Q: do you, Christian, claim that God exists, rather than you believe that he exists?

[max-greece]

I wanted to pick up on this section separately.

Why Would God Want Us to Praise Him?

I was recently asked why God would want us to praise and worship Him. This is a question I hear every so often since we immediately assume that a person who demands praise is a pompous big-head. I think there are many Christians out there who secretly wonder about this—afraid to ask the question (lest they be thought unspiritual), but bothered all the same.

God is completely self-sufficient and doesn't need our praise and worship. However, He does deserve it. Would you agree that it is right and good to praise someone who is worthy of praise? We instinctively know this and praise people for all sorts of achievements. We praise the people we love and admire, and it's not right or good for us to withhold praise from them.

We all understand the concept of praise being due certain people. Imagine that you crafted an incredibly beautiful sculpture and won a prestigious award for your creation; but when the time came for the award ceremony, they gave the prize for your sculpture to the wrong artist! That would not be just, right, or good. In the same way, God—as the only being perfect in goodness, justice, love, etc.—is worthy of our praise. We do, in fact, owe Him that praise. He wants us to praise Him because it is right and good for us to do so. Since God wants us to do right and good things, of course he wants us to praise and worship Him.

Beyond the praise being right and good (and because of its being right and good), worshiping God also brings us joy and enhances our relationship with Him. We see this in human relationships as well—think of a man with his wife. Doesn’t it bring him great joy to praise her?

Here's how C.S. Lewis puts it in Reflections on the Psalms:

I had never noticed that all enjoyment spontaneously overflows into praise…. The world rings with praise—lovers praising their mistresses, readers their favourite poet, walkers praising the countryside, players praising their favourite game…. I had not noticed either that just as men spontaneously praise whatever they value, so they spontaneously urge us to join them in praising it: 'Isn't she lovely? Wasn't it glorious? Don't you think that magnificent?' The Psalmists in telling everyone to praise God are doing what all men do when they speak of what they care about. My whole, more general, difficulty about the praise of God depended on my absurdly denying to us, as regards the supremely Valuable, what we delight to do, what indeed we can't help doing, about everything else we value. I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment; it is its appointed consummation. It is not out of compliment that lovers keep on telling one another how beautiful they are; the delight is incomplete till it is expressed.

Finally, God created us for His pleasure (just as we create delightful things for our pleasure). Praising God—acknowledging His goodness, love, perfection, and all the incredible things He has done for us—brings Him pleasure. If you have children, you know what a beautiful thing it is to have them praise you. You also know the pain of having them selfishly take you for granted and ignore you. When that happens, neither you nor your children are enriched, and your relationship is strained. In the same way, the right response from us toward God is praise because He deserves it. When we act out our love and acknowledgment of Him in this way, we fulfill our purpose; and when we are rightly fulfilling our purpose, we have the best possible joy—God is pleased, our relationship with Him is enhanced, and He has rightly received what He deserves. Luckily, this is not a difficult command to follow, for when we truly love Him, our praise will flow naturally from that love.

I have highlighted 2 parts of the above and quoted the whole thing just to ensure I am not quote-mining.

Now there are several examples given of where praise is due and freely given and these are good examples.

I am not sure how they would apply to the God:Man scenario, however, as there is a total lack of equivalence between the parties here.

When I praise my wife, or my child, colleague, friend etc. there is a sense of equals. My praise should mean something to them. This is not the case with God.

As we are talking about the Christian God this is even more the case. Christians delight in telling us that we are all worthless worms in the face of God. I find that loathsome for a variety of reasons, particularly as they go on to say something to the effect of the only good things about us coming directly from God.

In effect, therefore, if the only good things about us are the bits that come from God then what is God measuring when he decides who gets into heaven and who doesn't? Isn't he really just measuring the percentage penetration of himself into us? Does that make any sense?

The second highlighted section shows the true nature of things to a Christian. We exist to praise God. As I stated in my initial response this demeans any else we do that is not specifically aimed at doing that thing.

Art, literature, music, astronomy, mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, architecture, history, geography, medicine........all now worth less, less than our main reason for existence - praising God.

I mentioned freedom before. I now do it again in the light of the Christian perspective.

Assuming the Christian God:

I was not asked if I wished to be born. In being born I am declared guilty, guilty of original sin. I must praise my creator and his son (who is him), who I never met, who died to pay for my sins, without my asking.

If I pray to the son and believe in him my sins are taken onto his shoulders and I get a pass into heaven because somehow this fools God into thinking I am sin free and I must be sin free to get in (why?).

I will be watched by God 24 hours per day, 7 days per week for my entire life. He claims to be like my parent - yet he never leaves me, never lets me go.

God, apparently, doesn't need my praise, but I can't get into heaven without it. It doesn't matter what "good deeds" I do if I haven't praised God enough I don't get in. In fact, not getting in doesn't mean being left in peace for me, it means being sent to a place where I will burn forever.

And who runs that place? Not the devil - he's burning there too apparently. So God is running hell too, set up for us worms that didn't get the message.

So I am born into a scenario where my creator hides from me. I must praise him and love him (commanded to love him no less). If I don't do it right (choosing the right path and all that) I am punished, for eternity and just to make sure he knows how I am behaving I am monitored constantly.

Sorry - but this is a dictatorship. It isn't even a benign dictatorship. I have to do what my dictator tells me to do, when he tells me to do it and as often as he tells me to do it. Failure to comply is an eternity of punishment.

So ask me again about freedom.

---

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAw6Bf_f3bA

[Crossless2.0]

I wanted to pick up on this section separately.

Why Would God Want Us to Praise Him?

I was recently asked why God would want us to praise and worship Him. This is a question I hear every so often since we immediately assume that a person who demands praise is a pompous big-head. I think there are many Christians out there who secretly wonder about this—afraid to ask the question (lest they be thought unspiritual), but bothered all the same.

God is completely self-sufficient and doesn't need our praise and worship. However, He does deserve it. Would you agree that it is right and good to praise someone who is worthy of praise? We instinctively know this and praise people for all sorts of achievements. We praise the people we love and admire, and it's not right or good for us to withhold praise from them.

We all understand the concept of praise being due certain people. Imagine that you crafted an incredibly beautiful sculpture and won a prestigious award for your creation; but when the time came for the award ceremony, they gave the prize for your sculpture to the wrong artist! That would not be just, right, or good. In the same way, God—as the only being perfect in goodness, justice, love, etc.—is worthy of our praise. We do, in fact, owe Him that praise. He wants us to praise Him because it is right and good for us to do so. Since God wants us to do right and good things, of course he wants us to praise and worship Him.

Beyond the praise being right and good (and because of its being right and good), worshiping God also brings us joy and enhances our relationship with Him. We see this in human relationships as well—think of a man with his wife. Doesn’t it bring him great joy to praise her?

Here's how C.S. Lewis puts it in Reflections on the Psalms:

I had never noticed that all enjoyment spontaneously overflows into praise…. The world rings with praise—lovers praising their mistresses, readers their favourite poet, walkers praising the countryside, players praising their favourite game…. I had not noticed either that just as men spontaneously praise whatever they value, so they spontaneously urge us to join them in praising it: 'Isn't she lovely? Wasn't it glorious? Don't you think that magnificent?' The Psalmists in telling everyone to praise God are doing what all men do when they speak of what they care about. My whole, more general, difficulty about the praise of God depended on my absurdly denying to us, as regards the supremely Valuable, what we delight to do, what indeed we can't help doing, about everything else we value. I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment; it is its appointed consummation. It is not out of compliment that lovers keep on telling one another how beautiful they are; the delight is incomplete till it is expressed.

Finally, God created us for His pleasure (just as we create delightful things for our pleasure). Praising God—acknowledging His goodness, love, perfection, and all the incredible things He has done for us—brings Him pleasure. If you have children, you know what a beautiful thing it is to have them praise you. You also know the pain of having them selfishly take you for granted and ignore you. When that happens, neither you nor your children are enriched, and your relationship is strained. In the same way, the right response from us toward God is praise because He deserves it. When we act out our love and acknowledgment of Him in this way, we fulfill our purpose; and when we are rightly fulfilling our purpose, we have the best possible joy—God is pleased, our relationship with Him is enhanced, and He has rightly received what He deserves. Luckily, this is not a difficult command to follow, for when we truly love Him, our praise will flow naturally from that love.

I have highlighted 2 parts of the above and quoted the whole thing just to ensure I am not quote-mining.

Now there are several examples given of where praise is due and freely given and these are good examples.

I am not sure how they would apply to the God:Man scenario, however, as there is a total lack of equivalence between the parties here.

When I praise my wife, or my child, colleague, friend etc. there is a sense of equals. My praise should mean something to them. This is not the case with God.

As we are talking about the Christian God this is even more the case. Christians delight in telling us that we are all worthless worms in the face of God. I find that loathsome for a variety of reasons, particularly as they go on to say something to the effect of the only good things about us coming directly from God.

In effect, therefore, if the only good things about us are the bits that come from God then what is God measuring when he decides who gets into heaven and who doesn't? Isn't he really just measuring the percentage penetration of himself into us? Does that make any sense?

The second highlighted section shows the true nature of things to a Christian. We exist to praise God. As I stated in my initial response this demeans any else we do that is not specifically aimed at doing that thing.

Art, literature, music, astronomy, mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, architecture, history, geography, medicine........all now worth less, less than our main reason for existence - praising God.

I mentioned freedom before. I now do it again in the light of the Christian perspective.

Assuming the Christian God:

I was not asked if I wished to be born. In being born I am declared guilty, guilty of original sin. I must praise my creator and his son (who is him), who I never met, who died to pay for my sins, without my asking.

If I pray to the son and believe in him my sins are taken onto his shoulders and I get a pass into heaven because somehow this fools God into thinking I am sin free and I must be sin free to get in (why?).

I will be watched by God 24 hours per day, 7 days per week for my entire life. He claims to be like my parent - yet he never leaves me, never lets me go.

God, apparently, doesn't need my praise, but I can't get into heaven without it. It doesn't matter what "good deeds" I do if I haven't praised God enough I don't get in. In fact, not getting in doesn't mean being left in peace for me, it means being sent to a place where I will burn forever.

And who runs that place? Not the devil - he's burning there too apparently. So God is running hell too, set up for us worms that didn't get the message.

So I am born into a scenario where my creator hides from me. I must praise him and love him (commanded to love him no less). If I don't do it right (choosing the right path and all that) I am punished, for eternity and just to make sure he knows how I am behaving I am monitored constantly.

Sorry - but this is a dictatorship. It isn't even a benign dictatorship. I have to do what my dictator tells me to do, when he tells me to do it and as often as he tells me to do it. Failure to comply is an eternity of punishment.

So ask me again about freedom.

---

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAw6Bf_f3bA

But we're the nihilists.

[Esquilax]

He does not reject science, but rather, he, and I as well, reject some of the conclusions of SCIENTISTS.

Big difference. Scientists are men and women just like you and I and as such are fallible. Scientist's conclusions have been flat wrong on several occasions in the past. You know it, I know it. It is these wrong conclusions we reject, not the scientific method.

But scientists are how mainstream science gets done, and the process is self correcting. Disregard science all you like, but the only time you'll be justified in doing so is when you can present competing evidence that shows a better way. All you've done is labelled conclusions you dislike for ideological reasons "wrong," and moved on without bothering to present the evidence that would correct mainstream science to be more in line with your views.

Hence, you are disregarding science.

He did not say that the supernatural existed because many intelligent people believed in the supernatural. So he has not committed the fallacy you say he has.

Restating your original assertion while ignoring my reply is not an argument.

That is your opinion.

If I sit down and say to myself: "I want to get to the bottom of these religious claims and to start with, I will examine the claims of the most popular religion i.e. Christianity first, and then find through investigation that Christianity is in fact true, then my pursuit is finished. I need not search or evaluate any other claim. For I have what I set out to find, the truth. The crux of the matter is this: Is Christianity true? If it is then it necessarily follows that all other religions that contradict Christianity's central truth claims are false. This is simple logic, nothing too difficult.

You've actually got it ass backwards: start from reality, the facts of the world around you, and build your position based on that: if christianity fits into the things you can confirm to be true, then there, you've got your position. To start from a claim and work backward just leaves you open to confirmation bias; since you've decided christianity is true and have, by all accounts, stopped looking, how will you ever find out if some or all of it is false?

I love science. I am enthralled by what science has given us in the way of knowledge of the material world we live in. I also happen to believe science has its limits. When I have a question outside the realm of science, I take up other disciplines and learn even more. I am not an empiricist and I hope you are not either!

Here's the thing: just deciding that something is beyond the realm of science doesn't mean it actually is, and it certainly doesn't mean that it actually exists. You seem to think you can just define your god out of needing evidence or falsifiability by asserting that such things are impossible for it. That's not the case.

I have yet to complain about anything here. Nor do I put God beyond the reach of any form of testability or detectability. It is the methodological naturalist/empiricist/materialist that puts God beyond their reach, for they eliminate the possibility of His existence before they even begin their investigation!!!!!!

Methodological naturalism makes no statement about god, it merely states that things that can't be detected using the only measures of detection that humanity has... cannot be detected by humans. An entirely uncontroversial statement, I'm sure you'll agree, and yet when it comes to god, you'll claim that it's somehow unreasonable to expect to be able to detect things that you think exist.

Pray tell, how do you detect god, then?

We accept a truth claim as being true if and only if it actually corresponds to an actual state of affairs in the world (correspondence theory). There are several ways we can come to know a truth claim is true. It simply does not follow that since empiricism is untenable that therefore we must accept all religious truth claims as true. That is a non-sequitur.

That's also not what I said. I said that, were you to lower your minimum expectations for evidence to the point where you could accept christianity as being true (without engaging in special pleading) then you would then be in a position of accepting all other religions as true, because despite what you may say, there is not a significant level of support that is unique to christianity sufficient to justify believing the supernatural claims within that religion.

That's a very different thing to what you think I said.

If Christ died for our sins and rose on the third day, then Islam is false as well as every other religion that denies the divinity of Christ. Christ could not have both died and not have died, it is either or. To maintain otherwise would be to violate one of the laws of classical logic. In this way it is shown that WE CAN distinguish between contradicting religious truth claims.

However, what are you using to privilege your christian claim over the islamic one? If you have no support, then you're just using special pleading to say one is true and therefore the other must be false. But in order to support your christian claim, you'd need evidence, which would put you in the position of using the dreaded empiricism to resolve your conflicts!

I am glad you are not an empiricist, but you still demand empirical proof which, if you are a naturalist, you deny even exists a priori!

Are you a naturalist?

It is you who denies such proof could exist when you say god is transcendent and undetectable by the senses or the scientific method. That's your problem, stop trying to foist it onto me. Despite your claims, I don't have any innate knowledge of god, or spiritual bull that could detect that he's there; none of us do. We've only got our senses and our instruments, unless you can prove the existence of some other way. If you can't, then this problem you're saying I have only exists in your mind.

I am very convinced. Other brilliant minds have also been convinced by certain lines of evidence for the existence of God. Anthony Flew, the once outspoken atheist turned theist comes to mind.

And I don't care about who. As has been said previously, Flew had dementia, and more importantly, he was also a deist and not a christian toward the end of his life, so clearly this shit wasn't that convincing.

My point remains, I cannot furnish any evidence that cannot be explained away by them that are unwilling to accept it.

And my point remains that reinterpreting our motivations so that we're "unwilling to accept" evidence, rather than finding it unconvincing, is nothing more than a pitiable attempt at diverting investigation.

[fr0d0]

That conclusion is only self-evident to people who believe it to be

Well you're slow to catch on huh


@ Esq can you fix your #%¥℅ centre tags please!

[Esquilax]

@ Esq can you fix your #%¥℅ centre tags please!

What do you mean? Nothing looks out of place on my screen.

[fr0d0]

Every post after yours, including yours, is centred.

[Esquilax]

Every post after yours, including yours, is centred.

I don't know what to tell ya: I'm not using center tags- I even went back and checked - and everything is correctly aligned to the left the entire way down, for me.

[fr0d0]

OK thanks esq. How annoying!

[Ryantology]

When Islam overtakes Christianity, does that vindicate the Muslims?

[Bad Writer]

He's using the Mobile App, and posts get centered after quotes sometimes. It's not your fault, Esq.