Jesus as Lord - why is this appealing to so many?

[The Grand Nudger]

Are you under the impression that people just don;t understand what you believe?  You can't shut up about it, how could anyone be in the dark? On the other count.... why do you think that your atrocious beliefs deserve respect?

[Godscreated]

 I have accepted Christ and know He is real and no one could ever convince me other wise, I've experienced Him on a level that is undeniable. I have come to better understand atheist, that's why I have stayed so long. You may truly believe that God isn't real, but that doesn't mean He isn't. My experiences are personal but within those experiences God has proved to me that He is who He says He is leaving me nothing to do but accept His existence. I've yet to see any atheist bring forth any information to show God doesn't exist, I've seen multitudes of excuses and because of that I said that atheist pretend He doesn't exist. I can't pretend and wouldn't because I would be denying truth and that is an unacceptable thing to do, truth is a precious thing, this God has taught me in a awesome way.

GC

You realize that my atheism has nothing to do with whether or not you have the right to believe in a god, right?  I honestly do not care if you believe or not, and I'm not attempting to deconvert you.  I understand that theists are deeply concerned with increasing their flock, but not everything happens through the filter of proselytization.  

Regarding information about showing how god doesn't exist, how would one go about doing that when god is unfalsifiable?

  Don't play me for stupid, of coarse I know that. I do not even think about increasing the church, my concern is with each individual, God will take care of the church. Seems you have a problem doesn't it, if God is unfalsifiable then it's possible even from your point He is real.

GC

[Godscreated]

 I have accepted Christ and know He is real and no one could ever convince me other wise, I've experienced Him on a level that is undeniable. I have come to better understand atheist, that's why I have stayed so long. You may truly believe that God isn't real, but that doesn't mean He isn't. My experiences are personal but within those experiences God has proved to me that He is who He says He is leaving me nothing to do but accept His existence. I've yet to see any atheist bring forth any information to show God doesn't exist, I've seen multitudes of excuses and because of that I said that atheist pretend He doesn't exist. I can't pretend and wouldn't because I would be denying truth and that is an unacceptable thing to do, truth is a precious thing, this God has taught me in a awesome way.

GC

And I am speaking from what I believe to be the truth. I believe you have deluded yourself. The experiences you have had were NOT of God, but were, instead, a type of brain fart. After that, you get confirmation bias.

Your belief has deluded you, I'm a very rational person who looks for truth. Brains do not fart so we can do away with this kinda' talk.

I also will not deny the truth: that there is no evidence for a God. That, to me, is quite sufficient reason to not believe in a God. To deny that is perverse, in my view.

There is evidence when one looks for it, it's just that you do not look for it. God has also given me personal evidence about who He is. You can deny God through your blindness all you want it changes nothing.

As for Jesus being your Lord: you are, in essence, deciding to be a child. You pawn your moral decisions off on another being. But even if that being is beneficent, your refusal of moral responsibility is not. The adoption of a Lord is, in and of itself, an immoral act. Yes, even if that creature is your creator.

Christ did say we must have the faith of a child to believe. After that we grow into a relationship with Him that becomes undeniable to those who watch, listen and respond to Him. I pawn nothing off on Jesus, He has shown me a better way through life and there are certain things that we have to adhere to for this life to be viable and productive. I have never refused to be responsible for my moral actions, it is essential as a Christian that one owns up to his/her moral actions and ask forgiveness. It is a necessary part of Christianity. It is the atheists who feel they have only to answer for the moral wrongs they decide are wrong and you all can't come to agreement on what is morally right or wrong, so you are either highly confused about reality or deflecting responsibility. You need to explain what I put in bold above, it's ridiculous at best. 

Think about it the other way around. Suppose humans manage to create artificial intelligences with their own 'free will'. Would you want these intelligences to *worship* us? I certainly HOPE not. To even *ask* for worship makes one unworthy of it. And to worship makes the worshiper unworthy of respect. It is *inherently* degrading to adopt a dictator, even if that dictator is your creator.

 I just posted to another atheist how you all like the game of pretend, those who pretend usually have a mental problem or a child. SO, how does one program free will especially when many of your ilk don't even believe in free will. Besides how do you even create artificial intelligence, to create in the sense that God did is to do it from nothing. You do not have any idea what God did and did not create. God is worth of worship not because He asks for it, it is because of who He is, the righteous creator who is omniscient, omnipresent and omnipotent, who is the truth, the life, the way and eternal. 

GC

[The Grand Nudger]

You believe that a god managed to "program free will", so it's not as if you think it's impossible to do....right? Ostensibly, there's a way that this stuff works, whatever it is. The way it works for some of us..leaves us incapable of believing in the god you describe..and not recognizing the god you describe as anything worthy of worship.

Got a problem..take it up with the big man, he's the one who made us as we are...eh? It doesn't make any sense to complain to us about it.

[Cod]

God has also given me personal evidence about who He is.

Well lucky you! Can you reveal what that evidence is, and how God relayed it to you?

[polymath257]

There is evidence when one looks for it, it's just that you do not look for it. God has also given me personal evidence about who He is. You can deny God through your blindness all you want it changes nothing.

----------------------------


There is confirmation bias when one looks for it. But objective evidence is lacking. Your 'personal evidence' is also known as an anecdote. And we know that anecdotal evidence is unreliable in many ways.

And yes, I am sure you are now so convinced that no amount of actual evidence will sway you. That is what we call delusion: One of the characteristics of delusional thinking is impermeability to contrary evidence.

---

1. Experiences alone are not sufficient for truth. After testing for biases, delusions, and hallucinations, they have some applicability for truth detection. Religious experiences are inevitably under the categories of delusions or hallucinations because they  are inherently untestable.

1. 'Untestable' in no way even remotely implies "inevitably under the categories of delusions or hallucinations". That is really bad philosophy! There are tons of categories of things that are not testable. All human experiences/thoughts/emotions, logic, mathematical axioms, moral truths, aesthetics, philosophy. For crying out loud, science itself is governed by a philosophy of science--which itself is not 'testable'. Your claim that things have to to be testable to be true is itself not 'testable'. 

2. Would you claim there is evidence for the existence of Athena and Apollo? The Iliad gives testimony for both.

2. Do you think you have a parallel between ancient Greek Gods and the events surrounding Jesus in the first century? That is something a teenager might think is a good point. It is obvious from your responses that you don't even know much of anything about the thing you are sure is "not evidence". 

No, I do not consider the NT to be good evidence. It is no better than the Iliad, for example.

3. And so we continue... Did Homer see any of the events or talk to any of the characters? I'll answer for you. Homer was writing about something that oral tradition said happened 400 years earlier. Another question. Did Homer believe the events to have happened the way he related them? Yet another question. Were there any other people who wrote about the events of the Iliad at the time or shortly after the actual events to support Homer's version? 

No, I don't consider personal change to be evidence. We know full well that personal change can happen from a wide variety of opinions.

4. Not my point. It is the testimony of people as to the change and why. You would have to call them all liars or delusional. You don't have any philosophical or logical basis to do so. Your argument seems to be basically that God does not exists, he can't change people, therefore God does not exist. Good circular reasoning (also called question begging). You totally skipped over the mention of miracles. Are you sure you don't want to set up another question begging argument for that? 

No, those claims that God are the 'best explanation' are simply false. God cannot explain why anything exists at all, because the existence of God is assumed--i.e, not explained. The rest of the claims are equally BS.

5. Nope. Not even close. You logically need an uncaused cause for anything to exist. When you look around for available candidates that meet that description...hmm. See, God was not assumed, it is an inductive argument where the conclusion is a probabilistic one. Based on your response, I find it highly doubtful that you understand the other natural theology arguments (look at that, another example of inductive reasoning). 

Yes, if you are deluded into believing in a deity, that delusion spreads to the point you are willing to degrade yourself by slavery. That doens't make either delusion or slavery desirable.

And the robot analogy is spot on. Even if the creator is 'good' and 'awesome', that is nowhere close to being reason to 'worship' such a being.

6.Yeah--those were not responses to my points--you just restated yours. 

This post is more critical than usual because you think you know way more than you do about anything Christian. You really don't--you mischaracterize almost everything. You compound that error by criticizing the beliefs using really really bad logic. You are simply not good at this and your arguments are simple to pick apart. Just because the other atheists don't point it out, don't think you are making good points. Half of them reason as poorly as you do and the other half won't police their own ranks when it comes to religion. 

An intelligent person has two choices. 1) They can decide they do not need to know what the other side believes and why--and not ever engage them in a condescending, fallacy-ridden, critiques about things you know nothing about, or 2) they can be more respectful, ask more questions and have less opinions until they learn more. OR, you can keep doing what you are doing.

1. On the contrary, anything deling with the real world (as opposed to abstract structures like math) needs to be testable. The scientific method itself is testable and has been tested and passed the tests over the past 400 years. Most philosophy, in particular metaphysics, is quite poor.

2. and 3. Yes, people believed that what Homer wrote was the truth. he was claimed to be divinely inspired and thereby reliable. Sound familiar? Those who wrote the NT were mostly NOT eye-witnesses (Paul, for example). We know that most of the claimed authors were not the actual authors. Even those who were wrote well after the events and after the legend had grown way out of proportion to the facts.

So, yes, I consider the analogy to be valid and the NT to be unreliable. It is a book of stories from a legend, like seeing Elvis after he died.

4. People change from all sorts of belief changes. Not just Christian. Not just monotheist. Testimony comes from many different sources and supports many different views, not just yours.

So what does that say? Even false beliefs can change a person for the better. Which means that the testimony alone cannot validate the ideas.

5. First, if you allow for an infinite regress of causes, an uncaused cause is NOT required. Second, from quantum mechanics we know there are *many* uncaused causes all the time at the micro level. This is not a valid proof of the existence of a God. I understand the natural theology arguments and find them all severely lacking and misleading.

6. That I disagree with your claims is not the same as not understanding them. Your sources of evidence are inherently unreliable. The claims made are unreasonable and based on a faulty metaphysics (mostly Aristotelian). And the reliance on eye-witness testimony is, in and of itself, problematic.

[SteveII]

1. 'Untestable' in no way even remotely implies "inevitably under the categories of delusions or hallucinations". That is really bad philosophy! There are tons of categories of things that are not testable. All human experiences/thoughts/emotions, logic, mathematical axioms, moral truths, aesthetics, philosophy. For crying out loud, science itself is governed by a philosophy of science--which itself is not 'testable'. Your claim that things have to to be testable to be true is itself not 'testable'. 

2. Do you think you have a parallel between ancient Greek Gods and the events surrounding Jesus in the first century? That is something a teenager might think is a good point. It is obvious from your responses that you don't even know much of anything about the thing you are sure is "not evidence". 

3. And so we continue... Did Homer see any of the events or talk to any of the characters? I'll answer for you. Homer was writing about something that oral tradition said happened 400 years earlier. Another question. Did Homer believe the events to have happened the way he related them? Yet another question. Were there any other people who wrote about the events of the Iliad at the time or shortly after the actual events to support Homer's version? 

4. Not my point. It is the testimony of people as to the change and why. You would have to call them all liars or delusional. You don't have any philosophical or logical basis to do so. Your argument seems to be basically that God does not exists, he can't change people, therefore God does not exist. Good circular reasoning (also called question begging). You totally skipped over the mention of miracles. Are you sure you don't want to set up another question begging argument for that? 

5. Nope. Not even close. You logically need an uncaused cause for anything to exist. When you look around for available candidates that meet that description...hmm. See, God was not assumed, it is an inductive argument where the conclusion is a probabilistic one. Based on your response, I find it highly doubtful that you understand the other natural theology arguments (look at that, another example of inductive reasoning). 

6.Yeah--those were not responses to my points--you just restated yours. 

This post is more critical than usual because you think you know way more than you do about anything Christian. You really don't--you mischaracterize almost everything. You compound that error by criticizing the beliefs using really really bad logic. You are simply not good at this and your arguments are simple to pick apart. Just because the other atheists don't point it out, don't think you are making good points. Half of them reason as poorly as you do and the other half won't police their own ranks when it comes to religion. 

An intelligent person has two choices. 1) They can decide they do not need to know what the other side believes and why--and not ever engage them in a condescending, fallacy-ridden, critiques about things you know nothing about, or 2) they can be more respectful, ask more questions and have less opinions until they learn more. OR, you can keep doing what you are doing.

1. On the contrary, anything deling with the real world (as opposed to abstract structures like math) needs to be testable. The scientific method itself is testable and has been tested and passed the tests over the past 400 years. Most philosophy, in particular metaphysics, is quite poor.

That's called logical positivism/verificationism. That philosophy was rejected by most philosophers almost 50 years ago as untenable. Don't believe me?...

By the late 1960s, logical positivism had clearly run its course.[43] Interviewed in the late 1970s, A J Ayer supposed that "the most important" defect "was that nearly all of it was false".[44][45] Although logical positivism tends to be recalled as a pillar of scientism,[46] Carl Hempel was key in establishing the philosophy subdiscipline philosophy of science[14] where Thomas Kuhn and Karl Popper brought in the era of postpositivism.[41] John Passmore found logical positivism to be "dead, or as dead as a philosophical movement ever becomes".[44] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_po...Retrospect

2. and 3. Yes, people believed that what Homer wrote was the truth. he was claimed to be divinely inspired and thereby reliable. Sound familiar? Those who wrote the NT were mostly NOT eye-witnesses (Paul, for example). We know that most of the claimed authors were not the actual authors. Even those who were wrote well after the events and after the legend had grown way out of proportion to the facts.

So, yes, I consider the analogy to be valid and the NT to be unreliable. It is a book of stories from a legend, like seeing Elvis after he died.

I'm going to leave the Iliad comparison along. It's too stupid to argue 

You realize that you are asserting a whole bunch of things that you couldn't possible know about the NT. How do you now that the authors were not eyewitnesses? Certainly John, Peter and James were. Paul never claimed to be and his information is meant for instructions--not a history lessons. However his beliefs and how he came by them is instructive. Luke claimed to have investigate the whole matter and interviewed witnesses to write his two works--within 30 years of Jesus' life. The book of Acts chronicles over 30 years of things that happened because the disciples and early church leaders believed what they saw. What you DON'T HAVE is proof that the content is wrong. You have theories and assertions. Theories and assertions with no evidence just leaves the evidence we have standing all by itself. 

4. People change from all sorts of belief changes. Not just Christian. Not just monotheist. Testimony comes from many different sources and supports many different views, not just yours.

Sure. That's why I don't take stranger's experiences as proof of anything. It is entirely rational to take one's own experiences and of those he trusts as evidence. You have no logical grounds to deny this. When you go from the position of "I don't know" to "you are delusional" and "brain-fart" you have assumed the burden of proof by making a positive claim of knowledge. You have no evidence to help shoulder that burden. Instead, your argument seems to amount to "some people are obviously wrong, therefore everyone must be wrong". Your conclusion does not follow from your premise. 

So what does that say? Even false beliefs can change a person for the better. Which means that the testimony alone cannot validate the ideas.

In general or only in this case?  We rely on testimony millions of time every day to learn truth. Are you going to say that the #metoo victims are "delusional" because they cannot "validate" their claims? 

[/quote]

5. First, if you allow for an infinite regress of causes, an uncaused cause is NOT required. Second, from quantum mechanics we know there are *many* uncaused causes all the time at the micro level. This is not a valid proof of the existence of a God. I understand the natural theology arguments and find them all severely lacking and misleading.[/quote]

Why would anyone allow for an infinite regress of causes? It is illogical--it could not have happened. We would never get to the causes of today because there would be an infinite number of causes that still have to happen to get to today. In quantum mechanics, sub-atomic particles don't come into being out of nothing. They are the result of the fluctuating energy in the quantum field. You are comparing apples and well, universes. 

Judging by just your answer to #5 here, I am 100% sure you know very little about the natural theology arguments. Go ahead--which one do you think you are the most up on? 

6. That I disagree with your claims is not the same as not understanding them. Your sources of evidence are inherently unreliable. The claims made are unreasonable and based on a faulty metaphysics (mostly Aristotelian). And the reliance on eye-witness testimony is, in and of itself, problematic.

I can't wait to here this.

7. How is my metaphysics faulty?

[polymath257]

An infinite regress of causes is not inherently illogical. You are assuming there is a start, and *then* an infinite sequence of causes. That *would* be problematic (requiring an infinite amount of time, potentially), but that is NOT the situation. Even with an infinite regresss, there is a finite number of causes between any two.

No, the subatomic particles *are* the fluctuating fields. The fluctuations are uncaused. There is no mechanism for producing fluctuations.

I'm having difficulty finding a case where Aristotle gets the metaphysics correct. he does OK with basic logic, but even fails with quantifiers.

I'm not specifically a positivist. That philosophers dismiss them, however, doesn't make the position unreasonable. But I am a verificationalist. Ultimately, claims about the real world need to be testable to gain truth value.

[polymath257]

Sure. That's why I don't take stranger's experiences as proof of anything. It is entirely rational to take one's own experiences and of those he trusts as evidence. You have no logical grounds to deny this. When you go from the position of "I don't know" to "you are delusional" and "brain-fart" you have assumed the burden of proof by making a positive claim of knowledge. You have no evidence to help shoulder that burden. Instead, your argument seems to amount to "some people are obviously wrong, therefore everyone must be wrong". Your conclusion does not follow from your premise. 

If you, as an eye-witness, claim something happened that directly contradicts known laws of physics that have been extensively tested, I will justifiably conclude you are mistaken and misinterpreted your experience. Unless you have *very, very* good evidence, enough to show the otherwise testable results are wrong, I will make that conclusion. If you persist, I will conclude you are delusional.

And yes, that is fully justified.

And that goes tenfold for writings from a superstitious culture, where the provenience of the writing is unknown, and the claims are 'miracles'. Even if Matthew was an eye-witness, my conclusion is that he was mistaken in his interpretation and/or elaborated on the story for effect.

Now, for areas that have not been extensively tested, or where results are ambiguous there are allowances that can be made.

But that is not the case in Biblical myths.

[Amarok]

There is fuckall evidence that the gospels are eyewitness testimony . And no earlier writings don't increase the credibility.