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So that means you have more proof for God then the rest of us have for Santa Claus, Easter Bunny, and the tooth fairy right?
Now that we have that clear, perhaps you'd like to tell us exactly where that proof exist. Please don't refer back to all those Stone Age writings that a wandering desert tribe manufactured for their own narcissistic reasons.
If you would just bother to read the OP, I provide proof for one conceptualization of GOD, as it appears in several religions, that no one has been able to refute...a whole lot of fallacies, from the "argumentum ad populum" (that isn't what most people in Alabama believe!) to argumentum ad absurdum (what you are doing here) but no refutation.
Here it is again: God is a metaphor/archetype for reality, our highest thoughts (the super ego) and that which we experience in our lives but can't place into words that do it justice. That is the definition given by the Uppanishads, the Gnostic texts, Wiccans, Joseph Campbell etc.
Metaphors exist. Reality exist (baring solipsism) and the super ego exists. Hence, God exists as a workable model (an archetype) for them.
Why is that so hard to understand?
I don't believe in a personal GOD or a creator, and I don't believe my own Myths are literally true. But I believe in GOD and have a religion.
But by all means, keep pushing that square peg into the round hole. It will go in sooner or later
But then a no god model should be at least equally valid, right? So why the anger that people have found a different model?
I said it before (over and over...) and I will say it again: don't like religion? Don't practice it. An atheist? Nothing wrong with that. Just as there is nothing wrong with being a fundamentalist...JUST DON'T SHOVE IT DOWN PEOPLE'S THROATS.
The OP of this thread is explaining that "GOD" can be conceptualized and perceived in ways other than just as the Deities of Religion. "GOD" can be perceived as those Deities...but that is not a exclusive requirement to manifest a conceptualization of "GOD".
Of course...those afflicted with "Godophobia" will probably not be very receptive to taking his points under consideration...and will just look to flame, without reasonably engaging the ideas put forth. And that is unfortunate.
While I agree with you, I am saying that the deities of religion aren't necessarily untrue, just not literal.
One can believe in liberty and be inspired by Lady Liberty while understanding that the statue is just a metaphor for the real things. At the same time one can believe in the spirit of Zeus and be inspired by Zeus while understanding the Myth is not literally real.
I will provide proof of a literal GOD when someone provides me proof of a literal lady who is tall as hell, usually has one boob hanging out of her robe, and has been around for two hundred years. No such lady exist? Okay, than liberty does not exist. Oh. but you say that she is just a metaphor? I say BS! You can't change the definition of liberty to suit your mood.
You get it, I get it, and most people who can think get it, while others choose not to get it. Godphobia is exactly what we are seeing on display here.
An atom needs a model for us to truly conceptualize is. Same with many, many other things. When something is too big, too small, and too complicated, we use a model.
GOD is too small, too big, and too complicated all at once.
In your story fable it is. But you are just making that up. The reason your analogy fails is that we can at least evidence the existence of the atom. We use a model to conceptualize something that we can substantiate as being real.
You just use a model to help people conceptualize something you are imagining and making up.
Huge difference.
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Originally Posted by victorianpunk
FOR THE LAST TIME I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP!
Oh good. It is always good to hear someone plans to cease making baseless assertions. So if it is the last time, the better for all of us. Would that I could believe you mean it.
The problem is that it remains baseless and repeating it over and over does not change the fact that yes, you are making it up.
I have ignored nothing, I simply do not agree with you. If "god" is just a metaphor to you or a handful of other people then great. Have at it. I find it a pointless and useless redefinition of words with no other agenda other than finding a way to hold on to the precious word "god" you love so much.
But the fact is that there are millions of adherents to religions like Christianity, Islam and many other religions across India and Pakistan and the god they are espousing at us is no "metaphor" but a thinking, conscious, intelligent agent around the existence and opinions of which we are told we should be building our lives and morality and decisions and laws and education curricula.
In your story fable it is. But you are just making that up. The reason your analogy fails is that we can at least evidence the existence of the atom. We use a model to conceptualize something that we can substantiate as being real.
You just use a model to help people conceptualize something you are imagining and making up.
God is a model for reality, ourselves, and our thoughts and experiences...so, am I making reality up?
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The problem is that it remains baseless and repeating it over and over does not change the fact that yes, you are making it up.
So either A) I am Joseph Campbell or B) I didn't make that up.
Also, that is basically what the Tao te Ching said...so, did I write the Tao te Ching?
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I have ignored nothing, I simply do not agree with you. If "god" is just a metaphor to you or a handful of other people then great. Have at it. I find it a pointless and useless redefinition of words with no other agenda other than finding a way to hold on to the precious word "god" you love so much.
As I said before (but you ignored) there are a million Wiccans on Earth and about a million other neo-pagans, overwhelming majority of whom believe as I do that their deities are symbolic, not literal. There are also millions of Taoists, Hindus, Buddhists, spiritual pantheists etc...so, how is that "a handful?" (no need to answer the question: you've been doing a good job of avoiding it so far)
And I am not "holding onto GOD." This is my God, always has been. You are the one holding onto your atheism. You could say "well, that could work, but it still isn't for me" and I would respect that 100%
Quote:
But the fact is that there are millions of adherents to religions like Christianity, Islam and many other religions across India and Pakistan and the god they are espousing at us is no "metaphor" but a thinking, conscious, intelligent agent around the existence and opinions of which we are told we should be building our lives and morality and decisions and laws and education curricula.
I already explained this, but I see I have to again:
An atom needs a model for us to truly conceptualize is. Same with many, many other things. When something is too big, too small, and too complicated, we use a model.
This is a false analogy as technically, although we cannot see atoms as the models suggest what they may look like, we can observe much related to atomic "theory" and we have repeatable testable experiments that follows the math of this field. It does not matter where in the world you do this, the results are ALWAYS the same.
Electricity is derived from the same processes where the generator, coils passing through a magnetic field causes electrons to flow, "jump" from atom to atom along the conductor, fission and fusion are achieved in identical conditions and so on.
When it comes to gods, they cannot be tested, there is no ability to falsify them and as we know, everyone's version seems to differ. Gods do not even fall into the sphere of a hypothesis. They remain under the headings of conjecture and baseless assertions.
We do not even have a logical starting point to test for gods, this is why we are told to look for evidence in nature, the complexity of DNA (not really complex at all if you understand it) and so on. It comes down to throwing crap up against a vertical plate of glass to see what will stick. It all falls flat and we are only left with nasty stains that obscures reality.
Your personal god is no different to all the other folk's personal gods, ergo the "its a relationship not a religion". They all collectively only exist in ones grey-matter and this is why they are unable to present themselves outside of anecdotal "evidence". Anecdotal is not considered evidence as we can never replicate the conditions to set up for a repeat experience.
For you, your god and how you choose to define it, is perhaps very real at a personal level. Yet even when you test your god against other gods with folk of similar leanings, you still are left with differences of opinion/revelation. To an external observer, weighing this up, the logical conclusion is that these gods are all fabrication of the mind/imagination and willed into existence for whatever reasons there may be.
Any real god would exhibit universal attributes.
Even though we cannot prove or disprove the fairy tale examples, by way of illustration, there is more evidence for their existence even though we all already know these are childhood folklore stories. It is a little white lie that we accept does no damage and are for entertainment rather than life changing issues.
My earlier attempt at satire was to show just how preposterous bible folklore is if told in a modern setting using the modern vernacular.
Imagine (<- there's that word again) if that story was told to someone that had never seen an ostrich or at least a picture of one, telling the story I was very sincere, this person may well accept the story and when retold, may alter it with other embellishments. Somewhere down the line, a person decides to write it down and as time passes it becomes an accepted reason why ostriches do not fly. More time passes and a cult is formed around this bird and people that breed them are deemed evil.
Who knows where the story of the biblical nephelium came from. My guess is someone discovered dinosaur bones and from these stories grew to try and explain them as monsters or demons or whatever.
FF 4000 years and now many have accepted the legends and myths as truth. Gods are deemed to be real as so many folk hold to this concept it must be true. Along came the quest for truth and knowledge and as we started to discover things as our technology improved, a lot of these claims came up to be questioned as to their plausibility.
We start to test the claims of promises like in prayer and find that this really does not work. Claims of success are tested in blind tests and nothing conclusive is derived. The the current set of believers infer that is NOT what they meant and it has to fall within the bigger scheme of this god dude's wishes/will. Open promises written down and accepted for their oldness as written now become conditional and a new critter called an apologist is "born"
Can you really imagine science having an apologetic wing? It does not as findings and conclusions are reached by preponderance of real tangible evidence. The approach for the most part is objective. There are also speculative areas in science I do not even fully understand. Unless there is a potential "weapon" or "life extension" possibilities, they probably will find no funding.
Religion kept people in boundaries whereas science is always seeking to go beyond those boundaries. IOW religious or god ideals shuts the door to rational enquiry.
The ten greatest scientific discoveries by religion last year.
FWIW, I do not differentiate between religion and gods as god knowledge is indoctrinated in one form or another. Spirituality I also treat the same as that word can also mean many different things to different people and cultures.
I said it before (over and over...) and I will say it again: don't like religion? Don't practice it. An atheist? Nothing wrong with that. Just as there is nothing wrong with being a fundamentalist...JUST DON'T SHOVE IT DOWN PEOPLE'S THROATS.
Wait a minute. Virtually every thread you have started has been about how those who disagree with you are wrong, hypocritical, sanctimonious, and just bad people, coupled with lots of "Prove I'm wrong!" and nastiness toward prominent atheists. Who is shoving what down whose throat? In addition much of the original response to your post was a perfectly reasonalbe shrug at your post.
No one is pushing anything on you. In fact most of us agree that using God as a metaphor is a useful thing to do, we just object to the conflation of the metaphor with reality. If Eric Clapton is not a literal God, then reality isn't one either. It is simply something that we are using the word about to make a point about some specific attribute. That is God as metaphor. You appear to want to take it a step further and say that because we can make a metaphoric comparison, that means we can conflate the two concepts we are discussing.
A perfect example if your Lady liberty example. If we say Lady Liberty is a metaphor for liberty, denying the literal existence of Lady Liberty is not the same as denying the existence of liberty itself. Likewise, us atheists are denying the literal existence of a God, not the existence of an underlying reality that you wish to use God to abstract. We do tend to believe that the underlying reality is not transcendent, divine, or supernatural, as we have no evidence of this, just as you have no evidence that the concept of liberty is actually giant woman with a wardrobe malfunction, and thus you don't believe it.
You are suffering from the same contextual blindness as Goldie. As a rule, if an atheist says, "I don't believe that a god exists, and require proof of its existence", we are talking about a literal God. We all believe in figured of speech, in metaphors, in the concept of God. These things have to exist for us to even think about or discuss the topic. But just like Lady Liberty, that concept does not have to actually exist for it to be societally important or to convey information. I honestly think we are on the same page here.
Other like Mystic and GldnRule make the link more explicit. They do believe in a literal god, but they use the metaphor as an out. They end up arguing indirectly that since God can be a metaphor for reality, then reality is literally God, thus any proof that reality exists is proof of a literal God. I think that there logic is faulty in making this leap, but we can't seem to engage the issue, so I have stopped trying to poke at it. I think it would be a good and useful conversation, but I think make it prods to close to sensitive areas of belief.
Well I'm glad to see that someone understands what a metaphor is, and perhaps also allegory. Would be nice if maybe some of the fundamentalist would view the Bible from a metaphorical and allegorical point of view. We would probably have had a lot less violence and horrors perpetuated on the literal interpretation of it.
God is a model for reality, ourselves, and our thoughts and experiences...so, am I making reality up?
No, just playing with empty metaphors again. You simply are relabeling all those things as "god". Universe? Thats "god". Reality? Thats "god". The cherry pie on the table? That is "god". Whatever you care to mention you simply relabel it as god.
As I keep saying, you are doing nothing but labeling things with the word you personally have a fetish for and calling it "metaphor". As such you are saying quite literally nothing at all, but using a lot of words to do it.
As I keep pointing out however the Christian world, the Muslim world, and the worlds punctuated by religions with countless followers across the Indian and Asian world all have a concept of god that is not simply an empty metaphor. They subscribe to the notion that there is a thinking, intelligent, planning, conscious entity out there, that there are after lives, and that this entity can and has communicated with our species either vicariously or directly in human flesh form.
If the word "god" gets you so hot that you desperately have to find a way to use it: Thats fine with me. But do not do it while pretending you are actually saying anything or doing anything at all outside playing with linguistics.
The thread is about proving your god does not exist. We can not do that because you are not presenting anything but an empty meaning of an empty word. What is there to prove or disprove in that?
Other like Mystic and GldnRule make the link more explicit. They do believe in a literal god, but they use the metaphor as an out. They end up arguing indirectly that since God can be a metaphor for reality, then reality is literally God, thus any proof that reality exists is proof of a literal God. I think that there logic is faulty in making this leap, but we can't seem to engage the issue, so I have stopped trying to poke at it. I think it would be a good and useful conversation, but I think make it prods to close to sensitive areas of belief.
-NoCapo
You still do not get it because of a blind spot about God as traditionally considered. You refuse to accept the concept that the "unknown whatever it is" that is responsible for existence itself . . . is sufficiently God-like in ubiquity, scope, power and control over us and all of existence to be called God by any sane standard of "Godness." The ignorant deconstructing of this concept with absurd claims that God is then that pie or your car or whatever . . . is puerile evasion and refusal to engage the concept intelligently. There is no possiblity of good and useful conversation when such tactics are employed . . . especially the obnoxious "there is not one shred of evidence or reason to believe." Those are trolling behaviors . . . NOT intelligent discussion and conversation.
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