claiming that the creator would have created itself simultaneously with reality... but come on... that just reeks of intellectual desperation.

In general a god is defined as the creator of the universe, not of reality. But these are just definitions and empty nomenclature, we somehow all know what the word God means: a perfect, eternal being who is omniscient, omnipotent, etc.

Definitions aside, if one concedes that every thing that begins to exist has a cause, and that the latter principle is universally valid, then there is forcibly a creator of this universe. The only hanging point is that of infinite regress, which can be shown to be impossible in the case of actual causes. The result is an uncaused creator of this universe.
That's all what most deductive arguments for God rely on. Inductive-type arguments are compelling too, namely the teleological argument.

Why is religion necessary if a god exists? Not much can be said unless we assume the the god we reached through standard deductive/inductive arguments is infinitely just. In this case, a just God must have sent us detailed instructions on how to worship him, our goal in life, etc. We then look for traditional belief systems that are the closest to what instructions from a deity should look like.

To look for better reasons for believing after you're already believing, is just feeding a bias.
In my opinion, people shouldn't need to believe whether there is or isn't a god. They should just know - no irrational reasons required. Just pure evidence equivalent to that found for so many other phenomena. If, at some time in their evolution, mankind came across evidence for the divine, then that evidence should have remained intact for us to look into after all these years of worship... and yet, after all these years, all that mankind has managed to show is a multitude of religions and accompanying gods, and the arguing between said religions leading to conflicts and wars and loss of life. The perfect way for any god to reveal itself, huh?

But if the god is not real, or just doesn't care, then all this bickering is completely justified as a purely human psychological phenomenon.

First of all, that there is a multitude of religions doesn't prove anything. It's not because there are conflicting accounts of the divine message that there is no divine message. This is an outright non sequitur. Secondly, it may be the other way around: we are psychologically predisposed to believe in gods precisely because a god made it this way, as some sort of an imprint of the designer.