To explain why we can define God to affirm his existence!

[bennyboy]

If you are bothered by rambling and uneloquent way of putting things...I suggest you give God and his chosen ones a chance, his holy book and those tasked to explain it. Don't accept them right away but if guidance is to be achieved and sight is to be gained, your best bet is God.

Nononono.

It's a waste of time.  The tooth fairy is as real as God, but she gives my kids money.

You put forth a lot of word salad, but what you don't actually have is anything observable in the Universe which indicates the presence of God.

[Jesster]

you can believe whatever you want.

So you don't care what I believe then. I guess you'll move on, right?

[Mystic]

Seeds....perhaps you will think of this more. 

Who knows themselves, knows their Lord.

You could just say "I give up". Bye then.

You know very well your brain is not something that can universally judge all actions you can potential perform or have performed, and give you exact value.

And again, either you are subjective (a delusion created by evolution for survival) or objective (a soul maintained by absolute judge and perceiver).

The soul is obvious. It's manifest. Most cultures in the past believed in it not because they were stupid or anything like that.

It's because it's perceived and obvious.

[Jesster]

I thought you didn't care what I believed. I certainly don't believe in more of your bald assertions.

Also, you got the definitions of "objective" and "subjective" wrong. Open up that dictionary again.

[Astreja]

You know very well your brain is not something that can universally judge all actions you can potential perform or have performed, and give you exact value.

What you have there, MK, is an artificial problem.    I simply don't need to judge all actions.  Experience is a more-than-adequate guide to whether or not something works, whether or not I enjoy doing it, and whether or not it is in accord with my own morality.

"Exact value" is actually psychologically extraordinarily dangerous.  It's an impossible pursuit, and clinging it too hard will drive you into an obsessive-compulsive mindset.

[Cyberman]

You can't exist outside of perception. Your body can, but you must generated in some perception. Most people think that perception is themselves, yet what is real is something else truly sees them as they are while they only have some fuzzy scent of who they are.

Oh I see where this is going. You're trying to say that things can only exist if they're perceived; that since we humans don't do the perceiving then there must be some powerful entity doing it; therefore "God". Right?

Basically, "to be is to be perceived", à la George Berkeley?

"There once was a man who said: "God
Must think it exceedingly odd
If he finds that this tree
Continues to be
When there's no one about in the Quad."

"Dear Sir,
Your astonishment's odd;
I am always about in the Quad;
And that's why the tree
Will continue to be,
Since observed by
Yours faithfully,
God."

[Joods]

Concert tickets are another example....

My daughter thinks concert tickets to see BTS is great. Her dad, however, couldn't care less and therefore doesn't think concert tickets to see BTS are great at all.

Opinion matters. Especially to a teenager.

[Brian37]

You could just say "I give up". Bye then.

You know very well your brain is not something that can universally judge all actions you can potential perform or have performed, and give you exact value.

And again, either you are subjective (a delusion created by evolution for survival) or objective (a soul maintained by absolute judge and perceiver).

The soul is obvious. It's manifest. Most cultures in the past believed in it not because they were stupid or anything like that.

It's because it's perceived and obvious.

There is no such thing as a "soul", not for Muslims or Christians or Jews or Hindus or Buddhists or atheists. There is just nature, our bodies. More specifically our brains in motion. Nobody survives death, when you die, your consciousness dies. The only "afterlife" anyone has is being in the memories of those who survive the dead. But in 5 billion years our species will have long gone extinct, our planet and sun will die eventually and the universe will continue on with absolutely no record of either you or I.

If merely making a claim constituted truth then Apollo would be a real god. If merely making a claim constituted truth then I am dating Angelina Jolie. The only thing god claims prove is the the human ability to mistake imagination for fact.

[Esquilax]

The soul is obvious. It's manifest. Most cultures in the past believed in it not because they were stupid or anything like that.

It's because it's perceived and obvious.

Yeah, sorry, you don't actually get to do an end-run around actually demonstrating your claims, this don't work that way.

Most cultures in the past simply mistook a process that goes on in the brain as a quantity. There is a conscious portion of the human person that cannot be found by looking in the body... it's fairly natural to conclude from there that it's some supernatural thing, if you don't have the technological know-how that would allow you to see the processes that give rise to that consciousness acting within the human body.

Essentially, the cultures of the past believed in the soul for the same reason they believed in a lot of wrong, "obvious" things: it fit with what they observed, they just didn't have the apparatus required to observe further and see that this is incorrect. You, MK, live in a time where you no longer have that excuse, which is why you can't even offer anything other than a simpering "it's obvious," in support of the claim.

[Brian37]

The soul is obvious. It's manifest. Most cultures in the past believed in it not because they were stupid or anything like that.

It's because it's perceived and obvious.

Yeah, sorry, you don't actually get to do an end-run around actually demonstrating your claims, this don't work that way.

Most cultures in the past simply mistook a process that goes on in the brain as a quantity. There is a conscious portion of the human person that cannot be found by looking in the body... it's fairly natural to conclude from there that it's some supernatural thing, if you don't have the technological know-how that would allow you to see the processes that give rise to that consciousness acting within the human body.

Essentially, the cultures of the past believed in the soul for the same reason they believed in a lot of wrong, "obvious" things: it fit with what they observed, they just didn't have the apparatus required to observe further and see that this is incorrect. You, MK, live in a time where you no longer have that excuse, which is why you can't even offer anything other than a simpering "it's obvious," in support of the claim.

I don't think Richard Dawkins gets enough credit for his book "The God Delusion" in that he explains in very scientific terms from a biological evolutionary standpoint why god claims exist. Our species perceptions of what we think we see are notoriously flawed. This flaw in evolution is a result of life not always having time to slow down and assess because life evolved to make sudden decisions on the fight or flight aspect of evolution. Dawkins in The God Delusion describes this gap filling as akin to "The moth mistaking the light bulb for natural moonlight". The antelope on the African plain does not always have time to assess if the swaying grass is mere wind, or a lion stalking it. Our species created god claims as a projection of their own qualities on the world around them, that gap filling created a false sense of having the truth. Early deities/gods were earthy, like storm deities and volcano deities, and animal deities. Humanizing the world by giving it the same characteristics as humans gave humans the false sense that they could have some sort of control by bargaining with nature. Our species real ability to survive was never in begging fictional beings, but in our numbers. Those false perceptions did have a real outcome in creating groups based on those bad guesses.

The only place Allah/Yahweh/God/Brahma/Thor/Isis/Apollo exist are in humans imaginations. They are a mere false perception reflecting our own human attributes. False claims can lead to success, just like one can market cigarettes and get people to smoke them even though they are not good for you.