GOD is NOT Religion
Offline God is not Religion by John Kevin Badway Sept 12th 2010
This may offend someone who doesn’t quite understand my point of view, but, all I ask is that you the reader, no matter your proclivity to certain beliefs or ideologies that you examine the facts before stating your own opinions contrary to the authors dissertation. Thank You!
And now for something completely different….to borrow a line from Monty Python…Indulge me for a moment as I go against the grain of current popular thought regarding God and religion.
What is Religion?
Is it God?
Is God religion?
Well, first of all let me say that GOD is not religion!
WHAT! You say….How dare ye! I protest thee! And so on etc, etc.
As I mentioned this to an Atheist/agnostic, he argued that indeed God is religion and that’s what all these denominations are all about, however, I contend that GOD and religion are separate.
How?
Well, first let me explain that religion is a practice or series of practices that one does to support a notion, idea, or belief. There are people who worship the tomato but is the tomato a religion? It is in fact a tomato, an object unto which a select group of people may worship, pray, and practice certain customs or rituals involving this wonderful fruit…yes a tomato is considered a fruit…but it is still a tomato, an inanimate object and would not be considered a god unless you want it to be deified as such. So if according to atheists that GOD is not real then it can not be a religion on that merit alone.
Man created religion/s to justify their beliefs or ideals about practical matters and created gods whether in a physical form like a statue or painting or in mythological form like Zeus, Perseus, Poseidon, etc. Some may have been actual people that existed at one time like Buddha, but still the practices of ritualistic behavior towards these gods are in essence religion and not the object of devotion itself.
That being said, GOD or ELOHIM the Hebrew word for GOD as we know Him to be is not a religion, however man has made a religion of worshiping Him. Throughout the ages man has fought, died, killed, sacrificed, and persecuted among other things in their devotion to their own notion of whom they think God actually is.
I do not practice rituals in my belief of “All that is Holy”, ELOHIM nor do I celebrate holidays that involve pagan origins for I know this does not please GOD. I believe in HIM because of my life’s journey and what HE has done for me even when I have been the proverbial Rebel without a cause, a Christian without a clue.
The Church I go to is the one that very few attend. The one that lives in the hearts of the unfortunate and oppressed. The abused and distraught. The one that says your money is no good here but your servitude is required. Where giving is without expecting. And where Faith is essential no matter the obstacle or obstruction that hinders your walk for if you stumble He will reset your legs of spiritual motion, if you fall, He will lift you up and dust off the dirt of despair and set you back upon the prosperous path to glory. My Church does not convene on one day or two but of every moment you have when you encounter another of Gods children no matter their situation. In my Church there is no prestige or rank. No order of righteous vs. the non righteous. In my Church there is no He or She it is We!
…….sorry I got off track for a moment….I do that you know from time to time…lol…
We as Christians need to understand…GOD is not concerned with your practices or rituals for they are only in vanity we do these things. Jesus himself told the Pharisees these are your ways not my Fathers. It is our actions that prove our worth and our inactions that show our worthlessness. I am no saint, nor a prophet or preacher but I am one of Gods’ works in progress and I hope that we all quit using religion as a crutch. Religion is like a car you are pushing up hill…you can only go so far before it rolls back over you and leaves you worse off than you were before.
Remember!…it’s not how many times you’ve read the Holy Bible, attended Church, had communion or confessed your sins, been baptized, or how much money you put in the collection plate…This doesn’t please God it troubles Him for if you truly loved Him you would do the two things he sent Jesus down here to tell us….Love God with all your heart and Do unto others as you would have them do unto you…
How many of you have done those two things….
think about that the next time you see a person standing outside with a cup asking for change…sure, he might get a beer with that…but, then again…maybe, it’s an angel sent to test your ability to give without judgment….
God bless you for reading and if you disagree that’s fine after all, how will we ever learn to communicate if we can’t discuss.
“The preceding announcement has not been officially endorsed by God, Jesus or any Heavenly body and does not necessarily represent the views of current Judeo-Christian thinking…Thank you!
"They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions...I must be going to Heaven because I don't have any good intentions.".BADWAY
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And collectively it's all a huge theologically muddled mess that is presented to the doubting masses as TRUTH and yet it fails miserably in that respect.
As far as I can tell muhammad/the koran's creators had very little understanding of what the christians believed and he/they aligned Islam strongly with judaism with which they were more familiar. They had no clear idea of the nature of the trinity - they thought it was god, jesus and mary. The koran's re-hash of jewish theology turns many of the stories therein completely upside down, breaking their timelines, inserting bits of stories where they did not belong.
He/the koran's creators also used multiple local sources for their jewish references, including obscure cults and the result makes a mockery of consistency. Of all the holy books the koran is the most farcical hotchpotch of cobbled up bullshit.
Interesting too, the term allah doesn't mean god in the jewish sense, but refers to the main god of Medina, a city that practised Arabic tribal polytheism until Mo came along/was contrived. As the religion spread, allah the god of Medina became the one god... I guess this mirrors the way yahweh the local Canaanite war god the jews adopted took on the global powers of Ares as the bible evolved.
Pleasingly, before islam was invented, the Arabs worshiped stones, particularly those with human shapes. The kaaba is a remnant of this rock worship. That's not the only pagan stuff in islam. Circling the kaaba 3 times fast and 4 times slow in an anti-clockwise direction is a reflection of the sabians' star worship. The fast walks are for the inner planets and the slow walks for the outer planets. The sabians believed each planet had its own god. Silly stuff.
Having written this down I can't help thinking we should be arguing that god is indivisible from religious culture given he possesses only those qualities provided by human symbolism and concept. Badway is wrong.
"Experiments are the only means of knowledge at our disposal. The rest is poetry, imagination." Max Planck
There can be only one! *pulls out sword*
is what you should be saying. Which is the right version of god's truth, BTW? Would it happen to be yours?
"Experiments are the only means of knowledge at our disposal. The rest is poetry, imagination." Max Planck
"You can't write a chord ugly enough to say what you want to say sometimes, so you have to rely on a giraffe filled with whip cream."--Frank Zappa
http://atheisticgod.blogspot.com/ Books on atheism
1. What has or was everwritten about purple snarfwidgets? What miracles were performed and recorded? Is there a movement based on these widgets? Have you known anyone that has ever died, killed, or been persecuted for these creatures? Is there a book about these creatures that people have accepted as a testament to thier beliefs? No? Didn't think so....no comparison
2. Because of above comments I don't have to believe if there is no evidence as it appllies to literature, personal testimonies, witnesses etc to support your assertation of a snarfwidget!
3. You are obviously bad at math. I mentioned 1 GOD. GOD comes from the hebrew word Elohim which is plural and means "Family" and in that family their are 27 entities but not 27 gods.
Seriously...nice try gadfly but you need to read what is written as opposed to reading into what isn't..
"They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions...I must be going to Heaven because I don't have any good intentions.".BADWAY
1. So now you believe in God because something was written about him? What of all the other gods that have had books written about them? Do you believe in those equally? Superman and Spiderman have more complete and accurate canons. Your logic says you should believe they are also real.
2. Just I have no reason to believe that literature or personal testimony supports your assertion of a God.
3. You seem to bad at telling a consistent story. One God that is divisible into 27 entities that can and should be worshipped as "God" (according to you) equals 27 gods. You claim that 1=27 and my math is bad?
"I do this real moron thing, and it's called thinking. And apparently I'm not a very good American because I like to form my own opinions."
— George Carlin
Should have mentioned that your snarfwidgets are not worshipped, they don't perform miracles, commit genocide on entire "races" (which they happened to create) or anything else, "they just are" and no one can prove otherwise.
Faith is the word but next to that snugged up closely "lie's" the want.
"By simple common sense I don't believe in god, in none."-Charlie Chaplin
Well Badway, I am certainly not trying to attack or play on a personal level. I may be in disagreement with your idea or notion that a god exists, but that is not a personal attack upon you.
However, your insistence that all of us are agnostics is incorrect.
I am what they call a Positive Atheist. I personally believe that god is an impossibility. I do not personally believe that such a being can exist.
However, I am somewhat puzzled at the fact, that you seem to desire respect for your beliefs, yet seem to disrespect those that do not agree with you. Could that just be my misunderstanding ?
If you don't mind, could you clarify to me, why you believe there is no such thing as an Atheist ?
Your question of spirituality in the world, is addressed in Religion Explained by Pascal Boyer, The God Part of the Brain by Mathew Alper and a few other books.
Would you like to read into them an discuss ?
As has been mentioned on this thread before. God, is a word. Where do words come from ? The human mind, the human conception, the human intelligence. So the idea of god, probably could not exist without the imagination.
“It is proof of a base and low mind for one to wish to think with the masses or majority, merely because the majority is the majority. Truth does not change because it is, or is not, believed by a majority of the people.”
― Giordano Bruno
Badway. I am an atheist. I can objectively assume there is a possibility of a god. But I do not think there is any possibility of the classical theism of omnipotence, omnipresence, omniscience and all goodness of a deity. I am an atheist about Allah, Yahweh, Jesus, Zathurstra , Vishnu, Krishna, Zeus, etc.; I am not agnostic . When I say I think there is a possibility. It is like allowing for a possibility that the floor I walk on my give way even though I trust it won't. So I am atheistic about even that god because of the nature of probability. Someone has a hobby of collecting stamps. I do not collect stamps. But I does not mean I have a hobby of not collecting stamps. There is a difference between hobby and behavior. There is a behavior of collecting stamps and a behavior of not collecting stamps. But the specificity and intent of hobby entails its negation. If I do not collect stamps I do not have a hobby. There are those who BELIEVE in a god. There are those who DO NOT BELIEVE in a god. Those who DO NOT BELIEVE do not have the "believe" . They do not believe in not-god. They simply do not believe there is a god. I do not think it will rain today. It might there is a .01 percent chance of a local shower above my house. I am not agnostic about it. It ain't gonna rain. And I act accordingly.
"You can't write a chord ugly enough to say what you want to say sometimes, so you have to rely on a giraffe filled with whip cream."--Frank Zappa
http://atheisticgod.blogspot.com/ Books on atheism
No claim on any subject, much less religion, deserves blind respect just because we may agree with the human right to make any claim one wants. Politically correct believers, and even some politically correct atheists think that getting along constitutes avoiding conflict by creating taboos on certain subjects.
Taboos are the quickest way to destroy pluralism in society, it is also a way to maintain divisions.
You can have the "battle" and civil at the same time. The way you do that is to separate the claim, from the person making the claim.
EXAMPLE:
Person A claims "The Chargers won the Super Bowl this year"
Person B, can respond, "Bullshit, The Packers did"
The delivery of the response says NOTHING about whether or not person B likes person A, it is merely addressing the claim itself which is patently false which person B is correcting.
Sometimes atheists get tough with their words because the "honey" approach doesn't always work, that does not mean that atheists hate the people we are being tough with or that we hate all religious people.
I think far too many politically correct well intended people, both believers and atheists, forget to give their opposition the opportunity to know the difference between a person, and what comes out of their mouth.
Everyone here reading this, no matter their position, at some point in their lives, have had a friend, co-worker, family member say something they thought was absurd, and may even expressed that disagreement to them.
Pluralism cannot be protected by censorship. It can only be protected by knowing the difference of the individual and what the individual claims.
I hate any and all claims of the super natural, be it "spirits" "god/s" "entities", ect ect ect. I hate these claims because they are naked assertions and in reality merely placebos humans invent to placate their emotions
THAT does not mean I want to physically harm those who believe, nor does it mean in my daily life I am incapable of loving those who do believe. It just means I find claims of the super natural absurd.
Just as any sane person would hate it if they had a friend today going around claiming the earth to be flat.
The needless fear of atheists believers have is unfounded. We are not monsters out to dictate to the world. We simply get tired of ancient myth being used in a modern society when we have much better data now. We are tired of pulpit politics and the bastardization of science.
IF humans never questioned social norms or tradition, our species never would have left the caves. Theists do not have to fear atheists, we are merely challenging you to question your beliefs without fear.
What we won't do is give a claim respect "just because" we agree with your right to claim it. You have the human right to make whatever claim you want, but we also have the right to challenge your claims.
"We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus -- and nonbelievers."Obama
Check out my poetry here on Rational Responders Like my poetry thread on Facebook under Brian James Rational Poet, @Brianrrs37 on Twitter and my blog at www.brianjamesrationalpoet.blog
1. Vapor, liquid, Ice....3 different aspects but still one source water! Not 3 sources, so, yes gadfly your math as well as understanding is highly limited.
2. How many people do you know of that have actually witnessed or have developed a personal relationship with Superman, Spiderman or even Zoaraster, Horus, Vishnu, Mithra? If Chrisitanity is so wrong then why is it that it is the most discussed, debated, accepted, challenged, supported among other things icluding dominant "religion" in the world? Your rationalization is for all intents and purposes irrational and borders on the edge absurdity.
3. My life nomatter how rough is still blessed because ,in my situation I am able to still be somewhat coherent, articulate, witty, knowledgable, strong, loving, caring, compassionate and so on. How many people do you know of who can say they have been homeless off and on since 1999 and not be on drugs, alcohol, or panhandles and yet still be able to exist with out losing his freaking mind?
4. There has just been way too much literature and personal testimonies to clearly validate and authenticate the Christian theology as it exists today. Name one other book that surpasses the Holy Bible in it's accessability, accountabilty, historical reverence, wisdom, devotion, among other things and see if it holds up to the Holy Scriptures in areas pertaining to the fellowship and following of masses crossing every nationality, bloodline, gender etc. If that could be done then Chrisitanity could be considered a false doctrine or belief but until then your just fertilizing this post with rhetorical manure!!!
5. On the issue of atheist/agnostic. Understand the logic behind my statement. Sure , you can say there is no GOD or gods for that matter and for that you can assertain that you are in "fact" an atheist because you do not believe in a higher power or supreme being. But, to fully adopt that title you must conclude ,that science, has proven the nonexistence there of and support that with facts to back that up. If, as an atheist, you can not prove the nonexistence of GOD you must in fact accept that anything is possible no matter how implausible it may seem and on top of that if you say I need proof ...factual, conclusive evidence, then that alone says your are an agnostic. If you claim that your an atheist, you are saying no matter what the proof is, I refuse to believe in a GOD, that is fine but that also makes you a fool. If you claim to be a rational thinker then you have no choice but to say I don't know and it is possible there is a GOD. Possible! The fact that you have to admit it is possible leaves the more accurate description of agnostic rahter than a true atheist. You love this title of atheist because it says I am defiant but it is not an accurate portayal of your ideology. Seriously, consider what I am saying. Ponder it. Rationalize it. And ACCEPT IT! Sapient said it best, that he is an agnostic atheist which means to me he is a person who needs proof that there is a GOD but he also refuses to believe it. No disrespect to Sapient but according to scripture that would make him a fool and that is only if he chooses to not believe after he was provided all the evidence to validate the existence thereof.
"They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions...I must be going to Heaven because I don't have any good intentions.".BADWAY
1. So now you're a modalist? God simply shifts into Jesus mode or Spirit mode when he needs it? You do know that water vapor and ice can't exist together for long in the same vessel, right? What of the other 27 entities you claim make up God?
2. I thought you said personal anecdotes/testimonies were invalid? Oh, that's right. They're valid when you need them.
3. Good on you for stating as sane as possible in your situation (although since you're addicted to God now I could still make a case for "you've lost your mind"
. Did God put you in your off an on homeless state or did he only get you out?
4. see 2.
5. I have no problem being an agnostic atheist. I do not say there is no God (neither does Sapient). What I say is that there is no evidence for a God and that the god of the Abrahamic religions fails miserably at meeting the requirements.
"I do this real moron thing, and it's called thinking. And apparently I'm not a very good American because I like to form my own opinions."
— George Carlin
That's your argument? Appeal to popularity?
Christianity is merely successfully marketed, that is why the book is so accessible. That has NOTHING to do with evidence of magic babies and zombie god claims. It just means the myth is popular.
Otherwise to be consistent you should be a Muslim because it has far more members.
The majority of the word's population once believed the earth to be flat, and that turned out to be wrong.
I am quite sure there are plenty of Muslims who could argue "look around you, the evidence is there, you just don't want to see it"
AGAIN, I could care less if you were claiming the magic baby myth of Christianity or the 72 virgin claims of Islam. Neither of you have one lick of evidence that a giant invisible non-material brain with magical super powers exists. All you are proving to me here is that credulity is far to fucking common in our species. You, like Muslims, simply like the idea of having a super hero.
No such thing exists. The universe was around long before biological life, and it will be around long after all biological life dies on this planet and no amount of making up bullshit fictional friends will change that reality.
You want to waste your entire life on a utopia that will never exist, I feel sorry for you.
"We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus -- and nonbelievers."Obama
Check out my poetry here on Rational Responders Like my poetry thread on Facebook under Brian James Rational Poet, @Brianrrs37 on Twitter and my blog at www.brianjamesrationalpoet.blog
We cannot begin to tell you how many people who have come in here with their stories of surviving everything from disaster to addiction who make the bullshit claims that a pet deity saved them.
WE are glad you cleaned yourself up, but YOU DID IT. There was no magical super hero or super villain re arranging the neurons in your brain to cause you to make bad choices anymore than it caused you to finally get tired of it.
YOU YOU YOU, not a god, not lucky socks, not Allah, Vishnu or Jesus. YOU did it and YOU devalue yourself by pawning of your successful break from those bad things by assuming comic book characters were battling over you.
Disaster and addiction and every good and bad thing in life that affects humans are a product of nature, not myth. Earthquakes have always existed, disease has always existed and addiction to alcohol and drugs, HAS ALWAYS EXISTED in our species evolution.
There is no superstitious magical invisible being causing or allowing these things to happen. There is no magical super villain causing these things to happen.
You got addicted because that happens to humans, and you got clean because humans also get tired of being addicted.
No deity, past or present, monotheist or polytheist, is needed to explain either the good or bad that happen in life.
Addiction happens like cancer happens, not because of fictional beings, but because conditions of nature and the fact that they occur and we can observe them.
Do not devalue yourself by giving up your mind to superstition. Addiction is a bitch to get over and it is only because of human action that people do it.
AND if you think it takes a belief in god to get over addiction you'd be wrong. There are addiction support groups started and funded by atheists.
Addiction exists because humans exist, not because of any ancient myth, BY ANY NAME.
"We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus -- and nonbelievers."Obama
Check out my poetry here on Rational Responders Like my poetry thread on Facebook under Brian James Rational Poet, @Brianrrs37 on Twitter and my blog at www.brianjamesrationalpoet.blog
And believe me Badway, I blame society for victimizing you with religion at your most vulnerable time. You merely replaced one addiction with a distraction. Diversion therapy is a joke and even more insidious because it helps spread myth.
You got thrown a life bowie which came at the horrible cost of swallowing a myth.
Addictions, in reality are a physical, psychological, genetic and environmental and have nothing to do with ancient myth BY ANY NAME. And can be successfully treated without them. If you don't believe me, ask a recovering atheist.
God belief has absolutely nothing to do with reality and is merely a placebo people use as a crutch.
I smoke and if I die from lung cancer, it wont be because of Thor or Apollo or Allah or Jesus, it will be because I smoke, nothing more, nothing less. If I ever quit, that too will be because of ME, not a fictional being.
There is no magic to life and there are no fictional comic book characters pulling the strings on nature, good or bad.
Ask these atheists HOW they escaped addiction.They did the same thing you did and did so without swallowing any invisible friend claim.
http://www.cfiwest.org/sos/index.htm
"We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus -- and nonbelievers."Obama
Check out my poetry here on Rational Responders Like my poetry thread on Facebook under Brian James Rational Poet, @Brianrrs37 on Twitter and my blog at www.brianjamesrationalpoet.blog
I'm sorry if I was to personal for you. I'm not trying to insult you, but I will say what I believe to be true. This form is a place were you can expect a certain amount of honesty from people in that most people wont hold things back because they are worried about offending you. That is one of the main reasons why I like it here.
You don't now what your talking about, and that is because you refuse to listen. When I heard your unique definition of religion I listened to it and tried to consider the issues you presented with the definition you chose. You on the other hand aren't listening to anything we are saying at all when it comes to the word agnostic and athiest. That shows a decided lack of curtesy. To make this as simple as possible for you I don't believe in god in the same way I don't believe in the purple snarfwidgets that live in jcgadfly's shoe. Call that lack of belief whatever you want, but don't expect me to adopt you definitions.
Snarfwidgets says you can't eat fries on Wednesday, or it will make you fat.
Islam is the fastest growing religion. If Islam becomes bigger then Christianity will you become a Muslim?
So you think I should change my belief just because a majority of people believe differently? By that reasoning if the majority of people could be made to believe in snarfwidgets everyone should believe in snarfwidgets, and people would never again be able to question the belief in snarfwidgets because of the overwhelming 'evidence' of their existence. As for experiences goes science has show that 'spiritual' experience can be induced. Based on what science has shown it seems evident that such experiences are a poor source of knowledge. This is especially true given that the 'knowledge' people have derived from such experiences over the years is contradictory.
The problem with being outside the box is that if you get to far outside the box no one has any idea what your taking about. This is evident by what you say next.
No, lack of evidence is why many of us don't believe in a god or a higher power of some kind. If you spent more time listening to what people on this site say you would know that.
I've never heard that particular definition before. I imagine that many people would disagree with it. Do the people who disagree with you really believe it god? Borrowing your simile would you say that people who disagree with you are only seeing a facet of god existence while you understand gods existence as a whole? You say you base your belief of your experience. Does that mean your experience is superior to the experiences of the people who think differently then you? Are you closer to God? How can I interpreter what you say in a way that is not the height of arrogance? At least with empiricalism everyone is equal. They sky is blue or it isn't blue. To dog weighs ten pounds or he doesn't. We can all look at the scale and see how much the dog weighs. Can you look into other peoples minds and see what they experience? What makes you so sure that the way you interpret your 'spiritual' experiences is so much better then what is done by the people who disagree with you?
This is the biggest irritation to me and a large part in how "religion poisons everything".
It makes people feel like they can't do anything on their own, it breaks down their self worth and makes them a pitiful scrabbling thing begging for a handout from something supposedly far greater then them. The whole time it is them doing what they do and they are blinded by their self sustaining "faith". It is self sustaining, it feeds on it's self. If they do good then god loves them if something bad happens they must have done something wrong. It's insanity.
Faith is the word but next to that snugged up closely "lie's" the want.
"By simple common sense I don't believe in god, in none."-Charlie Chaplin
So if I wrote a book about snarfwidgets would you consider that evidence? What if I said snafwidgets performed a miracle, and I wrote a record about it, would you consider that evidence snafwidgets exist? What if someone died, was killed or persecuted for believing in snafwidgets, would you consider that to be evidence that snafwidgets exist? If you answered yes to any of these question you have a very poor standard of evidence, because people’s actions can't make snafwidgets exist. The same is true for god unless you think that people's action literally are god which is ironic because that is the definition of god you made this thread to argue against. It seems that the only gods you have evidence for are the ones you refuse to accept as gods at all.
No one has to believe anything. You can't force people to change their mind. That doesn't mean that your concept of evidence isn't crap. Evidence needs to be something we can all share. I can't share other peoples experience, or see what they witnessed. All I have is other peoples words, and peoples words aren't consistent about this. The 'knowledge' that comes from people's 'spiritual' experiences is inconsistent to the point that I can throw it all out as worthless.
I don't think the problem is his math. I think the problem is that you've gone so far outside the box that we don't have any way of knowing what you’re talking about anymore. Your definition of god as a family of 30 beings is quite frankly bizarre.
I think that your advice applies more to you then to does him.
Lets say Ratdog you relay a personal experience about something that happened to you when you were 12 years old. No one was around to witness it but it happened to you. You wrote about it but could provide no evidence or proof that it happened. You told people about it and some accepted it while others just didn't care or believe you. Does that make you a liar? NO! Does that mean your experience didn't happen? NO! So if I can't prove that what happened to you didn't come about or you provide evidence that it did....does that make your experience more or less real....? I Think not. And your writing about a snarfwidget etc. is far more insignificant than that of the Holy Bible. After a thousand years I doubt there will be as much to be said of a snarfwidget as there is about a leaf falling on the ground during fall. But the Bible, it's stories, people and places are still talked about to this day. Solomon, Abraham, and Elijah, are no snarfwidgets, because of historical archaelogical evidence to support their lives here. Unless, you, want to call millions of hebrews, jews, arabs etc...liars!
Conceding that someone had an experience that they can describe in detail, in no way means that what they imagine or feel was the cause of the experience must be taken seriously.
There is no way to distinguish between an experience generated entirely within the imagination of the individual, including the feeling that it could only have been a transcendental contact with God, and what a 'real' contact with a God would 'feel like'.
Add to that the FACT that our memories are very unreliable, especially over years from childhood to adulthood, and that sort of argument has no power.
And we are not calling most believers liars, just that they have normal human frailties and limitations of knowledge and judgement. And they are not sufficiently trained in and/or familiar with the state of modern rigorously determined understanding of "Life, the Universe, and Everything" to base their personal life narrative on such ideas.
Finally, it is far easier and there is far more social pressure to go with their local traditions.
Favorite oxymorons: Gospel Truth, Rational Supernaturalist, Business Ethics, Christian Morality
"Theology is now little more than a branch of human ignorance. Indeed, it is ignorance with wings." - Sam Harris
The path to Truth lies via careful study of reality, not the dreams of our fallible minds - me
From the sublime to the ridiculous: Science -> Philosophy -> Theology
I agree with everything that BobSpence1 said, but I would also add a few things. I am surprised you used children in you example because children believe all kinds of stupid things. Have you ever heard of imaginary friends? Lots of kids feel they 'experienced' imaginary friends but that is obviously just imaginary. People are very fallible, and they are easily influenced by what other people tell them. That is how things like religions get passed on. It is not so much that all religious people are liars as it is that people are easily fooled, and they interpret their experiences in ways that validate their beliefs. What you experience is not doubt the same thing as a Muslim experiences, what a Buddhist experience and what a Pagans experiences. You just attribute your experiences to a different mythology.
Our planet once had a majority population that believed the earth was flat. They were not lying when they believed it. They were merely wrong.
If our species never challenged social norms, we never would have left the caves.
I'm sorry, but there is no such thing as a giant invisible non-material magical super brain. It wasn't true when people falsely believed volcanos were gods. It wasn't true when the Egyptians falsely believed that the sun was a thinking being. And the universe itself, DOES NOT need any magical cognitive superstitious fictional being to continue.
It may frighten you to find this out. But not me. I do not need a fictional being to live my life. AND I most certainly will not ignore the reality that when this planet dies, all our human invented myths will die with us. The universe will continue without our species.
The universe IS NOT the result of a thinking being It is a result of natural processes, much like it doesn't take an ocean god to make hurricanes.
"We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus -- and nonbelievers."Obama
Check out my poetry here on Rational Responders Like my poetry thread on Facebook under Brian James Rational Poet, @Brianrrs37 on Twitter and my blog at www.brianjamesrationalpoet.blog
Anyway you are welcome to search for the top ten of the books, you're in for another surprise...