What do you lose?
Offline A question to god-believers (and I'm genuinely interested in the answer you give).
If a definitive incontrovertible proof should force you to abandon your belief in a deity what do you reckon you would lack which you presently have? (Or more importantly "miss"?).
I ask as a person who only experiences huge benefit from a rational conviction that your blind faith in other people's wild assertions is actually a handicap to achieving happiness, happiness being a concept I closely identify with the superiority of knowledge over assumption. Personally, I experience proofs daily that the reversal of this stance leads to terrible problems for the individual bordering sometimes on psychiatric illness in its effect and intensity. I promise not to gainsay or treat with disrespect your assertions - I am really curious as to what they are founded on.
I would rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy
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I don't know, when I was an atheist I don't really think I lost something in becoming a believer.
But if you held a gun to my head and asked, I'd call the police then say that perhaps a certain sense of awe and harmony when I look at the universe.
Well, exactly........how does.....................?
Our revels now are ended. These our actors, | As I foretold you, were all spirits, and | Are melted into air, into thin air; | And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, | The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, | The solemn temples, the great globe itself, - Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, | And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, | Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff | As dreams are made on, and our little life | Is rounded with a sleep. - Shakespeare
????
How does one lose a sense of awe and harmony in the universe?
More importantly... how does one go from atheist to theist? Was it the love bombing that got you?
After eating an entire bull, a mountain lion felt so good he started roaring. He kept it up until a hunter came along and shot him.
The moral: When you're full of bull, keep your mouth shut.
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Right... because those agnostic deist congregations are totally into love bombing... damn cultists.
-Triften
No love bomb, just a lot of reading/learning.
With all due respect pineapple, your abandonment of rationality and your present voluntary acceptance of delusion are interesting, but your case is not what I had in mind as an example of the theists from whom I was hoping to receive answers to my question.
There are many people who yo-yo between absolute realism and compromised rationality when forming an outlook on life, and some very high-profile people too. They tend, when justifying their occasional descents into delusion, to use vague justifications (your ambiguous "just a lot of reading/learning" is a typical example - as if reading and learning couldn't also lead you in a completely opposite direction too). In fact from a psychological viewpoint the justifications and how they are phrased are redolent of the reaction invoked in patients when resisting their delusional notions being challenged by the therapy they are undergoing.
But that is all stuff for another thread.
Those I'm interested in hearing a response from here are those whose immersion in theism is such that there is probably no reasonable hope that they would ever want to escape from it, but who are nevertheless open-minded enough to envisage the possibility that they are living a lie - at least hypothetically. My question is "should that lie ever be proven as one, then what do you think you would have lost?"
I would rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy
Bump.
Just in the probably vain hope that an honest theist will care to answer the question. What would you really lose if, even hypothetically, the whole god thing was proven undeniably and to your satisfaction to be sham?
I would rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy
You don't have to be a part of a specific congregation to get the love bombing. They'll freely give it in order to get you to jump ship, even if you don't make it on to their deck. I've received love bombing attempts from three separate churches, of which I share no affiliation. All churches are cults and if you look at them, not even very closely, you will see cult recruiting practices are common place. As far as the previous comment, it was a joke. Humor often does not translate well in text.
After eating an entire bull, a mountain lion felt so good he started roaring. He kept it up until a hunter came along and shot him.
The moral: When you're full of bull, keep your mouth shut.
MySpace
What did you learn that made you lean toward the existence of God? This one is a serious question...
After eating an entire bull, a mountain lion felt so good he started roaring. He kept it up until a hunter came along and shot him.
The moral: When you're full of bull, keep your mouth shut.
MySpace
I'll start a new thread somewhere else. You guys have a good chat about your own topic.
Nordmann, there isn't a lot of Theists on the boards, just so you know.
It mainly began with mathematics. When I first entered University, I became an atheist because I didn't think God and science were compatible. It was mostly mathematics that changed my mind, since there's such an elegence and harmony to it. That it can tell us what we want to know about the universe.
Go figure that a human abstraction that has evolved in complexity over time would be rather elegant?
- Leon Trotsky, Last Will & Testament
February 27, 1940
I don't understand the logic in that myself, but at least it's not based in indoctrination.
After eating an entire bull, a mountain lion felt so good he started roaring. He kept it up until a hunter came along and shot him.
The moral: When you're full of bull, keep your mouth shut.
MySpace